Sunday December 17, 2023 | Dan Kent
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
God, at the core of his divine nature, is gracious. This means that God extends his favor to us as a gift, out of his delight in us. This grace is fully expressed in the coming of Jesus, and Christmas is a time to celebrate and receive the grace of God.
In this sermon we explore the nature of God’s grace and how it defines the essence of God’s character. God shows us grace because this is God’s nature. To be gracious is to offer the gift of favor that is prompted by delight. God delights in us and this delight births favor. This word is used in the book of Esther when she comes before the king, hoping that he will delight in her in such a way that she experiences his grace.
In the New Testament we read in John 1:14 that Jesus was full of grace. And Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:4-5 that God extended his grace even when humans were living in rebellion. Grace is not something that is deserved or earned. It is a gift that is freely given. God’s delight in us is greater than our sin.
Jesus is the embodiment of God’s delightful favor. The coming of Jesus as a baby is the manifestation of what God thinks about us. He sees our delightfulness. And Jesus expresses this throughout his life. For instance, in Matthew 19:14, he demonstrates grace to the children, even though the adults were trying to guard them from Jesus. He says that God’s kingdom actually belongs to the children.
We are designed in such a way that we need to know that we are delighted in. We were created to live in grace and favor, because we were made for relationship with a graceful God. The divine attitude of delightful favor is stated with great clarity in Zephaniah 3:17. It reads:
The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.
God enjoys us as he desires to relate to us and be with us. Many times, grace is juxtaposed to the greatness of our sin, as if it requires great grace to address the grandeur of our rebellion. But this way of thinking gives the expectation that God’s nature is not full of grace, and that God does not delight in us. The truth is that God’s stance toward us begins with grace, not with revulsion at what we have done.
The question that we face is whether we live in God’s delight of us. This requires us to receive his delight of us as individuals. Also, we have to learn how to enter into God’s delight in all people. In a world where we are trained to show suspicion and judge others, we are called to love, build up and encourage others. We need to develop the ability to see what is delightful in other people so that we can participate more fully in the way that God delights in us.
We can do this in three ways. First, we do this as we put on “toddler-vision.” This is the ability to see all people as unfinished children, including ourselves. In this way, we can allow people to have weaknesses and allow them the space to grow up on their own journey. Secondly, we must seek to understand other peoples’ back stories. This give us insight into why people act as they do because their painful experiences will shape how they act in frustrating ways. Third, we can participate in God’s delight as we more fully enter into our own story. This means that we allow all kinds of people to be in our lives, even those who might annoy us. They play parts in a larger story, and we need to zoom out to see the big picture instead of getting caught up on the moment.