I was darkness all of my life,
I never knew the day from the night,
But Spirit, you made me see.
I swore I knew the way on my own;
Head full of rocks, a heart made of stone
But Spirit, you moved in me.And At your touch my sleeping spirit was awakened;
On my darkened heart the light of Christ has shone.
Called into a kingdom that cannot shaken;
Heaven’s citizen by grace, and grace alone.
These lyrics are from the song Grace Alone which we will be singing throughout our series on grace. It encapsulates all of the aspects of God’s grace that we have been talking about; all of the ways that God has heaped undeserved blessings on us.
Before we are really able to see how great these blessings are, we have to have a firm understanding of what we do deserve. If we are going to celebrate what God has undeservedly gifted us, we have to know how things would end up without grace. What does life without God look like?
To get this we have to know what sin has done to us. Romans 6.23 tells us: For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. We need the grace of God to escape the impending doom of eternal death. But sin does more than just put us in line for a bad future. It also takes away from us the ability to be good. Not to ever do good, but to live with a purity of motive and conscience. Sin removes freedom from us.
This song gives us an illustration of this when it says:
I was darkness all of my life,
I never knew the day from the night.
Sin plunges us into darkness; we become blinded from good. We no longer even know what a pursuit of God is. We begin to think that we, in our blindness, have it figured out. We are not just unable, but we are blinded to our inability. We are blind, but think that we can see:
I swore I knew the way on my own;
Head full of rocks, a heart made of stone.
The only way out of this darkness is light. The only way to know what we deny is for something to make us see. The Spirit moves in us, the Spirit makes us see:
And At your touch my sleeping spirit was awakened;
On my darkened heart the light of Christ has shone.
Called into a kingdom that cannot shaken;
Heaven’s citizen by grace, and grace alone.