I try to duck and dodge from it, but the reality of my sin is always before me. It’s ugly. It’s embarrassing. It’s persistent.
But the grace of our Lord is just as real, just as present. And the truth is that it actually has a greater, deeper, more solid reality than my sin. It’s more beautiful than the ugliness. It’s more embracing than the embarrassment. It’s more unshakable than the persistence of my sin.
God and his grace is the really real.
It is the reality behind creation, behind salvation, behind what we call sanctification, which is simply the way God makes the lost found, the broken whole, the unclean clean, the nameless named.
And yet we so often live as if what’s wrong in us and in the world around us is the most basic reality.
It’s not.
This is why I need the Scriptures and others who walk with me in my everyday life to speak grace into my life, why I need to speak grace into the lives of those around me. This is why I need to live in a community of grace and offer grace within that community. For we live in a culture that desperately needs it but actively rejects it in its efforts to build and secure life on its own terms, apart from God.
We need to restore the primacy of God and his grace in our lives, in our world.
So, know your sin. It’s real. But know even more deeply the elemental grace of our Lord.