In a recent column, I confessed that I might have gotten my first driver’s license before I was supposed to. I’m not sure how I got away with that, but my less-than-fully-formed conscience didn’t consider whether it was legal. My goal was just to get that license in my 16-year-old paws.
As it happens, a cloud of fortuitous mystery also surrounds my college graduation. My pursuit of a college degree was happily interrupted when I got married in the summer after my sophomore year. In the course of transferring credits from Auburn to the University of Louisville, I apparently hit the academic jackpot and was awarded more credit hours than I thought possible, enabling me to graduate a year earlier than I thought I should or could.
After I graduated, I dreaded receiving a letter from the University of Louisville informing me they’d made a mistake and would be rescinding my degree. Instead, the year after my graduation, I got a letter announcing that I’d been chosen to receive an alumni award at halftime of the university’s homecoming football game.
I was beyond confused. I hadn’t done a single thing to earn an award except get a real job after graduating from the university’s new mass communications degree program. Nevertheless, feeling very much like an impostor, I was marched out on that football field alongside bon a fide distinguished U of L graduates like football legend Johnny Unitas, prominent educators and scientists, and various medical, legal, and business professionals.
I later learned I was given the award as part of a public relations effort to promote the new mass communications program.
I also learned this: the only thing that feels worse than being overlooked for an honor we think we deserve is receiving one we absolutely know we don’t. And that, my friends, is why many of us have a hard time understanding God’s grace
We can’t earn or deserve it, so why does God bestow upon any human the ultimate honor—admission into His family and His heaven? Here’s why: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)”
The very pride that makes us think we can be good enough to deserve heaven clearly proves we’re not. But if we can get over ourselves, it’s incredibly freeing to realize salvation is a gift we can receive only by humbly believing that Jesus came to reconcile us to God by dying for our sins. We aren’t good enough, but He was, and when we believe that, all of Christ’s goodness is then credited to our accounts.
The Apostle Paul explained it this way: “But when the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3:4-7)”
I’ve gotten many good things I didn’t deserve. Some, like my first driver’s license, make me feel like a cheater. Others, like that alumni award, make me feel like a fraud.
But the greatest undeserved blessing of all—eternal salvation—just makes me feel incredibly and indescribably grateful.
?“… ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved. How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed. Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come; ’tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home …” (from “Amazing Grace” by John Newton).