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Grace, Is That You?
Dear One, I want to take you back…maybe to a long time ago, maybe to very recent memory. I want to take you back to the moment you first felt God’s overwhelming grace for you.
This was most likely your conversion experience when you first realized your need for a Savior, but maybe it was a recent running back into Christ’s arms.
What you felt at that moment was grace. It’s an overwhelming feeling that makes you emotional. It makes you feel so very close to God, like the world just got very big and you got very small in the best way.
This is grace: the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners.
It is free, meaning you did not earn it. No amount of good behavior, liabilities, or station earns you grace.
It’s unmerited, meaning you’re actually undeserving of this grace.
It’s from God, meaning that He is the One who gives you grace and saves you.
If you’ve been saved by God’s free, unmerited grace, then you know what grace feels like, even if you don’t feel it at this moment. God’s grace isn’t only for the moment of salvation, but it continues and is very practical for you today.
Being overwhelmed by God’s grace is something I hope you can relate to very strongly. There’s a sense of not being able to comprehend the full magnitude or impact of what you’re starting to feel. It’s a full head, heart, and gut experience. It’s a completely whole feeling of understanding your place in the world, a place that is much better than you deserve.
I can’t help but think of the book of Job when I think of being fully overwhelmed by God’s grace.
At the end of the book of Job, after Job has had his pouting time and is fully wallowing in his depression, God shows up. What God does is obliterate Jobs’ poor mood by making him see how very small he is and how very mighty and in control God is.
Feeling small might make you think that Job would’ve responded by being frightened, but he didn’t. He responded with praise, and that is exactly what my heart feels as I read God’s words to Job.
When you feel the overwhelming smallness of being fully known, fully loved, and fully forgiven by God, it humbles your heart.
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About this Plan
The Enneagram is an ancient personality typology. The theory behind it is that a person assumes one of nine personalities in childhood as a reaction to discovering the world as a scary, unkind place, and thus is unlikely to accept their true self. This devotional is designed for Enneagram Ones, also known as the Perfectionist.
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