Why is grace so hard to accept? (2 Kings 4-6; Matt 5)

Naaman was really unwell, he had a form of leprosy, an awful skin disease. In his house he had a servant girl from Israel. She had been taken captive, but amazingly God worked in her life so that she loved her enemy (something Jesus commands in Matthew 5). She sought good for the man who was responsible for her capture. She knew that only God was powerful enough to help someone like Naaman.

Naaman agreed to go, for he was desperate, but not desperate enough! When Elisha told him to wash in the river, he was outraged! He wanted something special, and he was willing to pay. Just wash in a river – he could have done that back home! But it wasn’t the river that would cure him, but taking God at His Word. This is what people still find hard to do, to trust God’s Word, especially in matters regarding to salvation. People want to do something to earn God’s grace. It is offensive to be told that your only hope is to trust in a man nailed to a cross 2000 years ago. We want to do something! And perhaps we don’t want to admit that we are so bad that there is no other solution than for God himself to die for us.

There’s something else objectionable about grace, if we contribute something, then we’re like a taxpayer, but if it’s all of grace, then there’s nothing God can’t ask us to do! Well amazingly, when Naaman takes God at his word, not only his skin is cleansed, but his heart as well. He becomes a worshipper of the one true God, he still wants to pay, but out of gratitude rather than to earn it. Elisha tells him he can’t pay, and so he leaves totally amazed by God’s outrageous grace. And it all started with the action of a servant girl loving her enemy.

Have you accepted God’s outrageous grace or are you still trying to earn God’s favour? There’s another servant in the story, and he can’t accept Naaman receiving grace, and so he rides after him and makes up a story to get some money off him. It doesn’t end well for him.

We need to accept God’s amazing grace on His terms, and allow his grace to change us from the inside so that we become like the servant girl – even loving our enemies. When we have received God’s grace, that is the kind of change that happens.