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God's grace as an unmerited favour is extremely attractive to people when they think they don't have to earn it, every wrong thing they have done is freely covered, and nothing they do now can remove this grace over their life. The worst of criminals will be happy to hear of this grace and they appeal for the President's pardon as a matter of course. But this is to abuse grace.

Even among Christians who have had the opportunity to receive grace from God at some point in their life there are many who have not thought through the implications of grace. For them, grace is just like God overlooking their sins. One way they show their misunderstanding is by demanding grace from others for wrong they have done to them and getting angry when they don't give it.

A typical misinterpretation of grace is in terms of making out God to be totally gracious, ignoring all the other characteristics of God such as righteousness, justice and impartiality. People expect Him, in effect, to just overlook or ignore sin because He is a God of grace! But of course, He cannot be unrighteous or unjust even when He is being gracious! In order to show grace to us, He had to satisfy His justice by placing the punishment of our sins upon His Son, Jesus Christ. Another part of His righteousness is that He cannot forgive anyone just because He wants to. We have to acknowledge our sins before Him, accept that we deserve death as our punishment and only thus become eligible to receive His grace.

Because of a one-sided preaching of grace that is going on, many people do not get to understand the balance of justice in God's dealings with them. They begin to expect forgiveness without repentance. They imagine that no matter how they live now, God's grace will cover them. They don't see any need to repent now when they sin. They don't confess their sins or seek to keep their heart right before God at all times (1Jn.1:9). They don't seek to overcome temptations so that sin will not be allowed to rule over them (Ro.6:13,14). They don't realise that this way of life is, in the meantime, accumulating consequences to them (for which they blame God later) (Ga.6:7,8).

They sin against others and then demand that others should forgive them and deal with them as if nothing has happened. When that doesn't happen, they call these others legalistic and ungracious. Suddenly, the focus reverses and the victim becomes labelled as the perpetrator!

Grace is a free gift from God without being based on any merit on our side. If it was not, then we could have demanded it (Ro.4:4). But, at the same time, we must not forget that God had to make an unimaginable sacrifice in order to become able to give it to us as a free gift.

Let us make sure we have personally received this grace with the acknowledgement before God that we don't deserve it. Let us also not demand it from others. But let us show it to others freely even when we think they don't deserve it.

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