GRACE – YOU JUST GET IT!

Having lived in the south for a time, I loved this story by Rich Bimler:

A man visiting Texas for the first time stopped at a restaurant for breakfast. He ordered scrambled eggs and wheat toast. When the order came, the toast was on a side dish, the eggs in a pile on the main plate with another pile of white stuff he didn't recognize next to the eggs. He asked the waitress what they were. "Honey," she said, "them is grits." "I didn't order grits," the man complained. Cheerfully the waitress responded in her southern drawl, "Honey, you don't order grits. You just gets 'em."

That's the way it is with God's grace. God's love is an undeserved gift. It isn't conditional on our asking for it, preparing to receive it, or being worthy to accept it. Like the man's grits, we don't even have to fully know what it is. Unlike grits, though, which I love but Bonnie says are "white dirt," everyone needs grace. We would all be lost forever without it for "we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." But He loves me because of what Jesus did for me not what I do. That is the joy of being a Christian. That is the central truth of the Gospel. "Honey, it is grace. You just get it."