Amazing grace - The Text Messages

God is faithful, but this isn’t a story about His faithfulness. You see faithfulness involves a promise but God did NOT promise me as a believer in Jesus Christ that my days would be pain or trouble free; in fact, because I believe in Him, I can expect my days to be more challenging because His enemy is now mine as well. This story is a testimony instead to the mercy and grace of God and involves the events which unfolded one Saturday morning.

Two o’clock in the morning can’t come soon enough when you’re nearing the end of another night shift and in the wee hours of the morning my thoughts had already turned to the afternoon of fishing that I had planned with my wife for later that day. I should tell you that I also drive an eighteen wheeler for a living and was making final preparations to drive the short 144 miles home and begin the weekend. After hooking up my two trailers and completing my pretrip safety inspection I departed for what I assumed would be another routine trip into the south Texas countryside.

Thirty five miles south of my location someone else was getting ready to go home as well – too much to drink, not enough rest, more problems than power in his life. He headed out from wherever he had been and entered a 4 lane toll road going the wrong way. It was ten miles travelling northbound in southbound lanes on a road limited to 85mph before he met anyone else on that road. He could have hit a carload of kids, a family headed on a vacation trip, a bus or any number of big trucks but he didn’t, at least not until he met me.

At night, headlights breaking from a right curve all look like they belong to vehicles on your side of the road and eventually it becomes clear that they are actually where they belong, so when I saw the headlights of this mans pickup truck rounding the curve ahead of me I thought nothing of it for a few seconds and then I realized he was in my lane. Closing the distance rapidly between us, the driver left me only two choices: veer to the right and meet him driver side to driver side or attempt to escape by heading to the left lane and hoping the man would realize that he was on the wrong side of the road and stay where he was until he passed me…but he didn’t. He followed me across the center stripe and collided with the right front side of my truck, knocking my steering axle under the cab and folding the wheels underneath. The collision ruptured my fuel tank, dislodged my single rear axle and turned the single axle on my first trailer side ways ending with me jackknifed half on and half off off the fast lane of the road and the opposing driver coming to rest in the ditch, trapped in his pickup. Within a minute, two more vehicles passed through the debris field and kept going and then, climbing out of my driver side window, I got out of my truck.

Upon arriving, first responders attention was on the driver in the pick up and using hydraulics they were able to pry the door open and get the man out. The man stepped out of his truck and walked with firefighters to a pumper truck 30 yards away and after a few minutes left the scene talking with EMS first responders.

I share this story with you not for the dramatics but to give God glory for His mercy and grace, you see it’s not every day that people walk away from a head-on wreck. God was with that man as he drove the wrong way, protecting him and others from a terrible outcome. Had we met, driver side to driver side there is no doubt that he would have been killed. Had we met on that side his still occupied pickup would have remained in the road and the two vehicles passing through the debris field would have struck his vehicle leading to what would have become a chain reaction wreck.

Finally, a number of people from my company have reviewed the video commenting that my ability to correct my jackknifing truck and trailers kept them from laying over. They say that it is apparent that I was steering to avoid the layover which I no doubt was doing. But what they forget and what I didn’t know was that my steering wheel linkage was no longer connected after impact and that my front axle was dislodged….I didn’t do anything!!! It was God’s hands that kept my equipment up right!!! His hands that shielded the wrong way driver at impact and His hands that kept me from suffering even the slightest ache, pain, bump or bruise in this wreck!!!

God IS merciful! He has a plan for your life, for the drunk driver’s life and for my life! God is also persistent, sometimes going to great lengths to get our attention and to turn us in the right direction. Have you believed in His Son whom God sent to redeem your soul and give you a forever place with Him in Heaven? My hope is that your “come to Jesus” moment isn’t this drastic and severe but that you hear the words which declare that “God so loved the world,” including you, “that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever (you) believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” If you have not yet believed, having heard the word, how far will God have to go to get your attention?

I have since returned to my night run into Austin, returning to work the next business day and praising Him who is merciful; acknowledging out loud what I KNOW in my heart to be true: it has been by His grace that I have come thus far and in that same grace that I will continue to go.

I heard something the other day that I hadn’t considered before concerning our tears before the Lord. King David wrote in (Psalm 56:8) that the Lord collects our collective tears in a bottle; that is, that every tear of every child of God who has ever or will ever live, every one shed in grief, sorrow, loneliness and despair is being collected for the day when He makes (Isaiah 61:3) “beauty for ashes” and “joy for mourning” and causes the days of “our light affliction” (2 Corinthians 4:17) to be over shadowed by an “exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”

But the same Bible which declares that also depicts the Lord Jesus as weeping.

Was He in despair? Yes and no. Was He grieved ? Again, yes and no. Was He afraid? Once more, yes and no, and to that last one some might be tempted to defend the Lord’s mightiness and say that our God is NEVER afraid. I say to you that in the garden, it was the human side of Jesus (the Son of Man) which cried out to His Father in (Luke 22:42), “If it is Your will, take this cup from Me; nevertheless not My will but Your’s, be done.” It was as the Son of God (the divine side) that Jesus earlier had said, ““Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour.” (John 12:27)

So often, when we see the Lord crying, whether at the grave site of Lazarus or upon His humbly grand entrance into Jerusalem a week before His crucifixion, it is not for Himself. His are tears of empathy, compassion and yes despair – despair because those He came for were missing the point. He said then in (Luke 19:41-44):

“If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.“

God’s grace was costing Jesus everything and the ones He came for were missing it – are you?

I have a terrible tendency to hurt my wife, not directly, not with hands or even words but by my actions I sometimes wound her deeply. A week ago as the message on grace was concluding and a time of reflection was called for in advance of the Lord’s supper I saw her – she was wiping away tears as once again she both reflected on the costly grace of God towards her and His call for us to be gracious to one another. One more time she was being obedient to the Lord in showing grace to me.

We’ve all sung about grace – most of us are familiar with the hymn Amazing Grace and some of us have sung songs about grace like the one we sang today with lyrics like “grace – comes – like – a – wave – crash – ing – o – ver – me.” We sing as recipients of grace with joy and exuberant gratitude but what does the song of the giver sound like? How do you know when grace has gone out of you? How do you know when you have shown grace? If I may, you know when grace has gone out because often time grace hurts the giver.

We are all called to be reconcilers (see 2 Corinthians 5:18) in a general and evangelistic sense and also in our most personal relationships (see Ephesians 4:26, Malachi 2:14-15). Ask the man (like Hosea) or the woman who has ever been betrayed in a relationship and then reconciled and forgiven his or her mate if the grace of that forgiveness hurt them and you will understand that often grace hurts the giver.

In order to reconcile the world to Himself, Almighty God dispatched His only begotten Son on a mission of reconciliation which would cost both Father and Son everything. Without question, the humiliation, suffering and torture of the Lord Jesus hurt Him but it also hurt the Father deeply nevertheless, without that costly grace we would all still be doomed to eternal suffering in hell; without that costly grace, relationships would fail and families would fall apart – nothing good results when grace is absent.

On our behalf, Almighty God weighed the cost of His grace and sent His Son anyways.

I wonder, can we sing of the Lord’s amazing grace as genuinely having only received it or does the song become more meaningful when being gracious has cost us too?

I think grace means more when its recipients give it away…

Tag: Amazing grace

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