Amazing Grace

17. AMAZING GRACE

By grace are ye saved.

—Eph. 2:8

My grace is sufficient for thee.

—2 Cor. 12:9

Grow in grace.

—2 Peter 3:18

John Jackson, superintendent of a Methodist mission in London’s east end, tells how not long ago he was walking along a street in Whitechapel when he saw in a shop window a notice which caught his eye and stirred his imagination. The notice read: AMAZING GRACE! SUPPLIES EXHAUSTED! COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!

The reference was, of course, to the popular record. Never before, to my recollection, has a great hymn been at the top of the Hit Parade.

Thank God, supplies of His grace have not run out!

Amazing grace! Grace is always amazing. If it does not amaze us, we do not really know what it is.

1. Saving grace is amazing.

“Grace … came by Jesus Christ,” John tells us (1:17). Everything about Jesus was gracious. His personality was gracious! “The Lord is gracious” (1 Peter 2:3). His teaching was gracious: “They wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth” (Luke 4:22). His whole redemptive ministry was gracious: “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.” (2 Cor. 8:9).

2. Sustaining grace is amazing.

Recently I purchased a ball-point pen in a Christian bookshop. I was in urgent need of the pen, and although the assistant at the counter warned me it wasn’t a good one and offered indeed to let me have it for nothing, I insisted on paying for it, as no other was available. The assistant was right. The pen was a dud. At least a dozen times I tried to coax it to write, but without success. Then I looked at a text printed in gold lettering on the pen. The text was: “My grace is sufficient for thee”!

3. Saintly grace is amazing.

It is a reflection on the quality of our common and commonplace Christian living that when a really Christian act is performed, it fairly takes our breath away. We are amazed at it. George Bernard Shaw used cynically to say that there has been in human history only one Christian, and that He got Himself crucified. It is scarcely an exaggeration. Most of us who bear His name are so monstrously unlike Him. Ghandi, a non-Christian, shames us. There was a Christlike amazingness about him. “It was his life that proved to me,” wrote K. Matthew Simon, “more than anything else that Christianity is a practicable religion even in the twentieth century.”

Ian MacPherson, Usable Outlines and Illustrations, Dollar Sermon Library Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1976), 29–30.