Definition of Grace
Today, we’re going to talk about another confusing church word - GRACE. If you ask a child what grace is, you might hear him say, "Grace is what we say before we eat." And that’s true. We do call that prayer before we eat "grace." But for many, that’s about as far as the definition of grace goes.
Most of us have heard that acrostic for grace "God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense." That’s a nice way to remember the basics of what God’s grace actually is. But grace is much more than that.
Some have called it "God’s unmerited favor."
One man said that "Grace is what God does within you, without you."
Dr. J. H. Jowett defined it like this: "Grace is holy love, but it is holy love in spontaneous movement, going out in eager quest toward the unholy and the unlovely, that by the ministry of its own sacrifice it might redeem the unholy and the unlovely into its own strength and beauty."
This is really a concise definition of grace, but even Dr. Jowett realized how far short he had come in trying to define grace.
To simplify the meaning of grace, we could say that grace is God’s undeserved blessing to an undeserving people.
(From a sermon by Carl Kolb, Isn’t Grace What We Say Before We Eat? 1/3/2010)