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| John Bunyan's Spiritual Story |
Grace in the midst Plague and Fire
John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim's Progress, also wrote his testimony, which he called "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Bunyan was referring to himself, the chief of sinners.
The spiritual biography was published in the year of the tragic Great Fire of London and the year after the deadly Great Plague which took the lives of almost one quarter of the population of that great city. 100,000 souls passed into the night.
Bunyan's spiritual biography was, so to speak, a calming balm in the midst of deep calamity.
He took the "abounding grace" from Romans 5:20 which says that where sin increased, so grace increased even more. Sin can never outdo grace! The grace of God always outruns sin. No man or woman can say "I'm too great a sinner to be saved." No Christian can ever say "God can never forgive me for that sin."
John Bunyan looked at his own sinfulness and concluded that he was a prime example of God's grace abounding to the "chief of sinners" (a title he borrowed from the apostle Paul, 1 Timothy 1:15).
Grace is God loving unlovely people. What a beautiful thing grace is!
Today, our verses from Psalm 103 are some of the most grace-filled words in the whole of the Old Testament. So we will have to slow down for a few days to absorb all the meaning!
Today, just a couple of verses will have to suffice:
He made known his ways to Moses,
his deeds to the people of Israel:
8 The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
God's Character is Revealed through his Actions
David says that the Lord, verse 7, has revealed himself, revealed his character, through the deeds he did for Israel.
Verse 7 - "He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel..."
As Israel journeyed with God, God's actions towards them revealed his character. That is how God the invisible, made himself known. How God responds to his people in different situations, reveals what he is like.
This is also how people reveal their characters, is it not? If someone always keeps their promises to you, then you know they are reliable. We do not learn character from what a person says about themselves, we learn character from their actions.
Actions, we say, speak louder than words.
Over the hundreds of years of Israel's history, God revealed his character by the way he behaved towards them.
Israel, for her part, also revealed her character by her actions! And Oh Dear! What a wayward people they were! We recall their rebelliousness, their thanklessness, their complaining and their faithless and rampant turning away to other gods! (Are we all that different? We ought to be.)
And yet! And yet! God stuck with them, provided for their needs, led them through the desert and protected them from all their enemies!
That is what grace is.
Grace is God's love and kindness towards us in spite of what we are and do. It's not something to be abused, "I can live how I please," but it can too easily be taken for granted. The purpose of this psalm is to remember and praise God for his grace.
You and I are also the recipients of abounding grace. In spite of our many sins, foibles, weaknesses and strayings, God continues to stick by us, provide for us, lead us and protect us from harm.
Let's hear more about grace.
Grace upon Grace!
Verse 8 - The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.
David lists four grace-attributes of God.
Compassion is a deep heart-feeling for someone in the midst of their trouble. God feels for us in our sorrows. He is not aloof and insensitive, but moved by our suffering, because, in the Person of his Son, he has walked our walk and carried our sorrows.
Graciousness, is goodness towards one even though they don't deserve it. God gives to us in spite of.
Slowness to anger is longsuffering, forbearance, having a long fuse before snapping. Ponder your past. Consider how slow you have been to respond to some command of the Lord. You knew this was what God required of you, but you delayed and procrastinated. All the while God waited and waited. He is indeed slow to anger.
Abounding in love is what it says, love in great great measure. God's love towards us has been nothing short of abounding, fullsome, bountiful. If we do not think so, we need to pull out paper and pen and begin listing his goodness towards us, just in the first three months of 2020, or just in the past few weeks of lockdown.
And all of these blessings in spite of our sinfulness!
Grace most revealed through Jesus Christ
Just as God's character in the Old Testament was revealed through his actions, so too his character in the New Testament is revealed through his actions. The difference is that in the New Testament, those gracious actions take place through Jesus Christ.
Jesus reveals God to us fully. That is why he is called the Word of God.
"No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only (i.e. Jesus Christ), who is at the Father's side, has made him known." (John 1:18)
Through Jesus Christ, the grace of God has been most fully revealed. John 1:16 says, "For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace," or as another translation puts it, "From the fulness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another."
The God revealed in Psalm 103, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love, is most fully revealed in Jesus Christ.
And most clearly in his deep suffering and ugly death.
Jesus went through all of his suffering to rescue, not nice people, but wretched rebels. The righteous died for the unrighteous, died while we were sinners and died while we were still dead in our transgressions and sins.
Grace is God loving unlovely people. What a beautiful and praiseworthy thing grace is!
Summing it Up
"The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love."
We should enjoy grace - we go to bed at night, knowing we have let God down, and yet he continues to love us.
We should practice grace - to that person who has sinned against us: let us forgive them freely. And in our homes where we can so easily rub one another up the wrong way.
We should preach grace: "Sinner you can come as you are, God will pardon you."
And, teaches Psalm 103, we should thank God for grace.
A SONG FOR THE DAY
A simple song about God's grace today. I love hymns, their depth, their accurate doctrine. But I have learnt that young Christians struggle with the long words and deep thoughts. What they need is something more immediate and comprehensible, so that they can worship God today. Why should their worship journey only begin after they have been converted for ten years? That has changed my whole attitude towards shorter and simpler songs.
These days I love to sing the simpler songs of worship.
God of grace, I turn my face to You;
I cannot hide
My nakedness, my shame,
my guilt, are all before Your eyes.
Strivings and all anguished dreams
in rags lie at my feet,
And only grace provides
the way for me to stand complete.
And Your grace clothes me in righteousness,
And Your mercy covers me in love.
Your life adorns and beautifies.
I stand complete in You.
Chris Bowater
You can hear it HERE.
A PRAYER FOR TODAY
Our gracious and loving Father,
We echo the psalmist and praise you with our inmost beings. We praise your holy name as we remember all your benefits.
We are not the people we should be; forgive us, cleanse us and renew us in our daily repentance.
We thank you for your wonderful grace to us. We thank you for your deep compassion, for your long-suffering and your abounding love to us. We thank you that all of your grace has come to us through Jesus Christ.
Help us to live grace-filled lives in the power of your Spirit, rejoicing in your grace, extending grace to those who offend us, and preaching grace to the lost.
Help us in these trying times to be filled with your Spirit and to exhibit in our homes, with our loved ones, the nine-fold fruit of the Spirit.
We ask these things in Jesus' Name
Amen.
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