A Grace Filled Home

 One day, a fishing man noticed that the fisherman behind him threw the big fish he had caught back into the water while keeping the small ones. This continued until the first man couldn’t hold his curiosity any longer. “I don’t understand,” he asked the other fisherman. “Why do you keep throwing the big fish back and keeping only the small ones?” “It’s simple,” the other man answered. “My frying pan is too small to cook the big ones.” A lot of us are a little like that fisherman… Our understanding of God’s grace is too limited, so our growth is stunted.

 Physical stunting in early life, particularly in the first 1000 days from conception until the age of two, profoundly affects lifelong growth and has adverse functional consequences on the child. Some of those consequences include poor cognition and educational performance, low adult wages, lost productivity, and, when accompanied by excessive weight gain later in childhood, an increased risk of nutrition-related chronic diseases in adult life.

 Similarly, God has designed us to grow and develop as believers by utilizing an unrestricted flow of spiritual nutrition. Much of that spiritual development happens through grace! Just as God’s grace has a justifying and sanctifying effect in our lives, through which we learn to seek to advance God’s kingdom agenda, children and marriages flourish in an environment of grace. If we fail to allow grace to do its work, we will end up with underdeveloped relationships with others and, most importantly, with our Heavenly Father.