Grace: More Than Forgiveness
I love the hymn "Amazing Grace." I'm sure millions do. There's a reason it has endured for over 250 years and crossed every cultural and denominational boundary imaginable. John Newton wrote it from the wreckage of his own story—a former slave trader who encountered a mercy so profound it rewrote his entire identity. The opening line captures something we all instinctively know: grace found us when we were lost, blind, wandering. It saved us.
But here's what strikes me every time I sing it: Newton didn't stop at forgiveness. The hymn moves forward—grace that taught his heart to fear, then relieved those fears. Grace that brought him safe thus far, and grace that will lead him home. Newton understood that grace wasn't a one-time rescue. It was an ongoing empowerment, a presence that carried him through every season that followed his conversion.
We often reduce grace to a transaction—God overlooking what we've done wrong. And while that's gloriously true, it's not the whole story. Grace isn't just God's unmerited favor. It's His empowering presence that enables you to become the person He sees when He looks at you.
The Father doesn't just forgive your failures and walk away. He provides grace—His actual power and enabling—to help you live from your new nature and grow into your full identity in Christ.
This is why Paul, when pleading for relief from his "thorn in the flesh," received a response that reframed everything: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). God wasn't simply tolerating Paul's struggle. He was meeting it with something more substantial than removal—His own empowering presence in the midst of it.
Here's what I love about God's heart: Grace isn't just about getting what you don't deserve. It's about receiving supernatural ability to do what you couldn't do in your own strength—to love like Him, respond like Him, and live like Him.
Peter understood this when he wrote that God's divine power "has given us everything we need for a godly life" (2 Peter 1:3). Everything. Not most things. Not a good start. Grace isn't God handing you a moral framework and wishing you luck. It's God supplying the very capacity to live what He's called you to.
When you face situations that feel beyond your capacity, remember: Grace isn't just God being nice about your limitations. It's God providing His unlimited resources to meet your need in that exact moment. The writer of Hebrews invites us to "approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (Hebrews 4:16). Grace shows up precisely when and where you need it most.
The beautiful reality: You don't have to try harder to be a better Christian. You get to receive more grace—more of God's empowering presence—and let His strength become your strength. Paul discovered this paradox and embraced it entirely: "I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Your inadequacy isn't a barrier to grace. It's the very condition that makes grace possible.
Newton spent the rest of his life as a pastor and abolitionist, advocating fiercely against the very trade that had once defined him. That's what grace does—it doesn't just pardon who you were. It empowers who you're becoming.
But Newton’s story doesn't end with his own transformation. In 1785, a young parliamentarian named William Wilberforce—brilliant, ambitious, and newly converted—was wrestling with whether to leave politics for ministry. He sought counsel from the aging Newton, now in his sixties and nearly blind. Newton's advice changed history: stay in Parliament. Use your position. The same grace that had redeemed a slave ship captain could empower a politician to dismantle the entire system.
For the next twenty years, Wilberforce fought relentlessly, enduring ridicule, exhaustion, and repeated defeats. Newton's influence and mentorship sustained him through the darkest seasons. When the slave trade was finally abolished in the British Empire in 1807—nearly six decades before America would follow—Newton was on his deathbed. He lived just long enough to see the first fruits of what grace had begun in his own broken life.
Think about that. The grace that saved a wretch like Newton didn't just transform one man. It rippled outward—through friendship, mentorship, and persistent encouragement—until it toppled an empire's economy of human trafficking. Wilberforce himself would later reflect that without Newton's pastoral care during his crisis of calling, he might have abandoned the very platform God had given him.
This is the compounding nature of grace. It doesn't stay contained in the person who receives it. It overflows. It empowers. It shapes history. The Puritan Thomas Watson captured this beautifully: "Grace and glory differ very little; the one is the seed, the other is the flower; grace is glory militant, glory is grace triumphant." Newton and Wilberforce lived out grace militant—fighting, persevering, enduring defeat after defeat, sustained not by their own resolve but by a power greater than themselves. The same grace that meets you in your weakness today is glory in seed form, already at work, already pressing toward its full bloom.
Kingdom Routine for today: When you feel overwhelmed or inadequate, pause and ask: "God, what grace do You want to give me for this situation? How do you want to empower me to respond from your nature instead of my limitations?"
Grace isn't just God's kindness toward your past—it's His power for your present and future.
Shalom,
Dr. Sam Kurien
