Amazed by Amazing Grace!
My mind goes back from time to time to a two-week mission trip I took to the poverty-stricken country of Haiti. I remember the culture shock of the absolute absence of abundance. Growing up in a comfortable, middle-class home I had heard of poverty, and even thought I had seen it, but I realized my misinformation in the capital of desolation, Haiti. To be sure, when I returned to my home in America, I had a new perspective entirely on the material blessings God had wrought in my life. I learned that unless I see true poverty, I’ll forget how “rich” I am.
It is this same sense concerning the material blessings in my life that God has recently worked concerning the spiritual blessings in my life. As I have been studying and preparing some old-fashioned Gospel messages and refreshing my contemplation of the Old Old Story, I find myself deeply moved, even shaken within, as if my introduction to Christ and the Cross was a recent one. I was saved at the tender age of six and grew up with Jesus. And in the same way that I took so much of my material blessing for granted before Haiti, it has been easy for me to take my spiritual blessings in Christ for granted as well, seeing as how I grew up with an abundance of both.
But, oh, what a wonderful thing God does in my heart when I meditate upon Scriptures such as Ephesians 2:1-3: “And YOU He made alive who were DEAD in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were BY NATURE CHILDREN OF WRATH, just as the others. BUT GOD, (Hallelujah!!!) WHO IS RICH IN MERCY, BECAUSE OF HIS GREAT LOVE WITH WHICH HE LOVED US, EVEN WHEN WE WERE DEAD IN TRESPASSES, MADE US ALIVE TOGETHER WITH CHRIST, FOR BY GRACE YOU HAVE BEEN SAVED!”
Can words express the song in my heart from knowing this great truth? When I dwell upon these things, God takes me afresh to the Haiti of my soul, my desolation apart from Christ, my spiritual poverty apart from the riches of His mercy! Like new, I am awakened to my riches in Christ that are so undeserved and so often taken for granted.
I am reminded that “in my flesh nothing good dwells” (Rom. 7:18) but Jesus! I am indeed the chief of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15) but Jesus! I have earned the wages of death for my sin (Rom. 6:23) but Jesus! Praise the Lord that God “made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21) Hallelujah! Jesus emptied his account of righteousness, and deposited it to my bankrupt, check-bouncing, in-the-red, indebted account and filled it to overflowing! Friend, regardless of what your earthly checkbook balance says, you are spiritually RICH in Christ Jesus!!! I was a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3), but now I’m the child of the King! I was a pauper, but now I’m a prince in the Kingdom of God!
My dear friend, we must be shaken and awaken to our sinful condition which continually attempts to eclipse the glory of God in us, lest our worship of Him grow cold, our witness of Him grow compromised, and our wonder of Him grow calloused! When as we expose ourselves to the poverty of other nations we will see our true wealth, so also when we allow God to remind us of what we are apart from Christ, our spiritual wealth in Christ will be magnified!
Take time today to visit the poverty of your own soul: view the wasteland of your wilderness wanderings, see the rancid “rags” of your own righteousness, smell the stench of your self-sufficiency. Then rejoice, dear friend, that our Redeemer lives and has paid the price, buying our freedom into the wealth of His Grace. No wonder they call it “Amazing.”
