Light of the World Today
Grace covered your past. Grace empowers your present. Today we deal with the dimension that closes the series most powerfully. Growing in grace. What it means, why most people never experience it and how the person who does becomes genuinely and permanently different from the person they were before.
"But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever! Amen."
2 Peter 3:18 NIV
Peter's final instruction in his second letter is not grow in your theological knowledge. It is not grow in your spiritual disciplines, your church attendance or your biblical literacy. It is grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The two things are linked deliberately. Grace and knowledge together. Not knowledge about grace as a doctrine but the growing, deepening, progressive experience of a grace that is inseparable from a growing, deepening, progressive knowledge of the one who is the source of it. Growing in grace is not a programme. It is a relationship. And like every genuine relationship it deepens over time not through information alone but through encounter, through trust tested by circumstances and through the accumulated experience of a God who has proved himself faithful across every season you have walked through together.
This final part of the series answers the most important question the first three parts raised without directly addressing it. You now know what grace is. You know that it covers your past and empowers your present. You know it changes how quickly you return to God after failure, how you treat the people who fail you and what you believe you are capable of when you stop relying on your own strength. The final question is this. How does a person actually grow in grace? What does that growth look like in a real life across real time? And what does the person who has genuinely grown in grace look like compared to the person who merely knows about it?
What Growing in Grace Actually Means
Growing in grace does not mean accumulating more grace as though it were a resource stored in quantities that increase as you mature. The grace of God is not rationed out incrementally as you demonstrate worthiness of more. It is complete and available in its fullness from the moment you receive Christ. What grows is not the supply of grace. What grows is your capacity to receive, live from and demonstrate what has always been fully available. The difference between a new believer and a mature one is not that the mature believer has access to more grace. It is that the mature believer has learned to live from what was always there. They have fewer areas of their life still operating under the old system of performance and earning. More of who they are has been brought under the authority and the supply of what grace provides.
Colossians 2:6-7 in the NLT says just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness. The image is agricultural and it is precise. Roots growing down. Not performance climbing up. The growth that grace produces goes inward and downward before it becomes visible upward and outward. It is the growth of a root system that draws increasing supply from the source, producing a stability that the person observing from outside cannot fully explain because it is invisible. You cannot see the roots. You can only see that when the storm arrives, the tree does not fall.
"Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness."
Colossians 2:6-7 NLT
The Person Who Has Grown in Grace: What They Look Like
There is something unmistakeable about a person who has genuinely grown in grace over time. It is not primarily visible in the quality of their public ministry or the impressiveness of their theological vocabulary. It is visible in the quality of their response to pressure, failure, disappointment and the ordinary friction of daily relational life. The person who has grown in grace does not keep score. Not because they are naturally generous but because they have received a grace from God that specifically does not keep score and they have lived from that grace long enough that it has become the default posture of their interior life. They return to God quickly after failure because experience has taught them that his response is mercy rather than condemnation. They extend patience to difficult people without visible effort because they have received a patience from God that they did not earn and that has shaped their whole approach to human limitation.
Titus 2:11-12 in the NLT says for the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation for all people. And we are instructed to turn from godless living and sinful pleasures. We should live in this evil world with wisdom, righteousness and devotion to God. This is one of the most important statements about grace in the entire New Testament because it establishes something that most people have never been clearly taught. Grace itself is the instructor. Not the law. Not guilt. Not the fear of consequences. The grace of God teaches. It instructs the person who lives from it toward wisdom, righteousness and devotion. The transformation that law could never produce through external demand, grace produces through interior renewal. The person who has grown in grace is not a person who is trying harder to be more righteous. They are a person who has been taught by grace from the inside out to want what righteousness produces.
"For the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation for all people. And we are instructed to turn from godless living and sinful pleasures. We should live in this evil world with wisdom, righteousness and devotion to God."
Titus 2:11-12 NLT
Four Practical Ways to Grow in Grace Starting Today
1. Receive it fresh every morning before you give anything out
Lamentations 3:22-23 in the NLT says the faithful love of the Lord never ends. His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness. His mercies begin afresh each morning. The mercies and the grace are renewed daily. But they require a daily receiving. The person who grows in grace is the person who begins each morning by consciously, specifically and gratefully receiving what is being offered before the demands of the day create the temptation to revert to the old system of performing for it. Five minutes at the beginning of the day, specifically acknowledging that you are approaching God through grace and not through your performance of the previous day, is one of the most practically significant habits available for building a life that grows in grace over time.
2. Let grace be your response to your own failures before it is your response to others
One of the most reliable indicators of how much grace a person has genuinely received from God is how graciously they treat themselves when they fail. The person who is harshly self-critical, who rehearses their failures repeatedly and who struggles to receive God's forgiveness for themselves, is the person who will find it most difficult to extend genuine grace to others. 1 John 1:9 in the NLT says if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness. Confess. Receive the cleansing. Move forward. The growing-in-grace person does not take sin lightly. They take God's forgiveness seriously. And they model the receiving of it so consistently that extending it to others becomes the most natural response available.
3. Study the character of Jesus rather than only the rules of religion
John 1:14 in the NLT says the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. The word translated as unfailing love is the Greek charis. Grace. Jesus was not full of rules and requirements. He was full of grace. The person who grows in grace grows by spending increasing time understanding, encountering and being shaped by the specific character of the Jesus they see in the Gospels. Not Jesus as a set of ethical demands but Jesus as a person. The way he treated the woman caught in adultery. The way he responded to the disciples when they repeatedly missed the point. The way he wept at Lazarus's tomb before he raised him. The way he made breakfast on the beach for the disciples who had abandoned him. Grace becomes native to the person who has spent enough time in the company of the one who is its fullest expression.
4. Give grace to others in the specific situation where it costs you the most
Romans 5:20 in the NLT says God's law was given so that all people could see how sinful they were. But as people sinned more and more, God's wonderful grace became more abundant. Where sin increased, grace increased all the more. Grace is not diminished by the severity of the situation that requires it. It is most abundant exactly where the need is greatest. The practical implication for a person who is growing in grace is this. The situation that costs you the most to respond to graciously is the situation where grace has the most room to grow in you. The colleague who keeps making the same mistake. The family member who has let you down repeatedly. The person who does not deserve another chance by any natural measure. Those are not the situations where grace is least appropriate. They are the situations where grace is most precisely at home. And extending it in those moments is not natural virtue. It is the supernatural overflow of a life that has been receiving the same quality of grace from God and has grown in it long enough to give it away freely.
So the Light of the World word for today and for the final close of this four-part series is this. Grace is not a starting point you leave behind once you are saved. It is the atmosphere you are designed to live in every day of your Christian life. It covers the past. It empowers the present. It grows in you as you grow in him. And it teaches you, from the inside rather than the outside, into the wisdom and the righteousness and the devotion that you could never have produced through discipline and effort alone. Let your roots go down into it. Let your life be built on it. And live this week as the person for whom grace is not without effect. Because that person changes every room they enter. Not through performance. Through the overflow of what they have received.
Memory verse for today
"But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever!"
2 Peter 3:18 NIV.