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Grace Increased
Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.
Romans 5:20
Our devotion today comes from Romans chapter five, verse 20. Saint Paul says
Where sin increased, grace increased all the more. (Romans 5:20)
I’d like you to use your imagination today. Imagine that there’s a mom who comes home from work one day, and she finds that all of her clothing are just thrown out in the front yard. As she goes into the house, she discovers that her 14-year-old son, who has kind of fallen under the friendship of some kind of a rough crowd. Her 14-year-old son, for no reason at all against her, has just decided to ransack the house and trash the place, and she finds stuff all over the place. Everything is ripped apart. She sees their family photos stuck in the garbage. There are things written on the walls. The refrigerator is emptied, things have been smeared on the walls and in her bedroom, right on her mirror, there’s a note that says mom on it from her son, and it basically says, I am leaving you. I’m sick of you. I don’t want anything to do with you. Goodbye. She sits down and just begins to cry. As you could imagine, her heart is full of just such sadness. Here’s this child that she brought into this world she’s been taking care of and done such a wonderful job with, and yet now he has fallen under this terrible influence and is showing such hatred and animosity toward her and just decides to desert her and run away.
She has every right to be angry, but the most powerful emotion that she feels is actually love. Her love for her son intensifies at this moment, and so she goes out looking for him and trying to find him. And finally, when she comes upon him and finds him, she comes up to him and just expresses to him her great love and concern. Her number one goal is to win him back into her love, so that he’ll come back home with her.
Think of that illustration is kind of the way we can sometimes be toward God, the very God who brought us into this world. In fact, the Bible tells us he knit us together in our mother’s womb, decided exactly who we would be the very God that gives us life, because of the sinful influence of the devil and his temptations, we have been turned into enemies of God. And just by our various actions and things that we’ve done. We have pushed God away from ourselves and on our own the Bible says we have just deserted God and wanted to run away from him.
He has every right to be angry with us. He has every right to land on us with his justice and his judgment. But instead, God chooses to come to us and to love us. He chooses to embrace us and try to find us with his love. That’s the strongest, most powerful emotion in God toward you and me is his love. That’s what caused him to send His Son into the world to be our Savior. And through the work of that Son, when he went to the cross, and also by the work of His Holy Spirit, God now comes to us and speaks so tenderly to us, trying to win us over back into his good graces through his love.
What a powerful God we have that even though our sin in our lives continues to increase against him, Saint Paul says that God’s grace abounds. It increases even beyond our sinfulness. What a wonderful, gracious God we have. May we always stay in his care by faith in his Son, our Savior. Amen.
