And Jesus said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous buy sinners to repentance. — Luke 5:31–32
Grace is a one of the most essential components of Christian belief and practice. Grace can be defined rather generally as “unmerited favor”. The Hebrew equivalent of “grace” that we find in the Old Testament describes when a superior shows favor towards an inferior especially when the inferior does not deserve that favor. We all love the idea of grace until we are challenged to offer it to someone. This is the result of pride.
In similar vein, did you know that being a Christian means recognizing human inferiority to God? No one likes to be considered inferior to anything, but that is precisely the human problem isn’t it? The posture that desires to be elevated above all others as the most the superior is precisely why the world is in the mess that it finds itself in today. Christianity turns human ego on its head and purposes humility as the solution to the human condition (Luke 5:31). Accepting God’s grace in our lives is inseparable from humility.
John Wesley (1703–1791) was an advocate for a special kind of grace called “prevenient grace,” which is “the grace that goes before”. Essentially, the concept of prevenient grace proposes that God’s favor goes before any of us even begin to realize it. In other words, God is working in the lives of people who are fully and utterly out of tune with spiritual things and especially Christian truth.
So what’s the significance of this? The Bible teaches that the thoughts of the human heart are corrupt, perverted, and ultimately evil. This being the case, when God offers humanity reconciliation, we don’t have the proper sense to see reconciliation as a good thing. When we victimize ourselves (which is the human tendency), we want anything but reconciliation; we want revenge. Even when we are in the wrong, we, through perverted logic, make ourselves out to ALWAYS be the good guy. This means that when God approaches us and says, “I want to set things right again. I want to forgive you,” our response is, “you owe me an apology!” Put another way, the sin nature has thrown our moral compass out of whack. We don’t know the difference between good and evil. We mistake slavery for freedom and freedom for slavery. We lose sight of common sense.
This being the case, how is it at all possible for people to reconcile with God? In a more general sense, how is the moral compass fixed? The answer: prevenient grace. Thanks to Jesus and his work on the cross, God’s grace is able to enter into our lives (because of the prayers of Jesus and the church) and being to teach us, convict us, and calibrate our moral compass once again so that we can distinguish good from evil. Once his prevenient grace is active ni our lives, we arrive in a position in our lives for when he comes to us to offer forgiveness, we are ready to accept blame and say, “Yes!”. You see, even the capacity to choose good is the result of God’s grace, that is why it is ultimately God’s great salvation. It is only by grace that humility is possible among men.
