Gracious

My favorite definition of God’s grace is, God’s gift of Himself to humankind. This gift is totally spontaneous, completely free, unexpected and most certainly undeserved. It’s the fulfillment of God’s plan from before time and the One that can bring completeness to each of us. We typically think of Jesus coming here as one of us to be the totality of this gift but it is so much more.

God’s offer of Himself to us includes everything that He is. All of the attributes that we’ve been looking at are for us to accept. He wants us to have it all: the gift of forgiveness through His death, the gift of eternity through His resurrection, the ability to know Him intimately and personally through Christ living in us, to hear His voice and be able to act on it through His Holy Spirit, to trust Him because of His veracity and on down the incredible list of who He is. It’s all for us.

This is the conclusion of our specific look at the attributes of God. This list is by no means the wholeness of God after all He is infinite. There is much more of Him to be discovered and all of that is for us too.

Omnipotent

Omnipotent means all-powerful. Everything is possible for God and all things are possible with God. This attribute has generated all kinds of “could God…?” questions that sometimes cross the line of ridiculousness. The way I like to look at it is the difference between “could God” and “would God”. I’m not comfortable with the phrase God can’t but there are certainly things God won’t do. As we mentioned at the outset of this look at His attributes, God is always each of these qualities so He would not violate a characteristic.

Also we can take incredible comfort in knowing that there’s nothing that God can’t handle. Sometimes that may even include us being pissed off at Him, He can handle it. In fact He would much rather we focus our anger on Him instead of those around us. Scripture says, “With God nothing is impossible.” It’s not saying for God, it’s saying with God. How cool is it to know that together He and we can accomplish the impossible?

Attributes

God wants more than anything for us to know Him. The relationship He desires with us must go both directions. He reveals Himself to us through His Word, creation, prayer and everyday interaction and one of the best ways to know when it’s Him is to be familiar with what we call His attributes or characteristics, those things about Him that are certain and have already been discovered. So let’s take a few days and explore some of the attributes of God.