Extending Grace

“And the commandment we have from him is this: that the one who loves God should love his fellow Christian too.”

1 John 4:21 NET

It is so easy to love everyone on Sunday at church, isn't it? We raise our hands in worship singing "glorly to you God, I love you Lord," we give each other hugs, we hear a message about God's love and how we are to love each other where we are saying "Amen" several times. Then we walk out of the building and across the parking lot...and words that we would never say in church start coming out of our mouths, sometimes at people we don't even know! Or we start thinking thoughts like, "if I walk into work tomorrow morning and there is a stack of papers on my desk, then heads are going to roll!" You may have never said those exact words, but don't say you never thought along those lines. I've done it, and sometimes I still do it. So where is God's love in all of that??? When it comes down to it, we do love God, the problem is we are still reacting to issues inside of us as are the people all around us. When we go to God, we know He is going to forgive us and help us, and we need to be giving that same kind of grace to our fellow Christian brothers and sisters as well. When we get into a situation where we feel our emotions rising up, we need to take a deep breath, and put the cross of Jesus as the back drop of the situation. When we do this, we bring the grace of God into the situation and in doing so we bring the "right thing to do" into the situation. We need to realize that we are not perfect and neither is our neighbor. We need to extend the grace that God gave us to our fellow Christian when they aren't acting so great. We need to extend the grace that God gave us to our wife, husband, children, friends, pastors, etc with the same grace that we expect God to give us.

Take Away: start looking at every situation you encounter with God's love. See the situation with the cross of Jesus as the backdrop and extend grace to those around you.