Amazing Grace

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”

There’s a lot of theology in that song verse.  There’s also a lot of humanity in it.  But most of all, there’s truth in it.  I am a wretch.  I am a poor creature, a despicable and contemptible person, a criminal, a poor soul, a creep, and every low personal description that you can imagine.  I am profoundly unhappy and in great misfortune.  If I am left to myself and only myself, I will do the most deeply evil things. 

Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. – Galatians 5:19-21

Everything described in that verse is something I am if I am left to myself.  All those works of the flesh will manifest themselves in me without God within me.  I am a wretched wretch.  The worst and best reality for us is when we realize what we are really.  No false fronts; fake impressions; wrongful descriptions; or hopeful blind perceptions.  We accept that what God says is true.  “But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; we all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” (Isaiah 54:6)  It is the worst because we don’t like to face the reality of what is truly inside of us.  It is the best because we see who God is and why we are destitute, a beggar with nothing, without Him.

“Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5)   

The glory of God is that His grace doesn’t accept that we exist without Him.  Even in our wretchedness, He comes to us, lifts us up, cleans us off, and offers an existence apart from the temporal flesh.  Through Him and Him alone we can “lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and … run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).  We are no longer unclean; we are no longer a wretch; but “in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). 

It is an amazing grace.  What a pleasant sweet sound!  I do not deserve the focus, the attention, the personal love from a pure and holy God when I am so impure.  But what a sweet sound is His amazing grace that saves a wretch like me.  That grace is something I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to fully grasp or understand except in the very presence of God the Father and Jesus the Christ.