'But he gives more grace'

Do you feel reticent about asking God for more grace? After all, when the apostles said, “Increase our faith,” Jesus replied that if they had faith as a mustard seed, they could command a mulberry tree to be pulled up by the roots and planted in the sea, and it would obey. The Lord’s reply seems to suggest that the apostles already had whatever faith was required, and that they merely needed to exercise it, and that we shouldn’t pester God to ask for more.

Does the same go for grace?

May we ask for “more grace” in hard situations, or does asking for a greater amount of anything spiritual betray a childish sense of what grace is? Isn’t grace an all-or-nothing situation, not a small, medium, large, or supersized situation? It’s so very odd even to speak of grace or faith in the same breath as words about quantity. When I was a child, my father’s mother explained to me the relative happiness of the unequally glorious residents of heaven using varying measuring cups she would fill with water each to the brim, but I thought I had outgrown that conceptualization.

Yet here it is again in James 4:6: “But he gives more grace.”

A few verses earlier, James has laid out a rather dour appraisal of the human condition: People’s quarrels and wars are not caused by poverty and social inequality (one might possibly make a start on eradicating these) but by something in the very warp and woof of the heart. How can one get that out? Where is the governmental legislation that can address lust and covetousness! Yet, it is in response to that bleakest of pictures that James wrote: “But he gives more grace.”

And we cannot think that he means what people call positional or imputed grace here, for those are surely not a matter of degree. No, the “more grace” seems to suggest a supply ready to be released for an arisen need.

To watch my father deal with the death of his wife of 64 years this week has been to see the “more grace” first hand. My father has done things previously undoable by him—reminiscent of the stories we hear of the woman who can suddenly lift the front end of a car when her child is pinned under it. While my mother was dying, I saw my father living beyond his usual capabilities and personality gifts, going to work and then rushing to the hospital to keep vigil by her bedside. When she died, I watched him choose the right door of the two that were presenting themselves to her: Door A of self-indulgent moroseness, or Door B of believing every word of 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17.

It does me good to take God’s word for it, that no matter how great our sorrow, or how dyed in the wool our sin problem, God’s grace is disproportionally greater, and is the last word in the matter—if only we will ask. With every ratcheting up of a problem, there is ratcheting up of grace availability of grace to handle it.

“But he gives more grace.”

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