God prepared and gave the gi# of grace to you before you
existed. In 2 Timothy 1:9–10, Paul wrote, “He has saved us
and called us to a holy life — not because of anything we
have done but because of His own purpose and grace. !is
grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of
time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing
of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and
brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
A familiar evangelistic aphorism tells us that sin will take
us farther than we ever intended to go. Christians in touch
with their character a&rm this: we know how far we could
have fallen — except that Jesus met us and kept us from
reaching the depths.
Preventing
Wesley emphasized prevenient grace, or preventing grace,
in his preaching. Grace permeates the process of salvation
— and we see from 2 Timothy 1 that grace precedes the
process. Testimonies of miraculous conversion prove to us
that God’s reach is long. Jerri, a faithful member at the $rst
church I pastored, joined me in trying to create a physical
description of the indescribable God. He has very long
arms, we reasoned, because He had to reach so far to $nd
us.
We know that some roads back to God are harder to $nd,
harder to negotiate, harder to travel. While one person
might be able to come to the Savior from the bottom of the
moral and behavioral barrel, another person might not. And
therefore, God gives preventing grace that keeps the bottom
of the barrel from becoming the point we all reach — but we
all could have landed there. Sin’s evil, sin’s sickness, seems
limitless. But grace precedes sin, grace came $rst, grace tells
the truth that no one need reach the bottom; but if they do,
pg. 9 — lightandlifemagazine.com
they will $nd the grace of God beneath them, able to raise
them up and bring them back.
I made a new friend last year at a pastors’ conference
on outreach to the LGBTQ community. She grew up near
Chicago, a member of a moderately religious home (her
words), and she self-identi$ed as gay from the time she
was 13 years old, and she made friends who had come to
the same conclusion about their own sexuality. But in her
youth group, she learned that pursuing intimate same-sex
relationships violated Scripture.
She decided to forego intimate same-sex companionships
until becoming a student at a university, where she intended
to throw o" all the spiritual constraints she had picked up
from family and church, to $nd someone and have her $rst
serious relationship. But during her senior year of high
school, God’s preventing grace invaded her life.
Her youth group scheduled a special “Get Close to God”
weekend. She went. God showed up. And though it was the
farthest thing from her mind when she agreed to the special
weekend, she said yes to an invitation from Jesus to make a
new commitment to Him. My friend says that the speaker
hadn’t said anything about her secret issue, and she never
told him, but “he knew exactly what to say to reach my
heart. He talked about me, and about my very super$cial
relationship with God.”
She went home from that weekend a di"erent young
woman, and the group she identi$ed with at her university
was an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter. She’s gone
out with a few guys, but she struggles to feel real attraction
for them. She chooses not to be intimate with anyone,
because she knows that the Bible teaches clearly that sexual
intimacy is reserved for marriage between two people of
di"erent genders. !e great miracle in her story, the great
truth heralded from heaven: God reaches $rst. God’s grace
sneaked into her life $rst, before she had gone down a road
harder to get o" of than to get onto. God made it possible
for her life to follow a trajectory that led to Him, by His
preventing, prevenient grace.
“Si!’, 1vi-, ,i!’,
,ickn23, ,4m3 5imitl23.
Bu* grac$ preced6 ,i!,
grac$ cam$ fi.*...”
“W$ 5iv$ +! )h$ m7*
,keptica- /g$ "f #uma!
#8tor9.”
/lightandlifemagazine.com