It is the happy portion of every Christian to know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Man by nature knows not this grace; his every thought is foreign to it. Sin made man a coward and a stranger from God, and his innate thoughts are that God is a hard master. He is, as the poet so aptly expressed it, "A stranger to grace and to God." Grace is not only unknown but unwanted. It is strangely sad that man should be so desperately in need of grace and y e t be a total stranger to it, while all the time the heart of God is yearning to show grace. But there are those who have "tasted that the Lord is gracious"; they have touched, as it were, the hem of His garment and found an exhaustless river of grace flowing forth. Every true Christian knows t h e "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ"; he may not know much of its soundless depths, but unless he knows that grace he is lost, in his sins, and on the road to the pit. So then, we may divide mankind into two classes: those who know that grace and are saved, and those who do not. He who knows it can joyfully sing those well-known words:
"Grace is the sweetest sound
That ever reached our ears;
When conscience charged and justice frowned,
'Twas grace removed our fears."
Thus the Spirit of God, by the Apostle, addresses these words to us: "For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich." 2 Cor. 8:99For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich. (2 Corinthians 8:9). Each child of God is embraced in "ye know." And fellow Christian, what grace it was that opened our poor blind eyes a n d hard hearts to lay hold of His grace—grace that met us where we were in our dire need. And note whose grace is here spoken of: "our Lord Jesus Christ." Him whom we have owned as our Lord—that One to whom we belong. And has it been a hardship? far be the thought. The Apostle spoke very affectionately of "Christ Jesus my Lord." The beloved Apostle was an old man in prison for his Lord's sake when he wrote those words to the Philippian saints; was his service hard? no, Paul gloried in it, he loved it.
Then take the next word of this verse—"Jesus"—and see what memories it brings to our hearts. Yes, "Jesus the name we love so well!" The name of that blessed One who came from heaven and trod the pathway on earth. How we delight to trace His footsteps in the gospels—every step showing divine perfection on earth, and yet He was truly man.
It is the "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." Yes, "God has made that same Jesus... both Lord and Christ." Christ means "anointed." He is God's anointed One. He is now seated in heaven at God's right hand, and God views us who know His grace as being in Him there. Oh, what a place of favor! All our blessings are in Christ. Yes, dear Christian, we know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, but how are we to gauge that grace? read on: "though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor."
First we must ask the question, How rich was He? Such a question plunges us into thoughts of His glory that amaze and astonish. His riches include all His glory in deity. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Can we poor finite creatures comprehend that? No. Go back before Genesis 1, go back before the world was, back as far as the mind can go; and when you get there, He "was" there, and He "was God." "All things were created by Him, and for Him." There is no single exception; all was created by Him and for Him. Go through the Word of God and you will find many verses which tell of His riches. He speaks through Isaiah t h e prophet, "I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering." Yes, He "was rich"; not as man saw Him in His pathway on earth. Here He was with the poor and, according to men's standards, He was poor. We never read of the Lord having had a piece of money. He came into the world in the stable of an inn. He was laid in one man's manger, and when He was to leave the world, He was placed in another man's tomb. Surely when Scripture speaks of His having been rich, it refers to all that He had before He became a man.
Then we see Him becoming poor. If His riches excelled all, so His poverty was greater than all. From the very highest, He went to the very lowest From the "form of God" to the "form of a servant" a n d "the likeness of men." Down, down, down He came and did not stop until He had gone to "death," and lower than that—"the death of the cross." Lower He could not go; higher He could not have been. The "cross," that death reserved for the lowest, for slaves and the meanest of criminals—such was the Roman thought of death on a cross. And what was the Jews' thought? It was formed by Scripture, "Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree."
And when we think of the shame, ignominy, and suffering of the cross, let us not forget those three awful hours of darkness, when the sun refused to shine—from 12 noon to 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It was in those three terrible hours that the blessed Lord
Jesus was made sin for us-
"What shame, what grief,
what joy we prove
That He should die for us!
Our hearts were broken by that cry-
`Eli, lama sabachthani?' "
It was the bearing of our sins in His own body on the tree that forced from His blessed lips those awful words, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Such then, dear saints of God, is the "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" in coming from the highest height to the very lowest depth; and why? "for your sakes." Does not this touch something in your heart and mine? Yes, for our sakes He came where we were; for our sakes He became a man and went into death and there was made sin—"the Just for the unjust." Our condition was so bad that such a great descent was necessary to pick us up; nothing short of such coming down would have met our case. Yes,
"Rich in glory, Thou didst stoop,
Thence is all Thy people's hope."
And was His grace only displayed in coming all the way down to where we lay in order to cleanse us from our sins? No, no, no; that would not have been "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." His grace will not stop until it has us with Him in glory—"that ye through His poverty might be rich." He came from the highest to the lowest, and He lifts us up from that low place where He found us, to the heights of heaven. There we shall be, not as beggars, not as strangers, but there with and like Himself, far above angels. We cannot comprehend the riches that He had, nor the poverty to which He came; and we cannot fully know the pit we were in, nor lay hold of the glory that shall be ours. Yes, that "ye through His poverty might be rich." Well may we add the words of the poet,
"Thou wast poor that we might be
Rich in glory, Lord, with Thee."