Prevenient Grace and Sid

Psa 139:7-17  Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?  (8)  If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.  (9)  If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,  (10)  even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.  (11)  If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”  (12)  even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.  (13)  For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  (14)  I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.  (15)  My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.  (16)  Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.  (17)  How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

The psalmist has reached a place in life where, at least to the psalmist’s understanding, the Spirit of God surrounds us all, and even before we are known by anyone else, the psalmist is sure that God knows us, and cares for us. But was the psalmist always so sure? Maybe, there was a time, when the psalmist felt like a blade of grass.

I wonder what a blade of grass feels. Not, “feels like”, that would be easy. We could go outside, kneel upon the lawn, and gently glide our hand across the top of the grass, already turning brown as winter’s cold approaches, and let each tiny blade tickle our open palm. Or we could really get serious about this and press our fingers deep between the blades until our fingertips press into the gritty earth beneath. But, that’s really not what I’m talking about. I’m really wondering what a blade of grass feels. And not just any blade of grass, I’m talking about a very particular blade of grass. One in a billion, or a trillion, but one nevertheless, just one.

This blade of grass which has captured my thoughts – let’s give it a name – if we’re going to get to know this blade of grass, we can’t just call it “blade of grass” – let’s call it Sid. That has a nice organic sound to it. Well, this particular blade of grass – um Sid – has seen his better days. You see, I’m remembering July in Batesville Mississippi, and it’s hot. Several weeks before, things were going well. Sid was full of life and the color of spring, but on this day, as I remember standing at my kitchen sink and staring out the window, at the lawn losing its color, Sid stands as one among many – dry and brittle and very far from green. So I stood there, wondering what this blade of grass – Sid – must be feeling. What do you think? Does he know that it’s July and he still has August to go. I wonder, as he looks skyward, and feels the heat of the day, scorching the life from him – does he know that it’s rain that he needs?

Or does he just feel an ache, a longing, for something, to fill him with life again. As I stood at my kitchen window, one hot summer afternoon, and pondered this deep existential question, I was interrupted by a tug at my elbow. “Daddy, will you fix me a drink?” my seven year old son asked. He didn’t notice the tears in my eyes as I handed him a glass of ice water. He turned and hurried away, anxious to continue…whatever. You see, I remembered a time, when he didn’t know how to ask for a drink. He probably didn’t know what a drink was – like a little blade of grass. He just felt this gnawing in his stomach, this ache in his tummy, and he cried. My wife would go to him, even in the dark of night, no matter when, no matter what, and take him in her loving arms, console him, and provide for him.

God, like a mother, comes to us even when all we know is that something is missing, something is wrong, something is making our tummy ache, and we cry. God takes us in arms of love and fills our emptiness.

John Wesley called this prevenient grace – the grace that goes before. This is the grace that is at work before we are even aware of it, or even aware that we need it. It is the love of God wooing us. It is the will of God drawing us.

Prevenient grace is present with us from the very beginning. It is at work in us from the moment we become a thought in the mind of God, until the moment we recognize the relationship that God offers us through Christ. The psalmist said, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” From our very beginning, God was at work.

Our journey in faith might be an erratic journey, filled with valleys and mountaintops and all of the landscape in between, but wherever we are on life’s journey, God’s grace is as constant as the love of the mother waiting in the night to hear her infant cry. The old hymn says it well, “See, on the portals <God’s> waiting and watching, watching for you and for me”

John Wesley’s eighth Article of Religion reminds us, “The condition of <humanity>… is such that <one> cannot turn and prepare <themselves>, by <their> own natural strength and works, to faith and calling upon God; we have no power to do good works… without the grace of God by Christ preventing us…” or going before us.

Prevenient grace prepares us to receive God’s justifying (or ‘saving’) grace. This prevenient grace, this prior love of God, awakens us to our need, awakens us to our inadequacy, and calls us to repentance; leads us to sorrow over our own sin, and the sins of the world; and convinces us that we cannot save ourselves. Some believe this happens as a crisis of faith accompanied with great emotion; others see it as a growing sense of one’s need for God, like the unfolding of a flower on a plant, or like the change from an infant’s hungry cry to the child asking for a drink.

Prevenient grace may first manifest itself as a pricked conscience, then as a gnawing conviction of sin. It ultimately leads, however, to the quiet confidence that faith in Christ is not founded in our feelings, or founded in our own ability to respond appropriately, but founded in God’s unfailing grace.  It leads us to affirm, along with the psalmist, that even “If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

Roman Catholic poet Francis Thompson paints prevenient grace in “The Hound of Heaven,” depicting God as One who pursues us “still with unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy.”

And while we may give up on God, God never gives up on us.