It's the Same Grace

My heart breaks to see this child make the choices he does. Choices that not only hurt my heart, but also must grieve his Father in heaven. I can so easily get caught up in the pain, the fears and the doubts. It is so easy to lose sight of the Truth when you are drowning in your own tears... 

Then I hear a faint whisper... 

“It’s the same Grace”. 

I stop the crying a moment as I try to discern what I am hearing. Over and over again I hear...  

“It's the same Grace”

“It's the same Grace.”

I look back some twenty plus years ago and see a very young woman desperate for love. She is living a Godless, sinful, selfish, and broken life. 

On the outside she is tough, on the inside, a frightened, empty little girl. For all of her twenty short years she has lived a rough life and her heart has been broken and crushed. 

When  I  look at this girl, not knowing the rest of the story, it seems utterly hopeless that she would ever serve the living God. Circumstances of life have only seemingly driven her farther from God.  The odds are certainly stacked against her.

Fast forward some twenty-two years.  Would you have  guessed she would be a happily married woman striving to be a Godly wife? A mama to nine children, doing her best to teach and train them in the things of the very God she never even knew?  A keeper of the home and perfectly content in this calling? A woman, who is certainly far from perfect, and even carries a few scars from the past, but oh how she loves Jesus. She no longer craves for love and acceptance, now she strives to know her God, to become  more and more in love with Him. To live a life worthy of being called His own. 

She desires to love and serve Him with all her heart, soul, mind and strength.

This same girl who before didn’t even give Him the time of day, now has her whole life, every aspect of it, colored by Him.

What was it? 

What made the change? 

Did she finally get her act together? 

Did she just start making the right choices?

GRACE, Gods amazing and marvelous grace!

That same Grace that changed Saul, the self proclaimed persecutor and destroyer of the Church of God, to Paul, who God revealed His Son in, so that he might preach Christ among the Gentiles.  The bond-servant and prisoner for Christ.  The man who penned at least thirteen books of our beloved Holy Bible. 

That same Grace that changed a promiscuous, filthy-mouthed sailor and an atheist, John Newton, to a sympathizing pastor, and well known hymn writer.  Writer of the very popular “Amazing Grace”

That same Grace that took a ‘boy of sixteen, already a liar and thief, a swindler and a drunkard’ to the man, George Mueller.  The man who lived his life literally depending on God to supply his every need!

The stories of lives forever changed by this same Grace are endless!

So dear mama, dry your tears, it is that same, amazing, powerful grace that will bring your child back to My arms. 

Trust Me,

 “It’s the same grace.”

Thus says the Lord: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work shall be rewarded, says the Lord; and [your children] shall return from the enemy's land.

    And there is hope for your future, says the Lord; your children shall come back to their own country. (Jeremiah 31:16-17)