"For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men." (Titus 2:11)
God's grace is like this gift that descended after Christ did what He did. Like, now it's in the air and it's something we breathe and live and walk in without even knowing it. It "hath appeared". It's not that His grace wasn't extant prior to Christ's sacrifice, just that now it's the law of the land. It's yours and it isn't a matter of earning it. Because something this freeing, something that would lift you out of the human mindset that has only the seventy-to-eighty odd year lifespan in its sights, would need to come from another plane.
"For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly." (Psalm 84:11)
Grace to grace
There are days when I bring my A-game to my routine. Where everything I do by rote is done with an effortless perfection and ease and I also feel pretty good. Then there are dayside between that and this: Days when I feel my life is this rut that has worn into a frozen earth surrounded by a tundra of hopelessness and misery. Call it bipolarity or depression (that's what a rut is--a deep depression) or what-have-you, it's the opposite of what I feel like on my A-game days. But the funny thing is how God is always the same when I come back to Him, I should say, when He draws me back by His Holy Spirit. To where one of the lessons that's brought back to my memory is that of His grace. Because it's His grace in which I walk whatever game (and again, I'm loathe to use "sports" metaphors) I bring. This notion is outside free will and determinism and, really, any thing inside ourselves. Stick your hand out in front of you and feel it. Because it's there.
"Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need." (Philippians 4:11-12, emphasis mine)
I came across a Japanese word the other day: kafusoku. It's translated as "excess or deficiency". While I may be missing some finer points regarding its usage and true meaning, I feel it relates to the aforementioned phenomena around which God's grace freely floats and is also available. See, if you need His grace, it's here. It's there. God has abundantly supplied all our needs in the person of Jesus and grace is like the grease that enables life's machinery to flow smoothly and without interruption. Paul sums it up perfectly when He says above "I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content."