Grace: When God Goes First

I grew up in a small rural town in northeast Georgia, sitting week after week in a traditional church with organ music, hymnals, and wooden pews. I’m not suggesting legalism was deliberately taught from the pulpit. But I am suggesting it was caught. Somewhere along the way, my young heart absorbed a clear message about what it meant to be a Christian: be a good little boy. God hates sin, and as a sinner, you are in big trouble. The solution seemed obvious – try harder, be better, clean yourself up. Christianity, as I understood it, was fear-based. Good boys go to heaven. Bad boys go to hell. Choose wisely.

If you know my story by now, you already know I did not choose wisely.

At the age of twenty-one, I found myself sitting in a prison cell, staring at concrete walls and contemplating my existence. What had I done with my life? Where would I go from here? And right in the center of those questions sat a deeper one: What did I actually believe about God, the Bible, and what it meant to be a Christian?

I decided to find out.

I began reading the Bible – partly because there wasn’t much else to do with all that time, and partly because I wanted it to fall apart in my hands. In all honesty, I started reading with the hope that it would prove itself an obvious fable. I wanted to confirm that religion was a myth for weak people who needed a crutch. Then I could do my time, get out, and live with myself firmly at the center of everything.

What I discovered was not what I expected.

I met Abraham, the great father of faith, who twice lied about his wife Sarah being his sister to protect his own skin, and who later took matters into his own hands with Hagar because God’s promise wasn’t moving fast enough. I met Noah, who got drunk and exposed after the flood. I met Moses, the murderer who fled into the wilderness. I met David, the man after God’s own heart – who committed adultery and then arranged a murder to cover it up. Page after page, the Bible refused to present a gallery of spiritual superheroes. It kept showing me broken people. People who failed. People who lied, doubted, ran, and fell hard.

I was shocked. This book was not an instruction manual for becoming a good person who could finally measure up to a standard God would accept. It was a story about broken people… people just like me. Maybe there was something more here than the version of Christianity I had absorbed growing up.

After many months, I landed in the book of Romans – ironically written by the same man I had just read about in Acts, the one who had once persecuted Christians and sought to destroy the Church. In chapter one, Paul makes a stunning claim: the gospel “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16 (opens BibleGateway in a new tab)). Not to everyone who cleans up their act. Not to everyone who tries harder. To everyone who believes.

In chapter two, he writes that it is “God’s kindness that is meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4 (opens BibleGateway in a new tab)). Not His anger. Not His disappointment. His kindness.

In chapter three, the words hit even harder: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift” (Romans 3:23–24 (opens BibleGateway in a new tab)). A gift. Not a wage. Not a reward for good behavior. A gift we do not deserve.

Then came Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were still sinners. Not after we got our act together. Not once we proved we were worth it. While we were still the problem.

Paul goes on to make the contrast unmistakable: the wages of sin is death, but “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23 (opens BibleGateway in a new tab)). And then came the words that capture the very heart of Amazing Grace – Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

No condemnation.

When I reached Romans 10 and read, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9 (opens BibleGateway in a new tab)), something broke open inside me. I will never forget that moment. I was sitting at the small desk in my cell when the light finally turned on in my heart and mind.

I get it.

The story of the Bible is not an outline of a religion where we scratch and claw our way into God’s good graces. It is the story of broken people who are utterly incapable of pleasing God in our own strength. The true hero of the Bible is not Abraham or Moses or David or even Paul. The hero is God Himself – who came near, put on flesh, lived the life we could not live, and died the death we deserved.

This is not a free ticket to heaven paired with a free pass to keep sinning. It is something far better and far more costly. It is the loud, clear declaration that God goes first. He initiates. He pursues. He provides what we could never earn. He comes near in the person of Jesus.

And if you have spent your life believing you need to clean yourself up before you can come to God, grace says the exact opposite: God has already come to you.

That is grace. And it is the very heart of the gospel.