Grace Car Driving

May we all grow in the Grace and Knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. What makes you a Grace Car Driver? One of my favorite subjects with the emphasis on FAVOR. John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was full of grace – “favor”, and John told us that he was the disciple that Jesus loved, John 10:26 I’m convinced that’s because when John looked into Jesus eyes he felt his favor, he was full of favor and John was gifted with both the favor/grace and the understanding of it.

Think of the moment you felt Jesus favor, you knew you were loved, favored, forgiven. Now think of a Godly person in your life and my guess is that when you are in there presence you feel like you are highly favored, they have an intense interest in you and what you are feeling, doing experiencing, you know they are looking out for you want to help you, you are highly favored in their world, that is, “grace” and the precious words in John 1:14

“And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. We looked upon His glory, the glory of the one and only from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Yes, count on it, to be in Jesus Presence is to be highly favored, He is going to treat you as a favored son. So do you let your favored son merge? How about if he cut in at the last moment uncaring about all the people ahead of him? How would you handle that with a favored child? One thing I would recommend is prayer, we pray for our kids, that they too would be grace car drivers that they would grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus.  We may want to roll down the window and instruct, prayer seems to have a better chance of working in my view, although I get frustrated and emotional myself, I am praying that I too would grow in my ability to feel grace towards those who are in a dark place, not go there with them.

This week I met a number of folks who shared a story of Jesus, grace with me. A man in Durham told me a time after his wife, who had committed suicide leaving him with two young daughters, distraught and helpless, he felt Jesus sit down in the car with him, late at night on a cold winters drive home from 3rd shift. Jesus put his arm around him. He told me, “I never felt so much love and peace, I didn’t even know they existed, I have never been the same since.”

You could look in his eyes and see the peace to this day over 47 years later. A lady and her husband donated a car to a single mom coming out of domestic violence through our Jesus Labor of Love, yesterday, as we were at the DMV doing the paper work, the wife was telling me of a time when she heard God tell her it’s time to take that job, three different times in the same day, she did and it and changed her life in so many ways. What grace, favor that God would instruct her on a life choice like that. Now she has highly favored this young mom, giving her a good car, it was a beautiful thing to see. Grace wins every time.

Look at the great leaders; Lincoln he treated people with “grace”, highly favored, how could you enslave someone that Christ died for. Or Churchill going to the ordinary people in London to see how they felt about peace with, Hitler? Churchill highly favored each he spoke with, wanting their name and what they did.

Grace, although its used many, many times to describe Jesus, interestingly the four times that Jesus himself taught on it, He set a the bar too high for us to reach without His help.