Imagine a plain room whose walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with small filing drawers. Every drawer holds index cards, and every card is written in your own handwriting and signed with your own name. One is labeled words I have said in anger. Another, kindnesses I have shown. Another holds thoughts you hoped no one would ever see. It is a catalog of a whole life, nothing left out, and standing in the middle of it is a picture of what it means to be honest about ourselves before God. Most of us would want to lock that room and hide the key. The good news is that someone else is willing to walk in and answer for what is written there.
A room we would rather keep locked
It does not take long in a room like that to feel the weight of our own record. We can tell ourselves we have done better lately, that this year was an improvement on the last, that surely this month held more good than bad. Then we ask about this morning, and the honest answer is humbling. Scripture does not let us round our lives up. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (). The trouble is not only that we slip now and then. It is that our sins put real distance between us and the One who made us. Your iniquities have separated you from your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you (). Left alone, that separation ends in a place we do not want, because the wages of sin is death (). We cannot tear those cards up. We cannot burn the file or work it off. That is exactly where grace begins.
Grace we could never earn
Before God ever acts, the Bible is blunt about our condition. We were dead in the trespasses and sins in which we once walked (). Dead people cannot improve themselves, and that is worth sitting with, because it strips away the idea that we might earn our way back into God’s favor if we simply tried a little harder. Grace, by its very meaning, is undeserved. If we could deserve it, it would be a paycheck and not a gift. The best among us has no claim on heaven by personal merit, and the sooner we admit that, the sooner we are ready to receive what only God can give. Owning our need is not despair. It is the first honest step toward being rescued.
A gift freely given
Into that hopeless picture comes one of the most hopeful turns in all of Scripture. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (). Notice that the love came first, while we were still in the wrong. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (). God did not wait for us to tidy the room. God shows his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (). His justice is real and sin has a real cost, so the cost was paid at the cross rather than waved away. By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (). Picture the one card in that room the man cannot destroy, and then picture a name written across it in red, so alive, covering his own. That is the gift. Where our own handwriting condemned us, another signature answers for it.
Grace that asks for a response
A gift can be offered and still refused, and the same Bible that promises grace freely is honest that not everyone receives it. Grace is not earned, but it is answered. Christ became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him (). That obedience is not an attempt to buy what has already been given. It is the way we take hold of it. Paul asks whether we should keep on sinning so that grace may abound, and he answers plainly, by no means. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life (). The point is a changed life. We do not leave the room the same people who walked in. We walk out meaning to fill the good files, to become people whose record tells a different story from here on, not because we are earning love but because we have been loved.
The last word over every card
One day the files will be read. In John’s vision the dead are judged, and books are opened, and another book is opened, which is the book of life (). That is a sobering scene, and it is meant to be. But it is not the last picture Scripture gives us. Beyond the judgment there is a promise for everyone whose name is written in that other book. God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away (). The same God who sees every card is the God who offers the water of life without price to all who thirst. The room is real, and so is the record. But the final word over it does not have to be ours. It can be his, and for everyone who will receive it, that word is grace.
