| OCTOBER 1, 2025 -- Psalm 84:11 For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.
2 Corinthians 9:8 And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work:
What is God’s grace? It is unmerited favor and mercy shown to unworthy men and women. Examples are found in both the Tanakh [the Old Testament] and the New Testament. It also pervades the Quran. Every chapter of the Quran begins with [translated into English] “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.”
Note that I call us “unworthy”. This is to remind you that none of us, no matter how we try, are able to live up to the standards that God wants us to follow. Nevertheless, despite our shortcomings, God blesses us with grace, and this blessing is unrelated to our unworthiness. It comes despite our shortcomings, our straying from the paths God has laid out for us to follow, despite our not doing those things we should be doing, and our doing those things we should not be doing. We fall far short of the two Great Commandments: to love God with all our hearts; and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
One may ask, since we are unworthy, why does God bless us? To me, it is because God is by definition Good, and he blesses us to express his inherent goodness and love. But there is more: God blesses us to make us a blessing to others. If we have been blessed by God, by an outpouring of his Grace, then it behooves us to pass it forward, to extend our grace to others, to share the blessing. As I have said several times before in this Chaplain’s Column, we are born, not for ourselves, but to help others.
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