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Thanksgiving Devotion: "I Am a Sinner Saved by Grace"

CHICAGO, IL (November 26, 2003) - Editor's note: During Thanksgiving week, Covenant Communications is posting devotionals sent to us by various Covenant churches. This one is written by Paul Taylor of River Ridge Covenant Church in Olympia, Washington.

The pastor's words at my grandmother's funeral caught me up short. Even as Alzheimer's began the long slow process of stealing away her wry wit, dry humor, and fiercely independent spirit, she would squeeze his hand and say with quiet confidence: "I'm a sinner saved by grace." The unkindest of all diseases could not steal away the shorthand for a Bible's worth of theology - and it was the thing that she had bet her life on.

I had grown up in the church where words like grace were common - perhaps too common. "Grace" was said before ordinary meals, which - as a kid - was always hard to reconcile with "amazing" from the hymn. The pipe organ would bellow the notes, the choir was in full voice and the senior saints in the congregation would sing as if their lives depended on it - but I really don't think I got it.

Marshall McLuhan, who has never been mistaken for a theologian, once observed that you should never ask a fish about water because he knows of nothing else. I know how that fish felt. The church was my small town, a second home - given the hours that we spent there as a family - and certainly a place where God was taken seriously.

My misspent youth had a singular focus - radio. My teenage years were spent hatching schemes on how to get on the air and, once there, balancing three graveyard shifts over the weekend with high school during what was left of the week. Something had to give - and it was the Sunday ritual of going to church. With this revised schedule, I was also able to avoid the calls from the church to be baptized as graduation approached. At the time, baptism seemed to demand too much - including the flexibility I thought I needed to navigate a career in the media.

Rebellious? Evidently. Without a cause? Perhaps not.

After three years away, I returned to church one Sunday evening. I snuck into the back pew and, after 15 minutes or so, realized that it was good to be back. It felt a lot like home - and the moonlight shining through the stained glass windows forcefully reminded me that it was God's house. It was the way theologian J.I. Packer said that church should be for those with unfinished business - welcoming but not too comfortable.

I do not remember which songs we sang or the subject of the pastor's sermon, but I can tell you a great deal about a woman who was sitting at the other end of the back pew that cold Winnipeg winter night. It turned out to be a providential introduction. Elaine and I were married five years later (and that was 15 years ago.)

I need no other evidence of God's grace and goodness than his gift to me of Elaine. We have shared much joy, laughter and companionship as best friends in the intervening two decades. There have been challenges, hardships and some heartache - but never more than we could bear and, by the grace of God, they have not been major themes in the story of our life together.

Elaine has been a steadfast partner and ally, an especially welcome circumstance given a vocational calling that seemed to cut against the grain. There has been a steady drumbeat in the evangelical subculture about the horrors of the secular media, public universities and government. I resisted -no, rejected - the idea that working in these fields was somehow out of bounds or could only be pursued if it was through an overly religious network, college, or public policy advocacy group.

My career has had three major stops to date - the media, public universities and government. I was either shaking my fist in the face of God or he was putting my feet on the ground where they were needed. The former was once certainly true and, thanks to a change of heart and a little wisdom that comes with age, I have become convinced of the latter. I am content knowing that this is a calling - odd and hard to explain as it may be - that has some redemptive purpose.

I am fortified by the story of Martin Luther answering the cobbler's persistent questions about what he should do to be a faithful servant of God: Luther told the cobbler, "Make a good shoe and sell it at a fair price." Micah 6:8 provides similar advice that transcends vocation, "Love mercy, do justly and walk humbly with your God." That living up to such reasonable sounding direction remains out of my grasp reminds me of my favorite essay, the central theme of which is captured in its title, "Christ died for the sins of Christians too." That's grace in all its sweetness. Singer/songwriter Keith Urban disguised a prayer for people like me in a country tune last summer:

I shouldn't be standing here today
After all the crazy things I've done
I am ready to fall that's OK
I ran as far as I could run
And you won.

Had it been written a few years earlier, it could have been the soundtrack at the baptism service where I was finally ready to fall in October, 1996. A few short weeks later, we moved to Olympia, where we came to a church that required baptism as a condition of membership. (An officially ordained dunk in Long Lake after we got here would certainly have been as effective but the timing appears to have been more than coincidental).

We have been blessed to find a new home away from home and another place where God is taken seriously. The central idea of River Ridge - celebrating God's grace through relationships - puts a common touch on a most uncommon mission. It is nothing short of amazing. My grandmother would've liked it here.

Now Thank We All Our God.
I Just Got a New Heart.

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