Digging Deeper – GRAPE is not the Answer
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9 (NLT)
“GRAPE” IS NOT THE ANSWER
I love the game Wordle. A quick round of the game is often part of my morning routine. It is a great way to wake up my mind and get me thinking. But I never believed that Wordle might have something to teach me about my faith. I was wrong.
The game is pretty simple. You get five letter blanks, and you enter a five-letter word. If you guessed a letter not in the word, it would appear in grey. If you guess a letter that is in the word but not in the position where you put it, it appears in yellow. It appears in green if it is the correct letter and in the proper position. You get six guesses. I usually get it on guess four.
On the morning in question, I started with my usual first guess, “FRAME.” I have never gotten it on the first guess, but maybe someday. The game told me that R, A, and E were the correct letters in the proper position. “Looks like I might get it in three,” I thought as I entered “GRAPE.” I know what you’re thinking. “GRAPE? Why GRAPE?” I don’t know. It was a heat-of-the-moment decision, but it wasn’t terrible because now G, R, A, and E were all green!
For guess three, I entered “GRAZE”… wrong. Guess four was “GRADE”… wrong again. Now things were getting a little desperate. I entered “GRATE” for my fifth guess but still no joy. Final guess, and then I saw it, what some of you will have seen already, “GRACE.” I plugged in the letters and it came up all green. The game posted “phew” across the top of the screen to let me know how close I came.
Grace can be a hard thing for us to see. We have our own ideas about how God should work, and most of the time it looks more like Karma than grace. We hear people say that God can’t exist because bad things happen to good people and that is God’s fault; but, in the same breath they will invoke Karma and tell someone “what goes around comes around.” So which way is it?
The only way it makes sense is that we as humans do our level best to mess everything up. We GRATE people. The definition of Grate is to shred or to make annoying sounds. We hurt each other going through our lives myopically ignoring the problems of the people around us. We make sure that people know what we are against louder than we let them know what we are for.
We GRAZE. We go after every little thing that draws our attention. We live our lives counter to God’s rules, chasing sex and money and anything else that takes our fancy.
We GRADE. We judge ourselves and others by comparing. We compare paychecks, addresses and sins. We want to put ourselves and others into categories that make us comfortable.
God knows we will do this and he offers GRACE. Not because we are so great, but because God is. Not because we deserve it but because it is His to offer. This is the message that the world needs. This is the seed that Jesus planted.
When we are there at the end, the last guess, with nowhere else to turn, GRACE is the answer. And GRACE is the gospel we can share with the world.
Chris Boggess is the Next Generation/Family Pastor at NorthStar Church. He grew up in St. Albans, West Virginia, and still cheers for the Mountaineers. He and his wife, Heather, have two grown children and one granddaughter.