God of all Grace

1 Peter 5:10, "But the God of all grace, who has called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus...". You and I must learn what God is to us, not by our own thoughts, but by what He has revealed Himself to be, and that is, "The God of all Grace."

This is crucial to our growth in who we are IN CHRIST. There is sometimes the thought that grace implies God's passing over sin, but no, grace supposes sin to be so horribly bad a thing that God cannot tolerate it. The very fact of the Lord's being gracious shows sin to be so evil that man being a sinner, his state is utterly ruined and hopeless, and nothing but free grace will do for him, nothing but the grace that is in Christ Jesus can and does meet his need.

The grace of God is so unlimited, so full, so perfect, that if we get for a moment out of His presence, we cannot have the true consciousness of it, we have no strength to apprehend it, and if we attempt to know it out of His presence, we will only turn it to licentiousness--to use it as a license to continue in sin.

Grace supposes all the sin and evil that is in us and is the blessed revelation that, through Jesus, all this sin and evil HAS BEEN PUT AWAY--PUT AWAY FOREVER. Grace has reference to what God is, and not to what we are, it reveals to us that as great as our sins are and were, they just magnify the greatness of His grace that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Thank God that He has to cause us to walk by faith, to be completely dependent on Him, to experience the reality that God is greater than my sin, and not that my sin is greater than God. We can only grow by God's thoughts about us IN CHRIST. We don't grow to become someone or something, we grow because we already are everything that He designed us to be IN CHRIST.

You and I are nothing short of who we are in His full thought about us IN CHRIST, IN all of His fullness NON STOP. You and I are like Paul, who at about 67 years old, chained to a Roman guard, said, "I want to know HIM" because in knowing Him, I know how God thinks about me, and how I should think about Him.