“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8

I do not like how I sound on a message machine, or on a video tape, and I do not like how I look on pictures. I am very critical of my voice, and my looks. It is not so much that I am a depressed individual, but I just believe that I have a face for radio, and a voice for the typewriter.

Seeing ourselves for what we are, good or bad, is a very important first step in understanding the richness of G-d’s grace. Grace becomes an amazing gift when we finally see ourselves the way G-d sees us—up close and personal, magnified hundreds of times, warts and flaws front and center. The apostle Paul wrote, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

G-d knows all things about us, our actions, attitudes, thoughts, and responses. I’m a sinner, and so are you — and G-d knows it. We don’t need a Sunday morning article on the front page of the news to tell us that. What is so surprising is that it is our terribly broken condition that prompts G-d’s grace and love to flow to us. It’s our blemishes, our sin, and our stupid self-centeredness that makes us desperately in need of G-d’s grace. And thankfully, G-d gives it to all people abundantly!

Through the years of my marriage to my wife, I have not gotten better looking. Far from it. I am heavier, I am balder, and I look more and more like my father every day. And yet, my wife continues to love me — and thinks, I believe, that I look the same as I did the day we were married. Of course she sees that I have changed in my looks, yet there is no difference in her love for me, nor my love for her. She will always be my beautiful, blushing bride. And I thank G-d for that. Her love for me is like G-d’s love for all of us. It was demonstrated in spite of our failures, not withheld because of them. That’s the grace that G-d chooses to love us with. And that’s the grace that drives me to want to love G-d in return.

Feeling broken today? Feeling unloved, out of place, behind the times, too little too late? Are you stuck in a stubborn pattern of sin you can’t break? G-d’s got you, nothing is hidden from G-d’s view, and still in this moment you are the object of G-d’s love, mercy and grace.

What makes it hard for you to see yourself as the sinner you really are—Comparison, rationalization, excuses, pride?

Write down the sins that constantly pop up in your life. Ask yourself, “Where would I be today if it weren’t for G-d’s grace in my life?” (Some of the thoughts in this devotion were taken from a devotion by Joe Stowell, Strength for the Journey, website.)

Pastor Dave