(A theological reflection in a great many parts – 16 in all. Don’t worry; it will end eventually)

The Lord is here; his kingdom has come

Part 1: Summary

This is the essence of the Christian faith. It is not primarily a set of principles, a philosophy by which to understand the world or find moral guidance to live your life by. It is not a political programme of action, nor a way of life that brings personal satisfaction. It is not carefully, systematically worked out so that all its elements fit together smoothly in a coherent and consistent package. It is not a faith that makes perfect theoretical sense.

Christianity is primarily an experience of Jesus. Of what God has and is doing in and through the person of Jesus. It is a response to this person. Believers begin with their experience of God in Christ and then try and work out what this means in terms of how they should live their lives. Our faith is based on our beliefs in who Jesus is and what he has done.

In simple terms, this boils down to the belief that in Jesus we have seen God in all his fullness and the belief that in Jesus God has saved us. These beliefs are an intrinsic part of the other fundamental dimension of Christianity, which is a commitment to follow Christ. This basically equates to following his way of life, accepting and living out his teachings, and being true to who he is in terms of living in tune with the love of God that Christ has taught us. However, this is not about extracting a code to live by from the person of Jesus, as though that code can be disembodied. Christianity is an acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Saviour.

All of this is held within the grace of God, for Christian faith is not primarily concerned with what human beings do, but with what God has done, and what he continues to do in the lives of his children.

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 7: A return to grace and so to fullness of life

Through turning briefly to the problem of evil, we have taken something of an emotional downturn, when we had been talking about the wonderful grace of God. However, it’s important not to hide from difficult questions, and I hope you can see that there is a way forward to embrace a belief in God’s surrounding grace while being completely clear-headed in accepting all of the reality of living in the world as we know it. In fact, it is the desire to accept all of reality which drives me to consider grace, for this is the key reality of life that I and so many others experience.

So, let us finish by returning to add just a little more, for, although it may seem as though I have gone on and on about grace, my feeling is that I am just tinkering around the edges, saying a few worthwhile snippets, but still failing to express adequately the heart of God’s grace – as will always be the case.

I will begin by combining the ideas of suffering with trust in grace, by stating that an essential part of living by grace is optimism. This aspect of grace allows that complete clarity about existence to lead us to live, not fearfully, not downcast, not in dread of the disasters that can so easily befall us, but full of hope and optimism. Dame Julian of Norwich’s great watchword was, “All will be well”, which is ludicrous, for all is not well. Yet, when we allow our faith to bring us into a sense of being surrounded by the grace of God then all IS well. It makes no sense but is true. Such a comment is not blind faith or self-delusion – my entire faith (and blog) is based on trying to reason about our faith. So, it is not so much a contradiction, though certainly a paradox, but most of all it is testament to the amazingly powerful grace of God which has the ability to make all things well, to fill us with a sense of perfect fulfilment, and to bring us to a sense of being completely at home – and all this, no matter what happens to us in the world.

The other aspect of grace to touch on is humility. I feel that this is a key spiritual grace. To large degree, the problem is that those who suffer from its opposite – arrogance – are likely to commend themselves for their abilities in making progress in the world, while the humble person is aware of their dependence on God. In giving him the credit, somehow all the goodness of the situation we are in, and which we are creating, is redoubled upon us. In contrast, the arrogant person is simply left with their brittle self-satisfaction, which has all the refreshing qualities of dust. Humble people do need to work hard not to be weak, so self-effacing that they are no use in the world, or resigned to sitting on the sidelines. Part of the work of grace is to call us to mission and action, and then to empower us to achieve those tasks that God has laid upon us.

So, here we believers are. Humbly trusting in God’s grace, full of hope and joy as we set out to work for God’s kingdom. As we experience ourselves to be surrounded by grace, it is so much easier to work gracefully for the extension of more grace in the world, for we are simply taking hold of what is self-evidently to us all around us and using it to produce more of the same.

Grace makes us so much more than we naturally are. It does not obliterate or over-ride our natural personality and gifts – that would be to deny the worth of God’s creation. Instead, God takes hold of who we are, and through imparting spiritual gifts – and a much better way to express this is: through his indwelling Spirit – shapes and builds and directs and enables our growing spirit or personality so that we grow up according to the potential that God placed in us through his unique creation of each person. A crucial aspect is that he continually heals and redeems our developing personality from the wounds that our failures (sins) inflict upon ourselves, and the damage from the wounds that others inflict on us. A clear analogy is of a plant, which when well-watered and nourished and protected has the ability to grow to a certain height and pattern and produce the appropriate fruit, but if denied all these good things might become a withered and twisted version of that plant and produce nothing of worth. By grace, we rejoice in the way God is nurturing us, protected by humility and hope, robustly dealing with the trials and tribulations of life. We become the best person we could possibly be. God is not forcing a template onto us to produce clones of some religious ideal. Part of his grace is the unique creativity and unfailing love that gives freedom to countless people to live their lives as they wish, but by his calling of us, enables each person to produce the unique creativity that God sees we have in us.

Thus, we find ourselves whole, healed, forgiven, resting in the loving care of God, actively and joyfully striving to stay in step with God’s Spirit. We are reconciled with one another, in the fellowship of God’s people, to build his kingdom here on earth, enfolded in the peace of God. This is what it means to be surrounded by God’s grace.

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 6: The problem of evil is always lurking at our elbow and must be addressed

Of course, I must face the challenge of those who suffer terribly, whose lives are filled with disappointment, who are oppressed and brutalised. My initial answer is to point us again to the remarkable fact that so many people whose lives are – to my mind- agonisingly painful with the wounds of life, manage to live with a faith that puts mine to shame. To explore this further, we need to delve into the problem of evil and why it is that a good God does not end evil. I have considered this in other articles, but very briefly now I will point us to the two key points:-

• In a changing material world, it is not possible to have a world without evil.
• Freedom is not possible without the possibility of evil

Perhaps I need to go into more detail in another article soon, but briefly (and so sounding somewhat callous to those who suffer terribly) the points are:-

Imagine God created a perfect world in which he had eliminated all possible harms. Think of an idyllic scene – I am imagining a couple enjoying a lovely summer’s day, sitting under a spreading oak tree, by a bubbling stream. There are no possible causes of harm in this world. Then time passes. The stream erodes a little valley with a cliff edge along its banks – now there is something to fall over. The oak tree becomes old, and as it reaches the end of its natural life, a massive branch becomes decayed and falls on one of the descendants of the original couple.

In a changing material world, it is not possible to guarantee that there are no causes of harm.

And the problem of freedom is familiar to most of us. We all love freedom, and we probably would not thank God for preventing us from doing something that we’ve decided we’d really like to do. If any of those actions are foolish or selfish we are extremely likely to harm others. So, for all who complain to God – and a complaint is certainly understandable – the thing to do is to consider in very practical, concrete terms: “What is it that you want God to do for you?”. The answer is usually a desire that God would intervene in how events turned out in order to stop harm coming to a loved one. However, once God intervenes to change events we lose our freedom because God is over-ruling our will and diminishing the value of our decisions by only allowing a limited range of consequences from the actions we took.

Thus, we are left in the world as we know and love it. A world of wondrous beauty – and great danger. Where heartbreak is always following at our heels and all that we love can be taken away from us. A world which we love viscerally and which produces in nearly all of us (subject to that question about those who have only ever suffered) a sense of the wonder of being alive, and which those who believe encounter as a sense of God’s grace. Strangely – and this does not comment well on our society – as we grow richer and have lives more at ease, we neglect, reject or despise God, while those who struggle with difficult lives, often in comparative poverty, remain attuned to this awareness of God’s grace that we have been exploring.

With my religious hat on, I cannot help thinking that human beings often become shallower in spirit as they pay more and more attention to material well-being, while those without these distractions are somehow more alive, or at least, retain the ability to value the whole range of human experience in a well-judged way. I should just note that some may complain that I am ignoring the struggles of many British people when I seem to assume that life is pretty good for most of us. Yet I believe it is, and a simple recalibration of our perspective confirms this. Many people today have no conception of how comfortable their lives are compared to people in Britain a few generations ago, or compared to those living today in abject poverty in other countries.

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 5: God is an additional “something extra” which is experienced within life: the fullness of grace

So, my experience of the grace of God is something like this. When I am engaged in the busyness of my life, I am “too busy” to be aware of God’s presence. I am doing my job; I am going to the shops; I am making dinner. But whenever – or very often when – I “look up” from my activities, when I have a moment of reflection, or self-awareness, I become aware that I am surrounded by God’s presence. I am enfolded, or embraced, in God’s love. Aswell as all the good things in my life, I am also conscious of an additional love over-shadowing me, filling me, actively loving me. So, I do not simply or only experience the goodness of life, how much I enjoy life, how many good and lovely and wonderful experiences there are in my life: I also experience a person who through, and beyond – and sometimes despite or regardless of the outward experiences of my life – the activities of my life is expressing his love to me. This is why it is grace. I have not done anything in particular to deserve this additional gift. It all just “comes at me” as an additional dimension to life – an underserved, exuberant, over-flowing gift of joy and love, which imparts to me an ineffable but utterly complete sense of fulfilment. I am loved. And not just by anyone, but by God himself. The God who is pure love, loves me. This is utterly bonkers beyond the realms of rationality or even delusional fantasy. Yet it presents itself to me – as to countless others – as a simple reality of existence. To attempt to live without this dimension of life is what strikes me as utterly bonkers-ludicrous (though I fully appreciate that some people just do not see it, even though many of them would love to). As a fish cannot live without being surrounded by water, but I imagine – if fish could do such thought – fish cannot conceive of life without being surrounded by water, so, when I look at the sky, at the curve of the earth’s dome above me, it is as though I am a fish surrounded by water. God’s presence is everywhere, and wherever God is, there is an experience of grace – of the over-flowing, healing, forgiving, renewing, empowering kindness and care of God.

I should note that if God is not real, so that all that I am describing is an invention of the human mind, then surely this is humanity’s greatest ever achievement. However, God’s grace does not strike me as something I have invented. I did not have to “work at it”. It’s just something I discovered one day. Just to clarify, I do not count my religious life to a particular day as do people who can give the precise moment and circumstances when they first encountered God. For me, it was a more gradual process whereby at the age of 12 I did not know God and was not really interested in religion and then one day when I was 15 I suddenly realised that I do now believe, and have done for some time. Somehow in that interval God had become real to me. I had learnt how to, or come to, perceive his presence. God would interrupt me walking home from school and his reality, his presence and his wonderful love were simply blindingly obvious to me. Much anguish and ups and down in faith have unfolded over the last 50 years, but the reality – now clearer to me than ever – is the same as in those first experiences. God is simply a reality that I experience; that experience is of a person; that person is someone who loves me (and everyone else) with an unconditional, unfailing, invincible love. Hence the sense of grace. It is as though we who believe, live our lives continually shadowed by an extravagant donor who lavishes gifts upon us at every turn. Of course, these gifts are not material gifts, but those gifts to the person, to make our personality whole and healed, to make us fulfilled and at peace, to connect and reconcile us to each other, to console and forgive us, to inspire and energise, to fill our lives with goodness in the loving service we are able to give to others.

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 4: Somehow, those with faith experience the reality of God

I don’t think we are anthropomorphising nature here – and then making nature divine. Rather, it is a reality that we experience: of course, for it seems obvious to the believer, the beauty of the sunset is just a pale imitation of the true and real beauty that is the “real” beauty that we experience. “Don’t you see it?!”. It is so obvious to those who do see it – though equally not obvious to those who don’t. This is one of the great mysteries of faith, that I have looked at in other posts, and will, no doubt, return to ponder again. Presumably, the atheist wants to say that I have made a mistake. I have been enchanted by the sunset – just as they were – but I have been falsely led on to conclude that there “must” be “something else” behind the sunset, when I should just accept the wondrous reality of the sunset – which is to say the wondrous reality of the effect that a sunset has on my mind. They may agree that it is a truly wonderful effect, but it is just something to do with evolved instincts or the ability of a highly developed brain to take pleasure in nature. This is, to repeat, a point of view that is impossible to measure and so is a belief system, just as much as my belief in something more than the sunset is a belief system.

Yet here I am, in my mind’s eye reviewing the sunset. It does not feel as though I have invented an imaginary “something extra” to add to the sunset. It feels like I am simply recognising a reality that is there. I enjoy the beauty of sunsets, just as beautiful sunsets. I do not always go from the sunset to God. Yet moving beyond the sunset does seem the most natural thing in the world. What might a suitable analogy be? Imagine that you visited a waterfall with a friend and they focused their attention entirely on the point where the falling water hits the pool at the bottom of the fall, and they say how much they love the sound of the crashing water and the spray, but did not perceive that the aspects that they love exist because of the river cascading over the falls. My response would be: “How can you not be aware that the sound and the spray come from the flowing river?”. The analogy is not quite right for it focuses on cause and effect – the sound and spray are caused by a falling river, whereas I am searching for a picture of one thing holding another, but the atheist only sees the “surface” object, not what the object is contained in. Does a cup of wine work? With the atheist only experiencing the wine, but oblivious that they drink the wine because it is held in a cup.

So, I open my eyes and I see God. I am not claiming some special power or being derogatory about those who do not see God – it is truly mysterious to me as to how people cannot see God. Of course, I must clarify my wording: I cannot “see” God. I approve of the theology that no-one can see God, and I am not a visionary mystic who claims that they can see God. If I was such a person I hope that I would have the right thinking to declare that I have not seen God, but I have been granted a vision which communicated to me a sense of God’s presence. Interestingly, this is exactly the same situation as is happening when I see the sunset. So even the very height of religious experience – the mystic visionary – is just the same as the “everyday”, natural experience of the sunset. And we can extend from the sunset to a myriad of other ordinary experiences which communicate to us the presence of God. So, if I speak more carefully, I do not see God but I become aware that he is with me.

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 3: We turn to God because we feel there is “something more”.

Let us turn to the core dimension of religious experience, often expressed in symbols.

Two people view a stunning sunset. One says, “What a wonderful sunset! It fills me with awe and joy at the beauty of creation and how wonderful it is for me to be here, seeing it”. The other says, “What a wonderful sunset! It fills me with awe and joy at the beauty of creation and how wonderful it is for me to be here, seeing it – and it connects me to a sense of God’s presence and love”. The second person “sees through” the sunset to a sense of God. In an unformed faith, we have just dropped that bombshell of a word “God” into the sentence, with all its host of connotations. However, for the person newly becoming aware of the wonder of life / the grace of God, the word “God” is a label for a concept that initially has little content. So, if a new believer is looking at the sunset, what do they mean when they say that “through, or behind, or above, or beyond” the beauty of the sunset they sense the beauty of God? I think it’s much more than simply a failure to find adequate words to describe the experience. The atheist may also be lost for words to describe the beauty and joy that the sunset evokes. What the believer is grasping after to express is that, no matter how awesomely, joyfully wonderful their experience of the sunset is, they are experiencing more than the totality of what a beautiful sunset could possibly impart to us. The beauty of the sunset has connected them to a sense that the beauty of the sunset depends on, stems from, flows from a presence – as yet barely known, but for shorthand we are calling “God” – which presents “himself” (to use standard terminology) as immeasurably more beautiful than the beauty of the sunset. And then God excels in all other good qualities that the experience of a sunset might evoke.

Why should we go beyond the beauty of the sunset to posit that there might be, indeed we feel sure is, “something more”? What can be more beautiful than the beauty of the sunset? Yet to the believer, it appears to be the most natural thing in the world to not be “limited” by the sunset (extravagantly, over-flowingly unlimited to our senses as it is) but to recognise that “obviously” there is a power “behind” the sunset, which is responsible for it. And we naturally identify this power as a person. (Note: in my idea of something “behind” the sunset, I am not simply bringing God into the picture in order to explain the existence of creation – even though I feel sure this was an important factor in the early development of religion. What I am exploring is the sense that there is an additional experience in the view of the sunset that is not explained simply by pointing to the beauty of it. The experience of God is a reality – an extra dimension of the experience)

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 2: Life without God can be wonderful; does God add anything?

Life is – or can be – wonderful. We are glad to be alive. If our life is in any way sustainable, then there will be many good aspects to it. We will have enough to eat and somewhere to live, and some people whom we love and who love us. We will have a sufficient sense of security and safety. So, it is an important question as to whether people who have never known anything except living in terrible poverty or oppression are able to experience God’s grace. I know that many people who do experience awful poverty or misfortune, that would crush me, are able to continue in faith in God. However, I don’t have sufficient knowledge to say if faith is possible without having at some point in our lives known the goodness of life. If my suggestion (which I hope is wrong) that our experience of the grace of God just is the experience of the goodness of life is correct, then I would expect that it is NOT possible to experience grace if life has always been awful. I suspect though that there are many people who live lives of faith despite constant hardships through their lives, and this would suggest that “God” is something extra to the experience of life as wonderful and something to be loved and cherished.

If the experience of God’s grace is really an entirely natural experience of coming to awareness with the wonder of life, it seems strange to me that humanity should have bothered to add on to the experience a claim that they are encountering a person called God. We know that the human mind is a wonderful, and strange and complex, thing, but in many other respects we are capable of enjoying profound satisfaction in aspects of life without bringing in a (supposedly) imaginary figure.

For us fortunate citizens of modern Britain, life is for most people saturated with good qualities. Therefore, it should be the most natural thing in the world for people to relate to my concept of “God’s grace”, even if, as secularists, they might call it something else – “the joy of living”, or some similar title. It’s interesting then that, as society has become much richer in material terms – and this translates into many other social goods, not necessarily linked to our personal wealth – it has become less inclined to faith in God. I really do not know the range of inner conversations that secularists have with themselves. I try to guard against the derogatory conclusion that, as secularists don’t have what I hold precious that therefore they must have nothing. All people value love and goodness, truth and trust; they have aesthetic and moral inspiration and unspeakably rich inner and outer emotional lives. Are they experiencing the same things as me, simply translated from the religious idiom to the secular? By analogy, is it no more than translating French into English? This is, of course, not easy to know for sure. The issue boils down to whether God adds anything or not. Of course, we can answer immediately that God adds a multiplicity of things of inexpressible value to the believer, which the atheist lacks. However, our question is whether – once our “translation exercise” has been done, there is anything in the believer’s life that the atheist simply cannot have?

(A theological reflection in 7 (rather long!) parts. This article is very much about my experience, so the word “I” appears rather a lot. There is a huge range of experience amongst Christians, so many people will see things quite differently, but I am hopeful that my experience is sufficiently understood to strike chords with many readers)

Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?

Part 1: Grace is certainly a real and wonderful experience, but do we need God for it?

I realise that I made a bold statement when I said that I feel strongly that I am surrounded by God’s grace. This raises the obvious challenge: “That’s all very well for you, but what if I don’t feel that?”. So, I will try and explore as honestly as I can what this feeling of grace is.

In previous posts, I often try to translate my faith beliefs into secular equivalents. I am doing my best to understand what my faith is. To consider if it might be understood in an entirely secular manner – in the sense that I might admit that I was mistaken in embarking on a life of faith because I could have found the same – very precious – experiences through an entirely secular route. I don’t want to belittle secular beliefs, but I hope that I can find something extra that faith adds to human existence. So, I will consider alternative understandings of what I consider to be the experience of grace, and then look at what a faith perspective might add – even if there is profound validity in the secular point of view.

So, what might an experience of God’s grace actually be if there is no God? Let me go back to my teenage years and investigate my own experiences, for that is when I feel I was strongly encountering God for the first time.

It could be an experience of the wonder of life, of how wonderful it is to be alive. As we move from childhood to adulthood we develop new mental faculties. So, I was overwhelmed to discover how beautiful the natural world is. I can remember staring at cherry-blossom and daffodils, scarcely believing how anything could be so beautiful. Of course, I had seen such things before in childhood, but I had not noticed them in the way I was now able to.

It could be an effect of the growing self-awareness we develop. Whereas, as children we take many things for granted, or unthinkingly, as we move into teenage years, we develop an ability to reflect upon our own experience, and to realise that, although things are so, they might not have been. We sense – and much of this will be unconscious, though in other respects we will be consciously aware of being inspired by new principles and values that we have just discovered – the wonderful potential of life. We are free, independent agents with the opportunity and possibility of charting our own particular course through life. There will also be a lot of unconscious, as well as conscious, awareness of the possibilities of sexual and romantic attractions that open up an entirely new realm of existence.

I can appreciate that all these factors can combine to give an extravagantly wonderful and extremely powerful sense of entering a new realm of existence, a new way of being. As it is a new faculty of mind and spirit and body that we are entering into, it strikes us as a wonderfully – almost magically – enchanting new way of life. For anyone with familiarity with a religious life of faith, it is the most natural thing in the world to associate this new experience with the experience of meeting God. In this train of thought, we are putting forward a suggestion, not simply for what the experience of God’s grace is, but a suggestion for what God is, in himself. This is not as big a step as I thought a couple of sentences ago, as, if there is any validity in the thought, then what we are saying is that the reality of God is “simply” an experience of being surrounded by grace. We have mistakenly thought that this grace is an effect of being in relationship with a person we call “God”, but really grace is an experience of becoming aware of the wonder of life.

Washed up on the shores of heaven

Part 2: The grace of God will bring us home

I hope you can see that I am a fan of grace! So, what about this particular image?

I think the meaning is that, even if we should somehow – spiritually speaking – suffer ship-wreck, whereby the whole vessel of our being is ruined and sunk, so that we are utterly lost, incapable of achieving anything at all – except to be drowned and lost, instead of being lost we will find ourselves – against all the odds, against all hope, utterly miraculously as it were, finding ourselves not lost, not dead, not simply temporarily given reprieve, as though clinging to a rock and hoping something will come along to rescue us. Rather, as we come to on the beach, we discover that we are exactly at the place that we have been heading for all our lives. Perhaps we thought that we were far, far away, perhaps we despaired of ever getting there. Perhaps we thought that with much striving and effort and time we might possibly draw near to our dear destination. But instead, we find that, even if we should, to our minds, find ourselves ship-wrecked and going down for the third time, we discover that we are not lost, but found, not alone, but firmly in the embrace of God, not far off, but home. Deeply home, the home that we have always longed for, the home where we are completely and utterly at home, at peace, at rest, at one with all whom we love, at one with the God of love, who by his grace has brought us safely here. Regardless of the chances and pitfalls of life, of success and failure, of our efforts to get there, or to go astray, heedless of the apparently immensely powerful forces that might sweep us away and against which we sometimes felt powerless, it turns out that none of that counted for anything. This is not fatalism or destiny; this is simply the power of God’s grace to achieve our salvation, to make us whole, to complete us by his love, to bring us, at the last, completely and forever to be with him. I nearly said that all that we need to do is trust in him, but even that is not so. The fullness of the power of grace to bring us safe home is that, even if we should deny him, betray him, turn away from him, so it seems to us, even from the depths of our souls, there is something even deeper that we cannot see but that God can. Having once loved him and, perhaps, and I think this must be true, him having once loved us, even deeper than the complete rejection and failure of our faith, there is still the grace of God within us. And because of this we will find ourselves washed up on the shores of heaven.

(A theological reflection in 2 parts)

Washed up on the shores of heaven

Part 1: We live and move and breathe within the grace of God

In a recent sermon, I made this comment:

“Somewhere at the centre of our souls – something that we cannot see, but that God can, is a drop of baptismal water that has made us clean, which is continually refreshing us, and which will, one day, wash us up on the shores of heaven.”

There is something about this final phrase: “will wash us up on the shores of heaven” that strikes chords with people, for a few people at the end of the service have delayed going directly to the tea-trolley to come and tell me how much they appreciated it. So, I thought I would explore what I understand about the image a bit more.

The main reason I am a Christian is that I am overwhelmed by the grace of God. I tangibly feel that I am surrounded by the undeserved, loving kindness of God. His grace upholds me in all things: through disappointment and failure, despite my weaknesses and lack of trust and faithfulness to God. His grace directs me in paths of goodness, truth and love. He protects me from vanity, selfishness and unkindness (to a remarkable degree). He enables me to achieve good things, and to take pleasure in the goodness of them while being guarded against the delusion that I am anything without God. God’s grace is, and will be always, and particularly at the end will be, all sufficient for me. I never can – and neither do I have to worry about being able to do this – present myself before God with a record of my achievements and an expectation, or even a demand, that I deserve entry into heaven, or now, that I deserve recognition as a good person. As Paul so wisely notes: the word of the Lord came to me saying that my grace is made perfect in your weakness. Of the many paradoxes in the life of faith, this is one of the most profound. It is not that our weaknesses or failures do not matter – they do, intensely! The well-being or harm of others, and the state of our own souls depends on whether we do good or evil. Nor is it simply that our weaknesses leave more scope for God’s grace – as though, if we could somehow be very good people, we would hardly need God at all. The point is that God, in his loving kindness, understands what we lack, and has the willingness and ability to make up for that, so that, by grace, we are able to achieve, not simply, what we could not do without him, but we are able to achieve God’s gracious purposes which are – without God – totally out for reach, for without God we neither know, nor are willing, nor have the power to achieve God’s transforming will. But when we “lean on God”, allow our weakness – and our strong desire to serve him, along with the gifts that he has bestowed on us -to be infused with God’s grace then we see his grace triumphant in achieving what he wanted, and clearly in a way where our weakness has become a strength, precisely because, in that weakness we called on God to help us, and so our weakness became not simply something that didn’t get in the way of God’s action, but became a partner in God and us together achieving the good that we both desire.