Amazing Grace

Just a couple thoughts about the hymn.

 Then King David went in and sat before the LORD, and he said:

       “Who am I, O LORD God, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? And as if this were not enough in your sight, O God, you have spoken about the future of the house of your servant. You have looked on me as though I were the most exalted of men, O LORD God. — 1 Chronicles 17:16-17 (NIV)

” ‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.”

It’s a strange lyric.

I remember singing this in church one morning, and realizing that I didn’t understand what I was singing. I wanted to know what it meant. And I didn’t.

So I made a guess. I assumed the fear in question was the fear of the Lord. But it didn’t make sense to me. Why grace? Why would you point to grace and say, “This is the thing that taught me how to fear God.”?

Well, maybe the degree to which we fear God is tied to the depth of our knowledge of God.  If we don’t know God, our fear is distorted and twisted. We fear something, but it is not the Lord, it is something else. We fear a phantom, a construction of our own minds, and it drives us to things the fear of the Lord never would.

So to truly fear God, we must first know God.

And the only way to know God is to first know grace.

Grace is the necessary introduction, without which there can be no relationship. We all must meet God in the same way. It’s the same way that Saul met God, with God saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Knowing who we are and who God is means that there is only one way we can live together – and that is by grace.

We can’t live our lives in the fear of a concept of the Lord, or in the fear of  a story of the Lord, or in the fear of some fact about the Lord.