They have all the tools they need to maintain their own spiritual condition and thus to keep themselves sane and sober. Many people believe this to mean that the Twelve Steps are a formula for attaining some kind of spiritual experience-a magical recipe of sorts.

The Steps promise a saving experience of God’s grace as a result of working through a list of twelve actions. One way to look at it is that when grace is really at work, we receive our activity from God, and our activity nurtures in us a receptive attitude toward God.Ĭonsider the Twelve Steps. There are things for us to do in the Christian life, but this does not mean that our actions place us in control of grace. Such behavior would constitute a passive-aggressive attempt to control God. Of course, accepting grace does not mean that we are supposed to lie on the floor somewhere, waiting for God to move heaven and earth for us. The truth is that if the world is depending on our efforts for its grace, then we live in a hopeless place indeed. Some part of us really believes that if we don’t make grace happen in the world, then the world will be without grace. Objections like these arise from our basic fear that God will not come through on his promise to us. Really, isn’t this emphasis on receiving grace just an excuse to lie around, passively waiting for God to do all the work? After all, this world is in bad shape and there is plenty of stuff for me to do! Can’t I just fiddle with things a little bit? Surely God could use a hand. Most of us can’t relax our control muscle longer than a second before we get too agitated to sit still. We can’t experience God’s grace unless we are willing to let God give it to us-not an easy task.Īccepting grace means ceasing our efforts at control and putting an active faith in the Unseen. Anything we do to try to earn grace cuts us right off from The Source. The hard rule of grace is that there is nothing you can do to earn it.

What does giving grace mean