So you’ve lived a good life, a moral life, a life of treating others as you wish you would be treated. You pay your taxes when they’re due. You let the elderly go first. You rescue fledglings fallen from the nest. Your colleagues count on you for steady work. Your dog adores you.

Does all of this not matter when it comes to final reckonings? Is God not suitably impressed with upright choices we’ve made—with gifts we’ve given to the poor, with candles lit, with self-denying sacrifice? Surely, righteous deeds must tip the scales in our favor.

Such thinking is both fully natural and painfully mistaken—not because God fails to notice, but because He has provided a better and more perfect way to bring us to His heart. The Bible is emphatic: “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:23-25). The Father has appointed a Saviour whose perfect life and sacrificial death isn’t sullied by our habits of accounting or self-congratulation. “He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with His truth” (Psa 96:13).

We’ll never earn God’s gift of grace. But in His name—and for His fame—we’ll move the world with kindness.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott

As Christ grows greater in our minds, we lose our need to be authorities over what others think and do.

The deepening awareness that we have been wrong more than we have been right—that we are only now approaching the starting point of faith—creates a gentle tolerance for those now camped where we once stopped, or mired in the stuff from which Christ freed us. We learn to smile at vehemence and vitriol, remembering how frequently we used them for bad causes or when we were still unsure.

Grace makes us gracious to the ungraceful, for we see ourselves in them. We remember that their faults are just as pardonable as ours, and no more dangerous.

The fellowship of the forgiven is as vast as the grace that makes it possible.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott

Of all the stories Jesus told, this one is our favorite.

An arrogant, entitled son demands his inheritance from his father, but wastes it in riotous living. When the money and the morals are lost, he remembers his father’s house, and begins the awkward journey home, offering to be a servant, not a son. But the father runs to meet him, sweeps him up in his arms, and completely reinstates him in the family. Scroll the closing credits on “The Prodigal Son.”

But that’s not the end of the story Jesus told, even though we prefer to stop there. An older brother, the “good son” who stayed home and worked the farm, refuses to accept his brother’s re-inclusion. He will not dance; he will not join the party. Unforgiveness runs deep in him—deeper than any furrow he has plowed.

Jesus’ story is unfinished. One brother isn’t reconciled.

If you are eager for the Father’s welcome but will not welcome other prodigals, you may not find your home within the Father’s house. The Father has one rule for all: “You must be both forgiven and forgiving.”

The grace shown you is meant for others too.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott