There’s a movie called Black Snake Moan, I suggest you don’t watch it. But it’s a good
movie none the less, and there is a great illustration in it. There is a woman
who struggles with sex in it, and that is her weakness. She ends up on the side
of the road, beaten and bloody, and a man finds her on the side of the road. He
picks her up, takes her to his house. After a few escape attempts to go fall
into temptation, he chains her to a radiator (non-sexual) and waits for her to
take control of her weakness. Later, she gets married in the movie, and during
the ceremony she wears a gold chain around her waist. On the drive from the
wedding her weakness, the thing she struggles with starts to fight back, as it
always does for us all, and she grips that chain, remembering what her previous
chain was attached to, the radiator. Throughout the movie we see the man,
Samuel L. Jackson, go to the radiator to find peace, to find God (he was a
religious man, good friends with a pastor in town). Here the woman finds her
peace with God, and begins to overcome her weakness.
A professor of mine told the class of a time when he was
in campus ministry, and they got rid of an arm chair. A simple chair. Now I
like chairs, I have one in my room that I always sit in. But he told us of when
he got rid of it at his campus ministry, and when the students came in the next
day one of the students was livid that the chair was gone. This is the chair
that he sat in when he came to Christ. They threw the chair out and it was in
the garbage, I believe at the dump. The student went and grabbed the chair out
of the dump, and kept it. It reminded him of when he came to feel the grace
that God gives us.
Recently, I gave a sermon for a class where I talked
about the sound of grace, using the song Amazing
Grace as my take off point. In the old hymn, we hear the words, “Amazing
grace, how sweet the sound…” and I began to wonder, what is the sound of grace?
Now of course John Newton, the writer of the hymn, probably meant the sound of
the word “grace.” But I began to wonder, what is the sound of grace? What does
grace sound like? I began a journey at that point, looking through scripture
and my own life looking for the sound that grace makes. I ended up at a few
different conclusions. The first of which is that there are many sounds of grace.
Two at least from Jesus, maybe more, and one from each of our lives. I looked
through my own life and found the sound that the grace of God made in my own
life, where I found his grace on KCU hill in the pouring rain with a hood up.
I went for a walk in the pouring rain one day, a Sunday
(I skipped church because I didn’t care back then.) I eventually ended up KCU
hill. For those of you that don’t know, KCU is a trip to get up to. First you
have to pass through a grave yard, then through a wood with thistles, then you
reach the top. I was soaked to the bone by the time I reached the top. The rain
was pouring down and I looked over the town that KCU is in, Grayson. At the
time I was questioning my calling, my faith (again), and even my life, though
not in a suicidal way this time. As I looked over Grayson, and heard the rain
falling on my hood, I had a conversation with God, and I began to feel his
grace fall upon me. This was where I felt the grace of God wash over me. This
is where I found God again.
I say again because there was a time where I was
seriously questioning my faith, which I think all Christians need to do at some
point. I know people will argue with me about that, but I feel faith becomes
stronger with you fight against it. I grew up in the Church, and was “baptized”
at about 11 or 12. I don’t really remember much from it because I was young at
the time and just wanted to be a “big kid” and thought baptism was a type of
rite of passage into adulthood. Little did I know that it just makes me
younger. But during this time of questioning in my life, I laid in bed, 3AM and
couldn’t sleep, school the next morning (my junior year of high school), and I
questioned God’s existence. I was exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to
sleep so I could function at a minimal level the next day at school. “God, if
you exist, let me sleep.” That was my only prayer that night. I didn’t expect
anything from it, but I was hoping.
That was the best night of sleep I’ve ever had.
Four hours is all I got, yet I haven’t slept better to
this day five years later. It is in my bed at the time that I found God, truly
found him. And it was on that hill that I found his grace.
I’ve rarely been on that hill since then, but I still
remember that moment. The rain beating on my soaked hood. The city beneath me.
The rain moving away from me. I can picture it now as if it were yesterday.
One day at KCU we had a speaker come in for chapel, and I
remember he told the story of how he came to Christ, and how it was in his
friend’s basement, and how that basement holds a special place in his heart all
these years later.
We each have a place where we find God, and find his
grace, we even have a sound that reminds us of his grace. Every time it rains
while I’m at home I hear the rain hit the pool, or at the moment the cover of
the pool, and it reminds me of that moment on the hill.
So I have this question for you: Where did you find God?
Where did you feel his grace? Where is your salvation?
The last question is not a “If you die today will you go
to heaven?” type of question. But where did you feel his salvation come upon
you? Where did you encounter God’s grace?
Is it on a hill? In a chair? In bed? In a basement?
During a trying time in your life? When you questioned God? Or was it when you
came out of the water?
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