Greater Grace

"But, in after life, as the Christian grows in grace, although he will never forget the solemnity of his position, and will never lose that holy awe which must encompass a gracious man when he is in the presence of the God who can create or can destroy; yet his fear has all its terror taken out of it; it becomes a holy reverence, and no more an overshadowing dread."

"Grace does not make us unearthly, though it makes us unworldly." 

I love the reference to solemnity. CHS actually uses this as a point of reverence, notice the allusion to reverence, not reference. We sometimes as people allow to let the things of this world overcome us with fear, doubt, or dread, but Charles equivocates that within the awe that comes with grace. Man has a penchant for transposing things of this world into a timeline, into a beginning and an end, a departure and a destination,  Grace is not something that is tangential, only dispersed in our ambiance as a still presence. This is a total departure from what he intends grace to portend. Grace is interwoven with an awareness of Godliness, a a focused growth from the reality of man to the wholeness of God. We so often try to realize this though a linear trajectory, almost as to if we need to reach the point of forward progress pre-negotiated in our minds to be fully eligible for the grace of God. This stands in contrast to the grace that Jesus offers, in fact, the grace that he offers follows no such path that any human construct could ever deliver. The difficulty lies in the fact that we try to piece together our case for grace with random pieces of the puzzle, so much expecting that out time before our savior will be us trying to reconcile the incompleteness of the missing pieces. 

"And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified." -
Acts 20:32 

The key phrase from this is building up. So often we seek out grace in out incompleteness almost as if those missing pieces are the finishing touches on a completed work. The reality is much more that we are still formulating what should comprise the foundation, nevermind the final pieces. So our heart's entire expedition towards completion is never one that finally reaches a destination. But Paul's explanation isn't one of destination, it's one of receiving the inheritance. Spurgeon explains,

"This is how grace works; it enters the soul, penetrates the heart, saturates the conscience, abides in the memory, affects the affections, gives understanding to the understanding, and imparts real life to the heart, which is the seat of life."

The corporeality of grace demands that it be anything but linear, rather, something that cycles through the element of our being so fully that only though it can we realize the fullness of life. Grace instantaneously transforms what was once a focused directive and turns focused tunnel vision into something of a fun house mirror. Not to confuse or obstinate, but to paint a right picture of ourselves before God. 

"See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled." - Hebrews 12:15 

He's designed such a grace to provide a right estimate of ourselves. The more grace that permeates out existence, the less room remains for our impurity. He's designed it as a light to not only find out way against the world but to reconcile ourselves to the fullness of redemption.