Appropriating Grace

I've been working on my Bible study lesson on chapter 12 of Transforming Grace - "Appropriating God's Grace." Not only is this a long chapter, it is also very convicting. It caused me to examine how well I am appropriating the four principle means of the divine strength (grace) God provides to all who are in Christ: prayer, His Word, submission to God, and ministering grace one to another. While all are important, I found myself really contemplating the section on submission to God. "All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward on another, because, 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.' Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time." (I Peter 5:5-6) Jerry Bridges states that if we are to appropriate God's grace, we must submit to His providential working in our lives. We must come to the point where we see God's hand behind all our adversities and heartaches. We must also see our adversity as the loving discipline of our Heavenly Father, not as evidence of God's desertion of us (Hebrews 12:7). We have the confidence that whatever hardship comes into our lives, God is in sovereign control, and He is using it as an instrument of discipline to conform us to His character. God wants us to share in his Holiness. This discipline may be used to correct some sin in our life, or to remedy a lack in our character. Either way, it is administered by God in love, not in wrath.

Even as Christians, we often fall into the worldly thinking that happiness is the greatest good, and we evaluate our circumstances in those terms. Bridges reminds us that our holiness is a greater good than our happiness, and God orchestrates circumstances to produce holiness in His children. He is more concerned with our eternal and spiritual welfare than He is our temporal and material welfare. So each trial, heartache, disappointment, and humiliation is used to make us partakers of His holiness.

While we might recognize God's sovereignty in all our circumstances, the difficulty comes in submitting to it. God will only give His grace to those who are humble under His mighty hand. We are called to submit in faith that He will lift us up in due time. That "due time" is when the adversity has accomplished its intended purpose. We can take heart that God will not leave us in that adversity one moment longer than is necessary to accomplish His purpose. Through it all, we must remember that God deeply cares for us, and He desires that we bring our burdens to Him (I Peter 5:7).