Towards the end of the service on Sunday morning, I sat in the front row of the side aisle and slightly turned to see the crowd. What a great group of young people who made God a priority by coming to Church! People from all sorts of different backgrounds all worshipping our Lord Jesus together. Sadly some of them may stumble and fall away this year. However, others are going to get and stay rooted in Christ. These people are going to grow and flourish in their spiritual lives. To you who are committed, to you who are going to grow, to you who love Jesus more than anyone or anything else…my challenge to you (and His challenge as well) is this: let’s make an impact this year!

Right now make it a PRIORITY not only to partake in worship, service, and community, but because you are a follower of Jesus Christ make it a priority to make an impact for HIM in the spiritual realm. As you are meeting new people and figuring out your routine, prioritize people who are not prioritizing God. Join another RSO. Spend time with your neighbors. Get to know your classmates. And, start this now,while it is an appropriate and easy time to introduce yourself and build friendships. Stay strong in the Lord, be yourself, and love other people. Naturally, casually, let your friends see and hear about God in your life.

We need Christians who are plugged in and serving and investing in the body of Christ, but do not lose sight of the mission field that God has placed you in. You are not at a Christian school. You are at a university. Take advantage of this mission field with no language barrier and few cultural barriers. Don’t seclude yourself from the world. Be in the world but not of it. Friends, be at this university and let His light shine!

“Grace” is one of those “Christian-ese” words whose meaning often finds itself obscured in a swirling fog of overuse, misuse, and abuse. It has become a term so popularly verbalized in everyday Christian vernacular that the scandal of it has been lost. You see it in the names of local churches, of whole denominations, of missions agencies, and even in the trademarked names of many Christian- owned “secular” businesses. Oh, and young couples find it attractive to name their daughters, “Grace.”

I know that a lot of books have been written about this important subject… not the least of which was Brennan Manning’s excellent work, The Ragamuffin Gospel. But I want to focus in on one aspect of grace that is often lost in our daily pilgrimage.

Grace is not just some abstract theological principle. It defines the very basic nature of God’s choice of us… His act of choosing you and me. The ancient Jews had the law. God dealt with them on the basis of their obedience—or their disobedience. When Jesus came, grace came with him, through him, and in him. He was (and is) the vessel and vehicle for grace—the free gift of God’s open arms to anyone who would fling himself or herself into his warm embrace.

At the heart of Grace is God’s understanding of sin—our sin. Sin separates. Sin alienates. Sin deteriorates. Grace embraces, restores, renews. I have sinned, but through eyes of grace God overlooks my failure. Where grace gets really “gritty” is when it is bludgeoned by sin—our sin—your sin— my sin. You see, it is not at the Sunday School picnic that grace does it greatest work. Nor is it in the midst of your passionate prayer life or your selfless service or even in your unfettered, uninhibited worship. No, grace does its greatest work when I am at my worst—when you are at your worst. When you have fallen spiritually and feel you can’t get up—or even more profoundly— when I have fallen and I don’t even feel like I want to rise… that is when His grace gets gritty. Grace is gritty when we are at our absolute worst—struggling with immorality, lying, lust, unfaithfulness. It is at this juncture of human experience and divine intervention that we realize that grace is not really very “pretty.” Grace is an activity in which God willingly gets down in the mud and the muck and mire of human misery, and holds us with an embrace only a loving parent of a wayward child ever really fully understands.

When you walk along an ocean shore, you are pretty safe. You can venture out in knee-deep or perhaps even chest deep water with a sense of relative security. So, in these occasions you would not likely wear a life preserver. But if you find yourself cast overboard in the middle of the vast ocean you immediately develop a keen awareness that you are lost, alone, and in grave danger. You will almost certainly experience self-blame and self- loathing for having been so stupid or irresponsible as to put yourself in this predicament where you are so close to utter destruction. There in the midst of the deep, vast ocean, you need a life preserver—or better yet—a life raft complete with provisions and a flare gun to signal any watching eye that you are here… and that you desperately need help.

Grace finds its truest expression, and its most profound understanding—not by the waders, but by the castaways. That is grace at its “grittiest.”