What is "grace" and what does it mean for the believer?
John MacArthur notes the following on the word “grace:”
Grace is a
single-word definition of the gospel. The gospel is the good news of God’s
grace to sinful mankind. The nature of grace is giving, and the Bible tells us
much more about giving than getting, because God’s nature is to give. God is a
God of grace because He is a God who freely gives. It has nothing to do with
anything we have done or have failed to do; it can only be received.
God is gracious because of who He is, not because of who or
what we are. His grace is therefore
unmerited, unearned, undeserved. It depends entirely on the One who gives it,
not on those who receive it. Grace
is God’s self-motivated, self-generated, sovereign act of giving.
God’s grace has
another dimension that places it still further above every other kind of
giving. The greatest gift of grace is self. Grace is therefore God’s Self donation, His Self giving. He not
only gives blessings to men, He gives Himself. Infinitely more important and
precious than any blessing God gives us is that gift of Himself. The
incomprehensible and staggering truth of the gospel is that the holy God of the
universe has given Himself to sinful
mankind! God grants us His salvation, His kingdom, His inheritance, His Spirit,
His throne, His wisdom, His love, His power, His peace, His glory, and every
other “spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3). But far
more than all of those blessings, He blesses us with His personal presence. God
owes nothing to sinful men except judgment for their sin. He does not owe men
the smallest blessing or favor. Yet in His grace He has given us the blessing
of all blessings, the immeasurable blessing of intimate shared life (cf. 2 Pet.
1:3–4).
When we choose a partner with whom we plan to spend the rest
of our life in marriage, we are careful to pick someone who is worthy of the
self-giving that marriage demands. That person is the one above all others to
whom we will give our love, our time, our thoughts, our devotion, our loyalty,
and our resources—in short, all that we have.
Yet when God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the
world” (Eph. 1:4), He did so out of pure grace and not for anything He saw in
us that made us worthy of His care. “For God so loved the world, that He gave
His only begotten Son” (John 3:16). All God can see in the world is sin, yet He
gave Himself to that sinful world through His own Son in order that the world
might be redeemed. The Son also gave Himself, emptying Himself of His own glory
that He might offer glory to fallen men and giving His own life that
spiritually dead men might live.
Throughout His earthly ministry Jesus continually gave
Himself to others. He gave Himself to His disciples, to those He healed, to
those He raised from the dead, released from demons, and forgave of sins. To
the woman at the well in Sychar He offered the water of eternal life (John
4:14), and He Himself was that water (6:35; 7:38). “You know the grace of our
Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor,
that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). To those who
receive His grace God will continue
to “show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ
Jesus” throughout the ages to come (Eph. 2:7).
The grace in
which we stand (Rom. 5:2) not only saves but enables (cf. Eph. 6:10; Phil.
4:13; 1 Tim. 1:12; 2 Tim. 4:17), and that is the sense of the term here. Paul
makes it clear that grace was given
to every believer. The definite article (hē)
is used in the original text, indicating that this is the grace, that is, the
grace unique to Christ. The term for grace
is charis and signifies that what is
given is not the charismata (the
special gifts indicated by this word in Rom. 12:6–8 and 1 Cor. 12:4–10) but the
subjective grace that works in and shows itself through the life of a believer.
This grace is the enabling power
that makes the special gifts function to the glory of God.[1]
