Grace: God's Power for Life's Challenges
When life throws us a curveball, how do we make it through when we feel like all hope is lost? How do we hold on to the love of God when we meet difficulties?
When we face illness, lose a job, endure injustice, or find ourselves in difficult relationships, finding a way to stay emotionally healthy or spiritually vibrant can feel impossible. How do we know that God is there to help us in the middle of life’s challenges? Through grace, a beautiful, marvelous gift of God that powerfully unlocks our understanding of His love in the context of suffering.
What is Grace?
A common definition of grace is that it is God’s unmerited favor towards us. In other words, God gives us something that we do not deserve. This favor falls on all of us, like the rain falls on good and bad people alike. Grace is God reaching out to humanity inviting every single person into personal relationship with Him - not because of our perfection, but because He is a perfect and loving God. Accepting this invitation, however, does not pluck us out of the world and its challenges.
This is where a second definition of grace comes in: grace is God’s power to help us navigate life’s challenges. Consider the life of Jesus. He lived a perfect life but He still endured incredible hardship. He experienced temptation, emotional and physical fatigue, saw loved ones die, and died brutally on the cross for a wrongful conviction. How did Jesus endure suffering without cursing God or hating those who hated Him? Through grace.
When Jesus’s follower, Paul, cried out to God in anguish, God’s response was not to take away the pain. It was to give him the power to bear the suffering, the same power He also gave Jesus. He told Paul:
My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.1
God gave Jesus, Paul, and gives all of us the ability to endure really difficult situations through this special power called grace.
Why Grace?
There are at least two reasons God chooses to equip us for suffering with grace instead of taking away suffering altogether. Â
First, grace transforms us. It reveals to us the areas within our lives where we are not fully dependent on God. Grace removes our propensity for self-sufficiency which is a deep human need. Grace shifts our gaze from our weakness to God’s infinite power and love. Truthfully, this is confounding. Why does God not just use this infinite power to magically solve the world’s problems? We do not know, but we know that the more we learn to rely on God, the more we see His love and the more willing we are to accept the wisdom of His ways.
Second, our ability to endure suffering gives us the ability to help others down the road. When we look back at some of the people who have helped us the most, we see they have faced similar challenges to ours. Even though it is hard in the moment to endure suffering or pain, it is sometimes comforting to know we can help others who find themselves in similar situations.
Taking Advantage of Grace
So how do we tap into God’s power for navigating life? We cry out for help. David, the great ancient king of Israel, wrote:
The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous
    and his ears toward their cry.2
When we are in a tough situation or facing a challenge, we can freely cry out to Jesus who understands what we are going through. He gives us the strength we need to be able to survive the moment.
The challenge will rarely disappear magically. Illness may remain – and may even result in death. A tough relationship may persist – sometimes for a long time. Grace is not God’s promise that the situation will change overnight - if ever. Grace is God’s promise that He sees our pain, understands our struggle, and will give us the strength and inner fortitude we need. We will need to cry out to God frequently. The situation may be particularly difficult, or it may pass but a new one arises.
How do we know that God has answered our cry? Usually, God will bring people alongside us, reframe our perspective, bring an encouraging word to mind, or change something about the situation. How God chooses to help us is up to Him, but one thing we know is that God will always send us a custom-made solution, tailored just for us.
Grace is God’s answer for survival in a hard world. Through grace, God helps us when we need it the most. As we call on God, He transforms us and gives us the ability to better reflect His amazing love to others as we lovingly use our experiences to also help other people. Grace knits us simultaneously to God and to each other by using our life experiences as the common ground for discovering and walking in love as we all overcome life’s challenges together.
2 Corinthians 12:9
Psalm 34:15