I admit it.  I have a love-hate relationship with grace.  I've been wrestling with it for a while now.  I want to just love, love, love God's grace all of the time.  It's so much of who He is!  But I have to confess that my heart is divided.

Grace is one of those things I'm so very glad is available to me, and I'm so very disappointed in myself for needing.  I feel the same way about other things, like "corrective undergarments" for example.  Really glad I can get 'em....really wish I didn't need 'em.

I completely understand that without the grace of God I would be totally lost. Ephesians 2:8 makes it clear: "For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God..."  But now that my salvation is secure, I find that I need God's grace all the more.  I need His gospel-centered, freely given, unconditional grace to make it through an hour without getting zapped into a charcoal briquette by His holiness.

I really wish I didn't.  I really wish that I were a better person, that my thoughts were pure, that my motives were pure, that my habits were pure. But they're not.

I wish that I was so progressing in my sanctification that I need God's grace less today than I did nineteen years ago when I first believed.  But I don't.  And I hate that.  My pride hates that I can't fix these things, and my finite humanity imagines that God tires of extending grace to me over and over again.  I certainly would have given up on me a long time ago.

But God LOVES extending grace!  When God reveals His glory to Moses in Exodus 34, He can say whatever He wants to say about Himself, and He chooses to proclaim, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God...."  Before His justice, before His holiness, before His wrath, God proclaims His grace.  And He continues to proclaim it in me.

O, stubborn pride of mine!  How I long for you to be swallowed up in the immense grace of God!  How I yearn to be free of your petty desires to "do it on my own" and be self-sufficient!

So while I struggle with this love-hate relationship with grace, I find that I need His grace to struggle on. I cry out with the Apostle Paul, "What a wretched person I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Do you have a love-hate relationship with God's grace?