In his book A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World, Ron Lee Davis , tells the following story:
Walking by a pet shop on his way to school, a young boy stopped and stared through the window. Inside were four black puppies playing together. After school he ran home and pleaded with his mother to let him have one of the puppies. "I'll take care of it, Mom, I will. If you can just give me an advance on my allowance, I'll have enough money to buy one with my own money. Please, Mom, please."
The mother, knowing full well the complications having a new puppy would bring to a busy household, could not resist her son. "Okay, you can get the puppy, but I will expect you to take care of it."
" Yes, Mom, I will." Filled with excitement, the little boy ran to the pet shop to buy his new puppy.
After determining that the boy had enough money, the pet shop owner brought him to the window to choose his puppy. After a few minutes, the young boy said, "Um. . . I'll take the little one in the corner."
"Oh no," said the shop owner, "not that one; he's crippled. Notice how he just sits there; something is wrong with one of his legs, so he can't run and play like the rest of the puppies. Choose another one."
Without saying a word, the boy reached down, lifted his pant leg to expose a chrome leg brace to the owner.
"No," he said firmly, "I think I'll take the puppy in the corner.
It turned out that what disqualified the puppy from being chosen by others is what most qualified him to be chosen by the little boy. The boy saw something in the puppy that others wrote off.
God’s grace is like that. In First Corinthians 1 the Apostle Paul has this to say about the makeup of the church – “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:26-29 in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, The Message).
Now, of course, we know that there were some well-educated, well-heeled, socially recognized individuals in the early church (e.g. Theophilus, Philemon, Apollos, etc). And while Paul is probably emphasizing the extraordinary action of God in choosing what many people in society think are “nobodies” and that “the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses” because he hopes to temper the arrogance and boasting of some members of the Corinthian church, Paul is also bringing out something that we see in the ministry of Jesus and throughout the New Testament and early church – God, in his mercy and love, often chooses what most people have disqualified, overlooked, undervalued and discounted. And the New Testament calls this “Grace”.
Most people familiar with the Christian gospel know about grace, “amazing grace”. We sing about it, preach about it, read about it, talk about it, and even say that we have experienced it. But it always amazes me how few of us really believe in the unqualified grace of God. Down deep inside, we still somehow feel that, “Yes, God loves us, as long as I’m good and whole and have it relatively together.” The reality is that we will never ever be that way and God’s grace doesn’t wait until we are to find us. If the gospel is to be believed, it turns out that what would seem, to us, to disqualify you and me from knowing the love of God – the mess of our lives and our “crippledness” and brokenness—is what most qualifies us to experience the grace of God. In the midst of his own weakness and brokenness, the Apostle Paul heard God’s hope-infusing words: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect (i.e. fulfilled, accomplished) in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). And maybe that is why Paul had empathy towards others. Like the little boy in the story above, he knew what it was like to be “less than perfect.” And so Paul saw us all in the same boat – all needing God’s grace and all called to live by God’s grace.
The question for each of us is:Can you accept and live in that Grace? “Faith,” writes Brennan Manning, “is the courage to accept acceptance.” An as author, Frederick Buechner reminds us, to believe the Gospel, to accept the life that Jesus offers, to respond to the grace of God is to “turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in the good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.”
