students of jesus

You’re in the garden, pulling whatever weeds catch your eye, whichever ones will yield and give way, root and all. Head down and sun on your back, you don’t even notice the gentle bead of sweat that blooms across your forehead as you work. Then comes a small breeze that brings a soft coolness upon your moist skin. You look up. You see nothing. Renewed and unaware, you return to the task. The returning is grace.

Grace is the breeze that cools. Grace is what only God can do in the midst of your labors. Grace is the whispered word of peace that breathes life into our effort and makes it the work of God. Grace is the calm instead of the storm. Grace comes again and again. It comes so often we think of it as grace returning, but in fact it never left: what comes again and again is our return to grace.

Grace is the foundation of God’s work in us, the firm footing from which we can reach and stretch and work and do, the still point that enables any effort--which no effort can improve or change. When the Psalm urged us, “Be still and know that I am God,” he did not mean that all our labors would cease, only that any effort separated from grace is vain effort indeed.

A return to grace is like a return to breathing: grace breathes life in us, a life that we so often take for granted. A return to grace does not mean grace had ever left us at all, only that we become awake to it again. Grace is the atmosphere of our life with God. Each moment it passes through us, unnoticed; yet we would cease to exist without grace. Our great need is to breathe deep of God’s inexhaustible gift. Before we sing God’s song we must fill our lungs with grace. In God’s kingdom, no matter what we sing, it’s in the key grace. 

Why not receive Students of Jesus in your inbox? Subscribe to our email newsletter and never miss a post.