Grace
Grace is not God finally paying us what He owes. It is His freely given favor toward people who could never demand it. We do not work our way into grace; we respond because grace has already been given.
Grace is one of those words Christians use so often that we can forget to ask what it actually means.
We are saved by grace. We sing about amazing grace. We thank God for His grace when something goes well and ask for grace when life becomes difficult. After a while, grace can become one of those words that means almost anything good God does.
But grace means something more specific.
If I work forty hours and my employer hands me my paycheck, I may be grateful for it, but my employer has not shown me grace by paying me. I earned the money. It belongs to me.
Grace is different because the recipient cannot point to the gift and say, “You owed me that.”
Scripture Overview
When God reveals His character to Moses, He describes Himself as;
“the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6).
Grace is not merely something God occasionally does. Scripture includes it among the qualities that describe who He is.
The New Testament develops that picture most clearly in salvation:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph. 2:8–9).
Romans 4:4 makes the same distinction from another angle:
“Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation.”
There is nothing wrong with receiving something you have earned. Once something is owed to you, though, receiving it is no longer grace.
Grace Cannot Be Earned or Owed
Imagine your neighbor unexpectedly pays off your mortgage.
First of all, please introduce me to your neighbor.
But assuming you did not perform some service worth several hundred thousand dollars beforehand, that gift would be an extraordinary act of grace. You could be deeply grateful for it. You might remember what that person did for the rest of your life.
What you could not reasonably say is, “Well, obviously they paid off my mortgage. I deserved it.”
The moment you claim you were entitled to the money, you are no longer describing a gift. You are describing something the other person owed you.
We can do something similar with God.
I did not earn existence before I existed. I did not negotiate the terms of my birth, create the people capable of loving me, design a world containing beauty, or build the body that was already keeping me alive before I understood how any of it worked. Granted, not every circumstance of life is pleasant, and people clearly do not receive identical opportunities. Still, some things are given to us before we have any possibility of earning them.
Salvation makes the distinction even sharper.
Christianity does not describe humanity as a group of basically deserving people waiting for God to hand over something He owes them. Scripture describes sinners being offered reconciliation, forgiveness, adoption, and eternal life.
Grace is not God finally paying His bill. It is something He was never obligated to give.
If God gives another person something He has not given me, I may grieve what I lack. I may ask God for it. I may even struggle with why their life looks so different from mine.
But a gift cannot become a debt simply because I watched someone else receive it.
This becomes especially important when we think about the salvation of another person. Consider the familiar dilemma of the unreached people group: people who might believe if only they had the opportunity to hear the Gospel.
It is easy to scrunch up our noses at what can seem like a flawed process. Why does God place so much emphasis on hearing the Gospel when He could just send an angel or something?
I have an entire post devoted to divine hiddenness. Here, I want to zero in on an assumption that can hide underneath it:
Are we assuming these people are entitled to salvation?
Maybe I am only exposing one of my own old assumptions, but I used to imagine innocent people somewhere in the world being condemned simply because they never had the chance to learn about Jesus.
But that assumption carried another assumption inside it: that some people possess enough goodness of their own that, given the opportunity, they could stand before God with something worthy to offer Him.
The Bible does not support that assumption. Jesus said, “No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Paul writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Psalm 14 goes further: “there is no one who does good, not even one” (Ps. 14:3).
The point is not merely that everybody makes a few bad decisions. Scripture presents the human problem as much deeper than that. We do not simply lack a claim on salvation. We also lack the righteousness with which we could earn it. We come to God with nothing that can make salvation something we deserve.
So the assumption has to change.
The question is not whether there are morally deserving people somewhere whom God has unfairly denied something they earned. There are not. That does not answer every question about how God deals with those who have never heard the Gospel, but it does remove one possible starting point: God does not owe salvation to innocent people who have earned His favor, because there are no such people.
Would it be good for them to be saved?
Of course.
But on what basis could any of us demand salvation as something owed to us—or claim that we possess enough merit to earn it?
We have neither a claim that obligates God nor righteousness that earns His favor. If salvation could be demanded or earned, it would no longer be grace.
That can sound harsh, and I understand why. But the harshness is not in grace; it is in the reality of sin and what it has done to us. Grace becomes all the more remarkable once we realize that God is not merely giving us something He did not owe us. He is giving to people who had nothing sufficient to offer Him in exchange.
Grace Does Not Cancel Justice
If grace means giving someone good they have not earned, what happens when the recipient actually deserves judgment?
Suppose a judge looks at someone who has committed a serious crime and says, “I'm feeling gracious today, so we're going to pretend none of this happened.”
Grace cannot mean that wrongdoing suddenly doesn’t matter. If it did, what looked like grace toward the guilty could become cruelty toward the person they harmed.
Christianity does not solve that problem by choosing grace over justice. It points to the Cross.
Human sin is not renamed or dismissed as though God eventually decided rebellion was no big deal. Christianity claims that Christ willingly bears the cost of reconciliation so that forgiveness can be offered without God declaring evil good.
John describes Jesus as “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), and that is where Christian grace becomes more than an idea about God giving good things to people who did not earn them. We see it lived out. Jesus feeds people who cannot repay Him, touches people others avoid, welcomes those whose reputations make respectable society uncomfortable, and continues teaching people who repeatedly misunderstand Him. He heals, forgives, serves, and ultimately gives His life.
Paul writes that although Christ was rich, “yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).
Free does not mean cheap. If someone gives me a car, the car did not suddenly cost nothing; someone else absorbed the cost. Salvation is freely received, but reconciliation itself does not cost nothing.
Grace and forgiveness therefore overlap without meaning exactly the same thing. Forgiveness concerns God's response to wrongdoing, while grace is broader: God gives what the recipient could never demand in the first place.
And He gives far more than forgiveness alone. Believers are reconciled to God, adopted, given the Spirit, brought into the life of Christ, and promised resurrection.
Grace Changes Us
Grace is sometimes defined as God's power working inside us to transform us. I understand why. Scripture clearly connects grace with transformation.
But that reverses the order. Grace is what God gives; transformation is what His grace can produce.
Paul captures both ideas when he writes:
“By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect” (1 Cor. 15:10).
Grace had an effect on Paul. It changed the direction of his life, his work, and ultimately the person he became.
Grace comes first, and our response follows.
Otherwise, we can quietly turn grace into another achievement. If grace is measured by how impressively I have changed, eventually I start looking at myself to determine whether God's gift is real.
We obey because we have received; we do not obey so that God will finally decide we are worth receiving.
That does not make obedience irrelevant. Scripture repeatedly presents grace as something that bears fruit in the life of the person receiving it. Our transformation is a response to God's favor, not the price we pay to obtain it.
Grace Confronts Entitlement
This may be where grace becomes uncomfortable.
Most of us like receiving gifts. We are less enthusiastic about being reminded that they are gifts.
The moment I begin treating grace as something God owes me, gratitude starts to disappear. The gift becomes an expectation, and expectations have a way of becoming resentment when they are not met.
Why did she get that opportunity?
Why did they receive the healing?
Why was that prayer answered?
Why does someone else seem to have more money, support, children, health, influence, or time?
Those questions are not automatically sinful. Some of them come from genuine grief, and pretending otherwise would be cruel.
But grace forces another question underneath them:
Has something God freely gives slowly become something I believe He owes me?
Entitlement does not always announce itself as entitlement. Sometimes it sounds like disappointment. Sometimes comparison. Sometimes, if we're being particularly spiritual about it, it sounds like an argument about fairness.
Grace was never a promise that every person's life would contain the same good things.
Someone could reasonably say, “Jessie, I don't think you understand the sheer magnitude of what I have had to deal with.”
Beloved, I understand sheer magnitude. I was malnourished as a child and deprived of food and proper care. I have been trapped in terrible relationships, battled severe depression for most of my life, and now live with a chronic illness that leaves me so debilitated I spend about 90 percent of my time in bed.
It is easy to say, that's not fair. I battle “not fair” every day of my life. Every time I see someone simply walking around, I am reminded of something I have lost. There are days when “unfair” feels like the story of my life.
So I am not suggesting that grief over what we were denied is shallow, selfish, or easy to overcome. Some losses are enormous.
But we do not know enough about another person's life—or even our own—to calculate God's grace like figures on a spreadsheet.
Grief is not the same thing as entitlement.
I can grieve what I do not have. I can hate the loss. I can tell God that I do not understand why my life looks the way it does. What I cannot automatically conclude is that because something good was withheld from me, God owed it to me.
Where That Leaves Us
Life, forgiveness, Christ, the Spirit, reconciliation with God—none of those began with something I earned.
That does not make obedience or faithfulness unimportant. It puts them in the right order. I do not work my way into grace; I respond because grace has already been given.
And that may be one of the harder things about grace to accept. Receiving something wonderful is easy when I think I have earned it. Receiving something I could never demand requires me to admit that God is not responding to my worthiness.
He gives because He chooses to give.
All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV).