Day 3596 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 1:16 NIV

And now it’s the lone reason we’re still standing in what is a life lived as if drown underneath what are wave after wave of a mercy and grace so deep that we are indeed sinking to depths no human could go.

That’s what I love of this faith that continues to find me for reasons I seem to daily to leave unfound myself. I see not what He sees in me. I know not what He has in store for me. I dream for less than what is His best for me. I’ve left no stone unturned seeking His will for me, and yet as here I sit still I see nothing more than a mountain of mistakes piled so high into the sky that sometimes Heaven seems a lifetime away in a place that I could no more reach than into the past in which all those mistakes were made that need now yet another flood.

Only one this time of grace as opposed the grave.

For that’s the truth of what I see. Maybe it’s through eyes now blinded to the hopes I’ve always known to look for. Maybe it’s eyes seeing finally what and where hope always waited for me to stop looking. Or perhaps it’s some mysterious blend of the both, eyes wide-open and eyes wide-closed as considered from here in this moment in this middle of what is again a mercy so deep that I feel as if I’m for once drowning in hope despite still having not much of any idea as to where it comes from nor why He continues to send it.

I suppose it’s because of His fullness. Yes, perhaps His fullness is so filled with what we’ve both failed to see and thus failed to be inside these lives lived as if seeing is believing, leaving us only becoming what we’ve been seeing. For are we not but replicas of the rebellion? Are we not merely mannequins of the mischievousness of mankind? Are we not only dummies, both those used in the crash testing of cars and too those who see no harm in bars, be them where drinks are served into the swerve of a late-night binge or rather those of these prisons built of and for ourselves we’ve been living in?

Suddenly, no, no we’re not. We’re not what we’ve known. We’re not where we’ve been. We’re more than we’ve wanted and even more than we’ve won within these lives lived to lose all of everything except our grasp on time and how we so arrogantly perceive it to be a matter able to be rebought, leaving us in doubt as to the dread of our failing to be reborn. But therein lies the beauty of a belief in better. It allows us to come out of our common confusion and seek instead another to lead the way to a life lived without all the delusion.

And in His fullness this is exactly what’s found us. It’s, as titled here, a grace given in place of grace already given. It’s grace upon grace. It’s a multiplicity of mercy made manifest in the Messiah who came for the rest of us who still daily doubt as to the reason why. For not one of us can say with any hint of honesty that we honestly feel as if we either deserve what He did or, as more common anymore, that we never needed it done.

We did. We do. We will. And yet this ongoing inability to be anything other than a walking, talking, living, breathing insufficiency, it’s still, as of yet, proven unable to undermine His fullness as having found us in our lowest and yet there laying down His life to lift some of us up from our love of the lowness. It’s the very definition of a miracle given. How else might we define or describe the idea of grace on top of grace?

How can grace given become more gracious?

Seems to make little sense to a people of constant consumption conceiving this assumption of there always being more to cover the more we continue needing. It’s something of a counter to our considerations as considered from perspectives formed of ignorance the likes of how we live as if we can reach the end of everything. Life here is a matter of finish lines all lined up in tandem, one after another, each tied to a pursuit that we seek to perfect before eventually settling for good enough and moving on.

That’s what He didn’t do. It’s what He could have done, in fact I dare say should have done. For a people so enamored by good enough should have been offered only what we crave. But to Him even the grace already given wasn’t good enough. So much that in His eyes He saw more reason to send Christ than to leave His prior mercy as the only hope for humanity. What was this older mercy, this grace already given, the opportunity we’d always had yet clearly still only failed?

The Law.

Such is what the very next verse speaks of at least. “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” And thus the Law, the Commandments, the righteous requirements of a righteous God reminding His creation that we are His creation and thus endowed with both the image of the divine but also then the responsibility to uphold that design, that was in fact without a doubt the most gracious gift given to man.

Because He didn’t have to.

No, God didn’t have to try and help us in regard to living the kind of life that He created us to live. He didn’t have to give us that gift of His Word as carved in stone as carried down the mountain by Moses. He didn’t have to try and lead us, guide us, find us to that promise He had for us. And yet still the Bible is the best-selling book throughout human history to the tune of an estimated 5-7,000,000,000 copies having been sold across 1,500 years. Billion with a B.

And yet still they sit upon shelves or gather dust on bookcases or get thrown into drawers and left to an afterthought despite the fact that the entirety of Scripture is in fact God breathed, alive and active, the very will and testament of God’s very investment into the procurement and protection of His creation. His Word is His will for our lives as it describes not only how to live godly lives but also even gets to the whys even though they lie often unwanted in this way of life in which we all but deny the gravity of His giving us of His grace, even the first time.

Why?

But why the second then? Why, if the grace given in the first place was enough, why more? Why do more? Why give more? Why would we need more? Yeah! That’s a good question to consider!! And I truly hope all of us sit with it from time to time because there’s a depth there that’s entirely too much to cover in this post today.

And yet to just try and surmise it in order for the benefit of this posit for today, it’s because He wants none to perish but all to come to repentance which is a turning away from what’s drowning us in the debt of death as won in our ignoring and thus remaining mostly ignorant of His Word which was given us in His grace back to the light of life as poured out in what is the grace given in place of grace already given.

It’s God doing what the love of God desires to do so as to try and get through to this people of His who often just refuse to see to the gravity that grace is.

Indeed, I love how the King James puts in Ephesians 4:7. “But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.” Just something about the often-rustic and yet oddly-poetic wording within the KJV that just speaks to the beauty of what all this means. Each of us have been given grace in accordance with and to the gift of Christ. This seems to mean that this second grace is of such expounded gravity that it is indeed worth the weight of the life of Christ.

And so not only has God now given us His Word as read within the Law as compiled into the Torah, and then expanded throughout the rest of the Old Testament, but indeed He has now even breathed the New Testament which is a description of the atoning work of the Sacrament of Jesus Christ our Savior who came from Heaven to lead us heathen back to living by bearing our sins and paying our debts and rebirthing our eyes and ears and hearts and minds and lives into our being a made-new creation leaving behind the ways and wages of the old in the place where all old things go to be left behind.

Yes, Jesus came to free us by beating us to the tomb so that He could, from there, lead us to our being made new in the image of the God we’d forgotten despite everything He’s done to make Himself and His grace known in this place. And so, upon this now second day removed from yet again another celebration of the arrival of our again coming King, we can and should continue to bask in the beauty of His benevolence as defined in that birth of a baby who came to bear the sins of a people who’d forgotten who they are having ignored who God is.

Because friends, that’s what Christmas is!

Christmas reminds that God in Christ came to be the gift that begins the change that helps us see that we've all we need so that we're then freed to serve the gift that came to begin the change that helped us see that we've all we need to be now freed from what we’d been that needed this gift of a grace given in place of grace already given.

It’s again a multiplying of mercy in order to drown our indifference in regard to the first as atoned in the second. We became indifferent toward His grace as proven in lives lived outside an understanding of who He is as defined by sin. And rather than doing what such a mistake deserved, instead He doubled-down upon the gift of grace. First the Law, second the Christ who came to fulfill its righteous requirements.

That’s indeed one of my personal favorite summations of our salvation as given in Romans 8:3-4, described then again in Colossians 1:19-20.

“For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Romans 8:3-4

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Colossians 1:19-20

In Jesus God is offering us the very embodiment of His fullness as given us in a spotless Lamb to atone for our sins and to then, through the reverence we talked about yesterday, the reverence such an immeasurably undeserved gift so clearly should inspire, to then walk forward throughout the rest of our days not merely revering only His initial gift of a grace given as given in His Word as written in the Scriptures but indeed walking behind the Word made flesh in Christ who dwelt amongst us and sends forth the Spirit to now dwell within us.

This grace given in place of grace already received, it’s God working His will so personally that He came in Christ to lay down His life to satisfy the wrath we’ve each incurred having forsaken the first grace given and then, having lain down said life, to then furthermore exist in us as His very Spirit sent forth to guide us back home.

There is now literally too much goodness, too much kindness, too much compassion and mercy and understanding for us to ever understand!

I’m physically at the point of writing 2-3,000 word essays every single day and yet still I feel as if I’ve not even found the surface to scratch!!

This hit me the other night as I moseyed through the last several Psalms. Psalm 119:96 has instantly become something of a new outlook for my life in light of so many changes that He’s leading me to make. “To all perfection I see a limit, but your commands are boundless.” He’s beyond perfect. He’s without limit. He exists inside such an extremity of everything that even a million eternities wouldn’t offer us enough time to fathom His fullness.

It’s as the song How He Loves says it maybe best. “If His grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking”.

For even still today He comes as if wave upon wave of everything from mercy to grace and then back again with even more of all the above.

Friends, even if we’re among the few seeking to learn more from Him, to know more of Him, to live a life that better tries to honor Him, to give ourselves as if living testimonies to the ongoing and unequaled goodness of Him, we still have no idea what we’re missing. Because in this life we cannot learn enough, know enough, grow enough inside of His grace that we can reach an end, a finish, a stopping point or resting place. There is a fullness to Him that continues to invite us in ever-deeper into a relationship that is so mysterious that even mercy is multiplied.

And simply put, in my eyes, this world then has nothing left for me to see. No, I need every breath I can steal from His kindness to seek a little more of His fullness as I might still come to believe to be waiting for all of us to take that next step into the unknown of all He is and where all this leads.

So take the next step as His grace has already made the way home and then even came to clear it of all we’ve cluttered it with. He didn’t stop at showing us the way. No, He came to be the Way.

And if He hasn’t stopped, then nor shall I.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold