Let's Go Greek (it's a big deal...for me)

Well in the extra long church service today, I started thinking about grace. Usually when we define it we come up with some cutesy utsy thing, but do you know how importatn this attirbute is, and how central it is to our Spiritual life and yet we cannot define it without an impudent rhyme. So, trying to find a deeper understnading of this, I first looked at words like grace and thier connotations in our society:

Gracious- polite, kind
Graceful-beauty, tenderness
Your Grace- A title implying power and royality
Gracing us with your prescence- just being there is a really big deal

Putting those ideas together, I came up with my own definitions: Grace is a superior gift given to us by a loving, caring, ruler. This gift is a great honor and an uncomprehendable sacfrice. It is given because, the King of Kings is tender to our cries and is passionate about just spending time with us.

Now, let's go Greek for the real definition of grace. First off, everytime that Grace is used in the New Testament, there is only one Greek word used- word 5485.

An act, of which, The divine influence upon the heart and its reflection in the life (including gratitude). A gift, joy, favour, liberality, pleasure, thankfulness. From 5463:

[side note: so far this is begging to sound a lot like my pastor's rhyme than I thought it would. What was it again: god showering his riches on us for no reason, or something like that]

a verb to be cheerful, calmly happy, well-off, full of joy, rejoicing

Wow, so, the grace that we value so much is really a gift to us from God because he wants us to be happy. That changes things a bit.