From Bishop Peter Carrell
God’s Amazing Grace
God always takes the initiative in relationship with humanity. God has loved us from before the foundation of the world. God came into the world in Jesus Christ to save us by becoming sin for us and dying sacrificially in our place on the cross and rising again to inaugurate resurrection life in which we are invited to share. In all such ways of God, God’s love is generous, inclusive of the undeserving, merciful to sinners, and embracing all.
To speak of these things of God is to speak of God’s grace. It is “amazing” grace because God’s love is so deep, wide, high and long that we can never exhaust it or outrun it. Nor can we abound in sin so much that our sin is greater than God’s capacity to forgive us.
Such is the gracious love God has for us, John twice declares in 1 John 4:8 and 16 that “God is love”. Theologians have reflected on the implication of texts such as these and declared that if God is love and God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then the relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a communion of love. Every person of the Godhead is love, every action of God is loving, every word of God is love addressed to humanity.
After two thousand years of Christian understanding of God’s grace in the light of Jesus Christ, there is a danger that we take God’s grace for granted. That God’s grace is no longer amazing but ordinary. Loving us graciously is just what we expect God to do, no more and no less. This issue of Anglican Life is an opportunity to pause, reflect, and pray so that we renew our appreciation of God’s grace towards us – an amazing grace. Grace so amazing that we do not take it for granted but want to lift our hearts and voices, and sing with John Newton, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound”.
Bishop Peter.