Get the Horse Before the Cart
Galatians 3:6-8 Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.
Grace, God’s grace, is such a difficult concept to wrap our hearts around. Even if you can wrap your mind around it, wrapping your heart around it, believing in the grace of God is so hard, because we don’t life in a world of grace.
We live in a world that measures you on your performance. A world that says if you’re wealthy, if you have a good job, if you live in a big house, if you drive a nice car – then you’re successful. Then you have value. Then you have worth.
And the flip side of that coin is true too. If you don’t measure up, if you don’t deliver, if you don’t fit into the world’s mould of success, if you’re not good looking and well dressed, then you don’t have much worth at all.
In fact, all too often, if you can’t do something for people, they just discard you, pass you by, throw you on the trash heap.
So we have a performance mindset. We’ve been taught to equate performance, measured by the world’s scale, with value. That’s the basic lie we live with.
And can I say, even as Christians, we kind of have this belief that what comes first in the Bible is the law of the Old Testament. The rule book if you will, and it was only later that this idea of God’s grace, made active in our lives through faith, came about.
Law first … then grace. But actually that’s not true. That’s putting the cart before the horse. Have a listen. The Apostle Paul:
Galatians 3:6-8: Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.
Now, the point that Paul makes a few verses later in that chapter is that this whole “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” thing happened a full four hundred and thirty years before the Old Testament law was given to God’s people through Moses.
So let’s get the horse before the cart. Grace through faith in what God says always came first. Always. Grace. The free, unmerited favour of God. It’s just who God is. It’s born out of his incredible love for you and me.
The world wants you to perform, to deliver, to be measured by its ruler of ‘success’. And frankly, religion is about performing and delivering too. But what God has for you today is His grace. And grace always, always comes first.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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