#347 – First Contact with Grace

I love Star Trek: First Contact. It’s easily the best of the Next Generation films. It’s not as good as The Wrath of Khan but I’d put First Contact up there with The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country.

In First Contact the Enterprise and her crew must keep the Borg from preventing humanity’s first warp flight, which will lead to first contact with the Vulcans and a new era for Earth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s grace lately and I think First Contact has helped me understand it a little better.

For most of my life I’ve had a pretty shallow view of grace. I knew it was God’s grace that saved me. It’s only because God graciously poured out his grace on the cross that I can be in a right relationship with him.

But I thought that the cross was the end of grace.

I thought grace was a one-time thing.

I thought that grace got me right with God and then left me to my own devices.

I was wrong, though. Grace is a lot like warp drive.

In First Contact, it’s Zefram Cochrane’s initial warp drive experiment that attracts the attention of the Vulcans and leads to first contact. Warp drive initiated humanity’s first steps into a larger universe but it also helped them continue in that larger universe.

Grace is the same way. Grace initiates us into a new reality but it also sustains us and helps us make the most out of that new reality.

I’m tired of grace being this static thing that happened 2,000 years ago and only influenced my life when I accepted Jesus into my life at 5-years-old. I want grace to be an active reality that I experience on a daily basis. I want grace to fuel the engine of my spiritual life, as I become more and more the person God intended me to be.

Unfortunately I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like. I do know, though, that I want to figure out how to boldly go where I’ve never been before with grace pushing me forward.

How do you actively experience God’s grace on a daily basis?