Grace 1

Breaking Down the Dam Wall

God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. I struggled with the concept of God resisting people for a while. If God loves everybody, and wants the best for them, then why is He resisting some? Then I realised that it is because He loves people that He resists them in their pride…

2 Corinthians 9:8 NKJV
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.

God is able to make all grace to abound toward us. And He wants to! God, by His grace, wants to do everything for us. He wants to exalt us and lift us up. He wants us to always have more than enough in all things. He wants us to have an abundance for every good work. And He wants us to be at rest and peace through it all.

Imagine with me a dam filled with water. There is a dry riverbed leading to a village below the dam. The village is in need of water. They are in drought. The riverbed is dry. If it were full, then they would always have all sufficiency in all things and have an abundance for every good work. Their crops and cattle would flourish. They would start prospering so much that they would become a blessing to the villages around them.

All of this potential is in the water. But it is being held back by the dam wall. The dam wall is stopping the water from flowing to the village. It is stopping the blessing of abundance. And so, life is a struggle for the village. For them to start experiencing abundant life, the dam wall needs to be broken down. It needs to crack and give way.

Let’s say that the water earnestly wanted to get to the people. It wanted to help them. It wanted to bless them. It wanted to pour out its abundance to them. In order to do that, the water needs to push against the dam wall as strongly as possible so that it can come tumbling down. It needs to resist the dam wall…

If the wall succumbs, then nothing will stop that water from filling up the riverbed, bringing refreshing and abundance to the village. It will abound towards them and they will always have all sufficiency in all things so that they may have an abundance for every good work.

Did you follow my parable? The water is God and His grace. The dam wall is our pride. Our pride is the only thing that stops the abundance of God’s grace from abounding towards us. God resists our pride in His attempt to get His abundant blessings to us. He resists because He loves. Because He wants to do it all for us.

If our pride comes tumbling down – if the dam wall cracks and succumbs – then nothing can stop the flow of God’s grace that is about to overtake us. We will be caught up in the river of His grace and goodness. And we will always have all sufficiency in all things so that we may have an abundance for every good work.

God desires this for us more than anything. And that is why He resists the proud. He wants to break down the dam wall. He wants the man’s pride to crack, so that he can simply receive and enjoy abundant life. And that is why I say that it is because God loves people that He resists them in their pride.

If you read the Gospels, then you will notice that Jesus treated different people differently. To the sinners and publicans, He showed complete mercy and grace. But to the Pharisees and Sadducees (the religious, self-righteous people), He was harsh and abrasive. What He was doing was resisting the proud and giving grace to the humble. And He is doing the same today…

Did Jesus love the sinners and publicans more than the religious crowd? Absolutely not! But the religious crowd needed to crack. They were trying too hard. They were labouring, toiling, struggling and striving. And so, He resisted them because He loved them…

Grace and Peace

Peter

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