Do you have any “grace suckers” in your life? You know that person who has that way of exhausting your grace. You may love them but you can only take them in small increments?
Yesterday, it seemed all hell was breaking loose. I try to write two hours a day after work. But yesterday was filled with interruptions. Business that needed tending. Correcting mistakes I made. And yes, it required interacting with a couple of grace suckers.
Between the interruptions, I managed to write a few sentences. My topic for the day was … Grace (I know, God has a sense of humor.) I was reading and writing about how God saved Apostle Paul even though Paul was unrepentant. While he was in the middle of destroying others, Jesus invaded Paul’s heart.
Paul would later write that he had been kissed by mercy, flooded with incredible grace, and captured by grace. And as I was writing that, I suddenly became overwhelmed by God’s presence. Overwhelmed by his love for me and His love for the grace-suckers in my life. Now the writing was interrupted by tears. (I pray everyone who reads this book is touched by the power and presence of God as I was yesterday.)
We have all been kissed by God’s mercy. Let us kiss others (even our grace suckers) with His mercy. God’s incredible grace has flooded our hearts and given us the capacity to love more freely, to extend grace generously. His beauty and his graciousness has captivated my heart. So, I repent. I repent from having limited grace. I repent for not extending grace freely to others and also to myself.
Let’s go out today and be like our Father, extending grace freely to everyone around us. Bring on the grace suckers. His grace is sufficient!
“Mercy kissed me, even though I used to be a blasphemer, a persecutor of believers, and a scorner of what turned out to be true. I was ignorant and didn’t know what I was doing. I was flooded with such incredible grace, like a river overflowing its banks, until I was full of faith and love for Jesus, the Anointed One! Yet I was captured by grace, so that Jesus Christ could display through me the outpouring of his Spirit as a pattern to be seen for all those who would believe in him for eternal life.”
1 Timothy 1:13-14, 16 TPT