What does the Bible say about grace?

The Bible passages below can be used in sermons, prayers, pastoral care, or worship planning focused on grace.

• Numbers 6:24-26, the Lord be gracious to you (Aaronic blessing)
• Psalm 103, God's grace in our lives (the Lord forgives our iniquity and heals our diseases)
• Jonah 4:2, God's loving grace and patience (grace to all was the reason Jonah fled to Tarshish)
• Matthew 5:45, God's grace to all (God makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good, showing grace to all)
• John 1:14-16, Jesus' grace and truth (the Word became flesh and showed his glory, full of grace and truth)
• John 3:16, God's saving grace (God loves the world so much that he gave Jesus so that all may have eternal life)
• Romans 5:8, grace in the face of sin (God proved his love when Christ died for sinners)
• 2 Corinthians 12:9, God's powerful grace (God's grace is sufficient for us)
• 2 Corinthians 13:13, Jesus' grace is with us (the grace of Jesus Christ greets us)
• Ephesians 2:8-9, gift of grace (we have been saved by grace through faith)
• 2 Peter 3:9, God's patient grace (the Lord is patient with us)

Sermon ideas about grace

It's tough to speak of grace in contemporary North American culture, even in sermons. Preaching grace is uphill work in a culture that celebrates do-it-yourself independence. At the heart of the Christian concept of grace is sheer human dependence on God. This is a difficult concept in a culture that stigmatizes dependency: Who wants to be codependent, drug dependent, or dependent on the generosity of others?

Acceptable to God?

A sermon on grace should acknowledge that in such a culture, it's hard to believe in God's grace. Hard actually to live by it. Cash-and-carry religion — religion all mixed up with moneymaking, power-brokering, and especially the achievement ethic — is a constant temptation for contemporary Christianity (as it was for medieval Christianity). 

Acceptability, or justification, becomes an achievement: If I just say these prayers, or let this communion wafer dissolve on my tongue, or eradicate one stubborn sin that clings like a vine, or if I can just grit my teeth and believe the Virgin Birth, if I can only think more positively, if I can only make myself think more of others and less of myself, why, then just maybe I can be acceptable to God.

Our goodness is derivative

To all religion featuring achieved acceptability, Luther and Calvin  said a resounding no. We are not a Savior for the likes of us. We cannot get our dim lights trimmed and burning bright. None of our pathetic little house cleanings prepares us for the God who wants to take up residence in us. Our newness of life is by grace. It is our calling and our final unspeakable glory. All our goodness is derivative; all our splendor is reflected light; for the whole run of our life we are at every point dependent on the gracious energy, impetus, nudging, wooing, watering, cultivating, chasing, modeling of God.

Double grace

At 3.1.1 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin speaks famously of the "double grace" which is the proper object of human faith — itself a gift. Calvin identifies the double grace as newness of life and acceptance by God, or repentance and forgiveness of sins, or sanctification and justification. By partaking of Christ, he writes, we receive a double grace: "namely, that by being reconciled to God through Christ's blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father and, secondly, that sanctified by Christ's Spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life." 

We want to be stroked. But God's grace comes to save. Grace powerfully redeems, and necessarily so, because sin is deeply dug in. Grace doesn't merely excuse or tolerate sin. Surely it doesn't just prettify or embellish it. Grace is not just a "grace note." It is a power or the quality of a power that is aimed at wholesale remaking of people who are guilty, perverse, stubborn, and inert. 

Grace works on people who are lousy patients — people who resist and resent any graceful great physician. Grace is tough love that remakes people sometimes in spite of themselves. Grace has the power, C. S. Lewis testifies, to drag people kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God. Grace is for wretches who really aren't up for being saved. And it is still grace, still graceful, when its muscles are flexed and it is rubbing our fur the wrong way. We want to be stroked. But God's grace comes to save.

Special grace and common grace

It is usual in some Christian contexts to distinguish the special grace that redeems from the common grace that supports but does not redeem. Matthew 5:45, above, is a common grace text.

Excerpts about grace

Following are sample excerpts from Zeteosearch.org sermon resources about grace:

• "If God saw Paul as worthy of love and mercy and grace, then Timothy, you are worthy too. If God came to save Paul, the worst of sinners, then Timothy, God can save you too. If God tells his story and builds his church through the likes of Paul, then Timothy, guess what? God's doing that through you too." Sermon Illustration, Sermon Preparation by Chelsey Harmon from Center for Excellence in Preaching
• "But in the ways we receive, and fail to give grace, love is doing its silent growing inside of us." Book Quote, Poem by Ana Lisa de Jong from Global Christian Worship