Grace Abounding

My God is true; each morn anew I’ll trust His grace unending, my life to Him commending.

God has blessed me beyond measure.

It would have been enough if he had forgiven my sin and promised that I could spend eternity with him. But, in spite of me, he has seen fit to demonstrate the "exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward" me (Ephesians 2:7) here and now by blessing me with countless temporal blessings.

John Bunyan, the Puritan preacher and author of Pilgrim's Progress, entitled his autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners -a reference to 1 Timothy 1:5. I read Grace Abounding about ten years ago, and the title left a deep impression upon me. Like Bunyan and the Apostle Paul, I have no reservations about identifying with the moniker "chief of sinners". In fact, I am convicted that if I were willing to settle for any nicer a perception of myself, I would be greatly underestimating the depth and gravity of my sin. My sin does more that separate me from God. It makes me his enemy and, justly, invites his wrath (Hebrews 10:31).

Question 82 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, "Is any man able perfectly to keep the commandments of God?" The answer is: "No mere man, since the fall, is able, in this life, perfectly to keep the commandments of God; but doth daily break them, in thought, word, and deed" (emphasis added). I am a daily commandment-breaker. More specifically, like Adam, I am a covenant-breaker (Hosea 6:7).

But when God looks at me, he only sees the imputed righteousness of the Lord Jesus -who kept every commandment perfectly, and died on my behalf (Romans 4:24-25; 5:19). I'm reconciled to God, and through no merit whatsoever of my own. If that were all he did for me, it would have been more than enough.

Yet he has also blessed me with so many other good things. He has blessed me beyond what I ever hoped, or could ever ask. He has blessed me beyond measure.

The second verse of one of my favorite hymns reads:

Praise to the Lord, who over all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth!
Hast thou not seen how thy desires ever have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

Amen.