Book Excerpt

"Grace: The Essence of God"

The Definition of Grace
by Wayne Monbleau

"You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich." 2 Corinthians 8:9

What is Grace?

The often quoted definition I used to hear as a young believer was, "Grace is God’s unmerited favor given to undeserving man." I understood this to be a statement about the means of my salvation. I was saved by God’s grace and I didn’t deserve it. To tell you the truth, sometimes I believe I thought more about the "I don’t deserve this" part than the "God’s unmerited favor" part, which sounded a bit remote anyhow.

Although I could see in a few Scriptures that my salvation was by grace, grace itself remained a distant concept to me. I thought of grace more as a thing, an attribute of God or a gift of God. I hadn’t yet seen the beauty of God’s grace.

And now, nearly thirty years later, I still see that grace is God’s unmerited favor but I have come to see and realize that grace is also much more. The Bible actually gives us a beautiful definition of grace. In his second letter to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul wrote, "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich" (8:9).

What is grace? What is Paul’s definition of grace? According to this verse, grace is Jesus Christ giving up all He had in glory, as God ("Though He was rich"), and coming to this world to lay down His life for us so that we might live forever in Him ("That you through His poverty might become rich").

Why would He do this? The only conclusion I can see is that He must have come to us because He wanted to live in fellowship with us, giving us His riches through His poverty. When Jesus suffered upon the cross at Calvary, this was His becoming our poverty, paying our penalty of death ("for your sake He became poor") in order to transfer the abundance of Himself to us. He became poor for us so we might become rich in Him. Grace, as described in this verse, is all that Jesus has done for us and all that Jesus is to us.

Grace is Jesus Christ taking our poverty; the poverty of our sins, hurts, failures and trials and giving us all the riches within Himself in return. Grace is Jesus saying, "I love you and have given you my life so that you may have life in Me."

Grace is Jesus Christ! Grace is His love for us, long before we knew Him. Grace is His desire to come to earth. It’s Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and His unmatchable invitation for all to know Him, personally, as Savior and Lord.

Grace is more than a statement about God’s unmerited favor. Grace, in essence, is a revelation into the heart of Jesus Christ.

This is why grace is the heart of our relationship with God. This is why I cannot listen to anyone who would present Christianity as a "what you do for God to earn His favor" type of religion. Any doctrine or belief which seeks to add our efforts in any way to God’s grace actually diminishes grace and becomes a sad misunderstanding of Jesus’ love for us.

Grace is the way of our salvation. But grace is also more than the way of our salvation. As we will see in the coming chapters, the more we behold God’s grace the more we will see that grace is "everything" when it comes to living an abundant life in Jesus Christ.

Jesus gave up all He had, in glory with God, to come to earth so He may show us the depth of His love. This is His grace. "He became poor for us so that we, through His poverty, might become rich."

Thank God for His grace. Thank Him as often as you can and ask Him to ever give you eyes to see and a mind to understand His grace. The more you look at the grace of Jesus Christ, the more you will see how and why grace is the key that opens the door for a joy-filled realization of all the abundant riches that are yours, right now, in Jesus Christ.