Cruising on God’s Grace
Cruising on God’s Grace
There’s nothing like a fancy gadget to make life easier.
That’s how I feel about the cruise control switch on my van. As you might imagine, it’s not easy for me to keep throwing the weight of my shoulder against the joystick in order to accelerate. So if I’m on a long drive down the freeway, I’ll just flick on cruise control and float along at an easy fifty-five miles per hour.
It almost feels like the van is driving itself. It gives itself gas going up hill and levels off on a straightaway. All I have to do is sit in the driver’s seat and think about steering. Everything automatic. Everything self-operating. And all so easy.
I suppose the danger is that a driver could tend to depend too much on cruise control, switching his mind off as he sails along that lazy, asphalt river.
I’ve discovered another kind of cruise control that’s even more dangerous. You and I employ it more frequently than we realize.
It has to do with God’s grace and the automatic, self-operating view we tend to have of it. Let me describe it for you.
You flop in bed and mumble a good night prayer to God. You wake up in the morning a little later than you should, throw back the covers and hop in the shower, barely giving God or His grace a thought. In the back of your mind you feel like the morning is driving itself, without you deciding much about it. In your least consistent moments, you might even feel as though your whole life is on cruise control. All you have to do is decide which way to steer yourself.
Why do we act like this? Perhaps it’s because life seems easier when we assume the grace of God in our lives is as automatic as breathing, as self-operating as the beat of our heart. But it’s not that way. When it comes to God’s grace, cruise control simply doesn’t apply.
God won’t let us get away with that sort of sloppy attitude. In 2 Peter 1:2, we’re told that grace is ours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. In other words, grace comes in abundance only as we get to know Jesus. It only comes as we seek Him in prayer, meet Him in His Word, follow Him through obedience, greet Him in the morning, relax with Him at night.
As in any relationship, it takes work to develop a relationship like that. There’s nothing automatic about it.
The old King James Bible puts it nicely: “Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our LORD.…”
I like that word “multiplied.” I never made fantastic grades in math, but I do know what it means to increase quantity through multiplication. If Peter intended to be mathematical in his word choice, then grace and peace is only increased in our lives as it is multiplied by our knowledge of Jesus.
So let’s switch off the cruise control, friends. Life—at least, life in abundance—doesn’t work that way.
The grace of God demands our full attention.