Finally, after many days of learning about such exciting concepts as cascading style sheets and hypertext markup language, an actual site has been born. This is it — the very first entry of a site entirely devoted to the radical, wondrous, exciting, overwhelming, all-encompassing Grace of our Savior, Jesus Christ! A few more adjectives are no doubt in order, but hopefully the point is made. Grace amazing, to you and me.

Everywhere I turn these days, I am struck by the ongoing grace of God in the world around me. Every page of God’s Word rings with grace; love worked out in the body shines forth grace; from marriage, to parenting, to work, to enjoyment of the creation, every day is filled with the grace of God. Hopefully in the days ahead we’ll get to explore more fully how grace impacts the Christian life; impacts not only in the moment of salvation, but every moment afterward.

One of the least-known lines of John Newton’s famous Amazing Grace reads:

The Lord has promised good to me, His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures.

How fantastic a thought, that the Lord will my shield and portion be for as long as my life lasts. Perhaps Psalm 84:11 is in mind, where the sons of Korah proclaim that “the Lord God is a sun and a shield; the Lord gives grace and glory; no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.”

The Lord is the sun for Christians… all light, all sustenance, everything comes from Him. The Lord is a shield for Christians… protection, help, safety. The Lord gives grace and glory (interesting connection, the culmination of grace is glory), and gives us all good things (hmm… not necessarily what we’d call good, but His best for us!).

We could just stop right there and bask in the wonder of what we’ve been given, except that Psalm 84:11 ends with a (possibly) disturbing phrase: “from those who walk uprightly.” Doesn’t this mean that if you do the right actions, then God will give you what you want? Doesn’t this fly right in the face of Amazing Grace and grace and glory and shields and portions?

Right away we are into the very reason for this site: grace, grace alone, after salvation. Because “he who walks uprightly” can only be said of you, or of me, inasmuch as we are united with the Righteous One, Jesus Christ. So our works, whether before or after salvation, are not what qualify the Christian as one of “those who walk uprightly.” No, rather that amazing phrase applies to us because we have “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” (Romans 3:22).

That’s alot to chew on. Named among the righteous in Psalms only by association with Christ, and not by my ongoing efforts (though I make them) to be an upstanding, moral person.

But that’s my faith. And yours too. Amazing Grace, my whole life long. All glory, praise, and honor to Jesus Christ my Lord!