Grace
By Mike Rule  

For most of my life I have felt hopeless, worthless, useless, stupid, guilty, incapable, unacceptable, unlovable, and that I make everyone around me miserable, especially those whom I love.  These are all the emotions that reside in my flesh and it is obvious that nothing good dwells in it.  Yet, at the age of 15, I met the most gorgeous young lady.  When I laid eyes on her for the first time, I knew I was in love.  Well okay, I was in love as much as you can be at 15 when you are hormones in tennis shoes.  But when I first laid eyes upon this young lady I was deeply moved in my spirit.  I immediately dismissed the things I thought and felt because: 

1. I figured she would be a snob.  
2. No one that looked as good as she did would ever want to have anything to do with me. 

It was not too many months after first meeting this young lady that we began to get to know each other and I discovered that she wasn’t a snob at all; she was just quiet when around other people.  But when she was with me she really began to open up and let me see who she really was on the inside.  It wasn’t too long before we began to regularly spend time together.  We became virtually inseparable and after a few short years, we were married.  According to how I felt about myself, and according to how I acted at that point in my life, I had done nothing to deserve her.  Yet she gave herself freely to me, even though I could never have done anything to deserve someone as wonderful as she is.  She gave herself to me and became my wife. 

This is grace.  Grace is the gift of something that I never deserved.  I didn’t deserve Becky and I still don’t, but God has given something to me that is more precious than gold.  He gave me His daughter to cherish for life.  Likewise, God has given me something even greater.  He has given me His Son.  In my rotten fleshly dead condition, I never deserved Him, but God looked beyond my rotten flesh and created in me a clean heart.  He gave me the very heart of Jesus by placing His life within me.  I never could have done anything to deserve it, but He gave it freely simply because it pleased Him to do so.  AMEN for that!