I love the name ‘Grace’ which is a constant reminder of what is all around us! Grace means God’s undeserved favour and just looking at creation makes us think of the enormity of what God did in creating our world.

God, being God, could have made a world without men and women but then who would look after the birds, animals, plants, fish etc? He could have fed his creation and looked after and sustained them well but God had a plan that involved responsibility and accountability. He wanted us to become co-workers with him in caretaking His Earth.

We could have been made like robots, doing God’s bidding without any choice but it was God’s grace that gave us free will to choose to go God’s way or our own. It was a huge risk for God who wanted and wants to love everybody that He has made. He wanted people to love Him for who He is not because they had to. In the book of Acts, in the New Testament of the Bible, it says that in Jesus we have our being – “we live and move and have our being in Him.” (Acts 17:28) or as the New Century Version of the Bible puts it “We live in him. We walk in him. We are in him…”

Jesus is the pinnacle of what we humans are to be. We can seek to copy Him but this requires a change of heart that only God can bring about. Jesus talked to Nicodemus about being born again (see John 3) and even the smallest of children can grasp what’s needed to become a simple child of God, a Christian, which offsets the choice that the very first people, Adam and Eve, made which took them away from God’s grace. Still, however, God reached out in sending Jesus to our earth so that the grace of God could be extended to each of us, child and adult alike.

No wonder John Newton wrote the famous song ‘Amazing Grace’. Words cannot pen in detail what God has done for us in Jesus and in preparing an eternal home for each of his children.