Asking Our Gracious God to be Gracious?

Anticipating a difficult conversation the other day, I asked God to be gracious to me. Allow me to explain how he answered my prayer. As soon as the words of my prayer were on my fiery tongue, it struck me, or rather, the Spirit of God brought me down to earth from up high on my little personalized hill of perfection. I remembered God is always gracious to me. Never has he not been gracious to me nor anyone else. He is unchanging in his character. He does not give and take away his grace. He’s not like that. He may give and take away things which are dearly precious to me, but he knows what’s best for me, so once again, it’s his grace. By his grace, I was born, grew up, and started a family. And it’s by his grace that I grow old, weary, and worn. His grace is eternal and constant, or I would have imploded long before now. Asking God to be gracious is like asking me to love my wife or my son or my daughter. I’m wasting precious pleas before the almighty God who invented the very idea of grace and love. Of course he’ll be gracious to me. My prayer ought to be a little more filled with adoration for and remembering of the grace of God. Now, on to what really happened.

So, how did he answer my prayer?

Holy Spirit, God, prompted me to ask him a different question altogether: to make me more gracious in my thoughts and words toward this other person in our conversation. I asked God to make me more gracious. He brought me to repentance. He changed me. My unchangeable God transformed me to become more like his own perfect Son, Jesus Christ. You see, it’s not a matter of will he be gracious to us but how he will be gracious to us and whether we will be in step with the Spirit enough to recognize it. His whole purpose is to get all the glory and be wholly loving to his children in a way that only he can orchestrate all at once. We are changed that we might more fully reflect the glory of our unchanging God. By his grace, I pray we will know it when we see it for he has been, is, and always will be gracious.