The Grace of God: Three Reasons Grace is Amazing

John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace,” knew something about grace. Born in England in 1725, he worked as a young man in the transatlantic slave trade and became the captain of a slave ship. During a violent storm, believing that the ship was about to sink, he cried out to God for mercy. God spared him, and Newton later looked back on that night as the beginning of his conversion. He became a pastor and a prominent voice against slavery, influencing William Wilberforce. Near the end of his life he said, “I am a great sinner, but Christ is a great Saviour.”

Newton’s story raises the questions that shape this article: How do you define grace? When you ask God for grace, what do you think you are receiving? And how amazed are you by it?

Christians use the word “grace” so often that it is worth asking what we mean by it. It is helpful to root our understand of grace in three things.

First, grace is undeserved favour. Paul says that all “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift” (Romans 3:23–24). A gift cannot be earned. We have earned nothing of what God has given us in our justification, our sanctification, or our future glorification.

Second, grace excludes human merit. “If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Romans 11:6). Grace and merit are opposites. If salvation were ninety-nine per cent Christ and one per cent us, it would cease to be grace altogether.

Third, grace originates in God’s sovereign will. God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world … according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:4–6). Grace is not a response to something attractive in us, nor is it God feeling sorry for us. It is his initiative, never our request.

The Father purposes grace, the Son purchases it, and the Holy Spirit applies it. When we say that God is gracious, we describe God himself, not a separate substance that he possesses and distributes. Grace is the one gracious work of the triune God.

This corrects a common distortion, which suggests that the Lord Jesus rescues us from an angry Father. That is not grace. Scripture presents it as trinitarian from start to finish. Paul’s benediction speaks of “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (2 Corinthians 13:14), and Peter greets believers chosen “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood” (1 Peter 1:2).

Grace, then, is not so much what God gives as who God is. When we receive grace, we receive his graciousness and the glory of the Trinity. We use the word so freely that we can miss the weight it carries.

Paul tells Timothy that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9). Grace was given before the ages began, which points us to the covenant of redemption: the eternal counsel of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit concerning the accomplishment and application of our salvation. From that counsel flows the covenant of grace.

This means grace is not God’s Plan B. It is not merely his reaction to Adam’s fall. The experience of saving grace unfolds in history, but God’s gracious purpose to save sinners lay in his eternal counsel.

The practical question is how safe we are in grace. Do we fear that it might fail us, our children, our marriages, or our souls? Our security rests not on the firmness of our grip on the covenant but on God’s faithfulness and Christ’s fulfilment of it on our behalf. Jesus is “the guarantor of a better covenant” (Hebrews 7:22). The covenant cannot fail because Christ cannot fail, and so grace cannot fail. We are as secure in grace as Christ is faithful.

John writes, “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16). The phrase expresses superlative abundance: wave upon wave of grace. Verse 17 adds, “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The law was itself a gracious revelation, but not the fullness of God’s saving revelation. It served grace by showing our need of it, acting as “our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith” (Galatians 3:24). Salvation was always by grace through faith.

Christ does not merely possess grace; he is the very fullness of grace. Imagine standing on the shore of an endless ocean that represents the infinite fullness of God. You cannot contain or possess the ocean, only receive what comes to you. Each wave that rolls onto the shore is the grace we receive in Christ. Wave follows wave, and you never exhaust the ocean or receive the last wave.

Grace is unearned and unmerited as far as we are concerned, yet it was merited by Christ, who emptied himself and paid for it in full. That is why, when we look at grace, we see the face of Christ. The law revealed the righteousness that God requires, but the gospel reveals the righteousness that God provides.

How, then, can we receive grace in waves and dish it out in teaspoons? Having been given grace undeservedly, we are called to be vessels of it, not to withhold it from one another.

The gospel is a proclamation of grace. To those who do not yet know Christ, God extends it freely and offers terms of peace: Repent and believe. Refusing it is grave, because it means shunning the very grace of God. If you protest that you are too great a sinner, hear this: There is more grace in Christ than there is sin in you. No sinner comes to Christ and fails to find a fullness of grace.

Grace is God’s free, undeserved favour, whereby the triune God graciously gives himself and his blessings to sinners through the fullness of Christ, to save those who have no claim upon him. He gives all that he gives because he gives himself, and that is what we receive when we receive grace.

Unlike the moments we wish would last, but which fade into memories, grace does not fade. There is grace sufficient for every affliction, trial, and bodily ailment, for the salvation of our children and the strengthening of our marriages. Christ told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Graceis always sufficient because Christ is always sufficient, and for every need we have, there is Christ—and his grace—for that need.