I’ve met with and talked to quite a few different guys this week. We all share one particular thing in common, our battle with homosexuality, but it was interesting to see how differently each of our lives played out as we all took different directions in the ways we coped/dealt/lived with this thing. While I obviously took the route of recklessness… some, with just as much diligence, pursued meaningful gay relationships. Some pursued straight relationships. Some even walked the path of church and religion… and somewhere along the way the weight of their desires seemed too heavy to bear anymore and they just gave up.

But no matter how different our personalities and coping mechanisms were, or how diverse our backgrounds and upbringings were, we all ended up in the same place… in rebellion against God.

The roads we traveled differed, but our destinations were the same: condemnation, destruction and separation from God. We all ended up on the wrong side of Justice, and rightly deserving of God’s rejection. But to the shock of us all, rejection isn’t what we received. Grace is what we received. We finally really heard the gospel, responded in belief and repentance….and God accepted us. Totally and completely. Everything we didn’t deserve and could not attain– irrevocable forgiveness, full joy, eternal life–was given to us freely….just because He loved us. And not merely with a sappy, emotional, fallen-human kind of love…. but a love that drove Him to hang, suspended from nails, on a wooden cross. He knew that His death would open up a fountain of grace for us—and we have received it. Redeeming grace. Transformative grace. Saving grace. 

No matter what road you’re traveling, God’s grace is sufficient to pluck you from the destination of destruction you’re trucking toward. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or how you’ve done it or where you’ve done it or who you’ve done it with. Grace is beyond all that. It swallows all that up. The Cross of Jesus Christ absorbs your weaknesses, your mistakes, your failures, your evils. The Blood of Jesus Christ whites-out the scarlet streaks your sins have tattooed all over your soul. Grace is undeserved, unearned and unimaginably powerful… and it’s not far from you.

The great Grace of God is like an invisible ocean always at the very tips of our toes. Step into it. Let it wash you. Let Jesus wash you.