Fifty Years of Grace

I recently celebrated my fiftieth birthday. I have had four other birthdays that ended in zero, but this one feels more significant—half a century. So much time has passed, and so much has changed, yet in all of that time and change, some things have remained the same.

For fifty years, I have had wonderful parents who raised me in the ways of the Lord, and I have four amazing siblings I would not trade for the world. We all have families of our own now. I have a wonderful wife and two fantastic adult children. My in-laws are a constant support and encouragement, and everyone walks with the Lord.

Being older and seeing how easily things could have gone wrong, even in Christian families, I can only thank the Lord for his grace. Pitfalls are all around. I could have been born to a family that played fast and loose with the scriptures and tossed significant parts of it away to align more with trends of our secular culture. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, we could have imbibed too much Gothard-type fundamentalism and become hyper-critical Pharisees or been crushed under its manufactured oppressive rules and abandoned the faith altogether.

I am not saying none of those temptations ever found their way into our lives, but I am saying that when they did, they soon lost steam in favor of biblical truth. That is the rock that kept us stable.

The pitfalls have not changed. If anything, they have multiplied for young families today. There are temptations on every side to abandon critical truths of the faith. Unfortunately, even many Christian schools imbibe the cultural mood regarding permissiveness and favor non-Christian ideas. Other groups have swung the pendulum so far in the other direction they stifle themselves with extra-biblical rules and regulations. I cannot help but think of when our kids were young, and many Christians were pushing the standards of I Kissed Dating Goodbye upon them.

The answer is the same as it has always been—the Word of God must be our daily source of truth. We must realign ourselves to it regularly, for if we do not, it only takes a few months to find out how accurate the old lyric is. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” This leads me to a final thought.

Fifty years with a heart prone to wander is plenty of time to make mistakes. Failures and sins line my history: some big, some small. As I age as a Christian, I realize that the picture I thought I understood when I was younger was incomplete. Growing up, I heard testimony after testimony that sounded something like this. “I was involved with this and that sin, but that was before I became a Christian. Now those sins are far behind me.”

As wonderful as those testimonies are, if that is all you hear, they often communicate a harmful ideal that your struggle with sin is finished once you become a believer. At least, that is how I may have misinterpreted them. I always assumed you could talk about the sins of your life as long as you can say, “but that was before I became a Christian.” After that, it seemed not many people spoke up.

I was saved at a young age, which means most of my sinning happened as a believer. There are two dangers in assessing this reality. First, some might say my struggle with sin proves I was never truly converted, and others might say, “Of course, you sinned as a Christian. Don’t give it any thought; no one is perfect.” Neither is helpful. The first leaves us without consolation as we grasp for an elusive radical change, and the second leaves us unconcerned with our sinfulness. Once again, there is only one solution.

The word of God shows us the truth: sin is serious, and we must contest it in our lives on every front, but that sin has also received its just penalty in the cross of Christ. We are to fight against it as men and women set free from the curse of the law, but still in agreement with, and in pursuit of, its standards for godliness. The pitfalls I have fallen into throughout my history as a Christian are no longer memorials to regret; they are markers of God’s grace. He has never let me go. We are to forget what is behind us and press forward with our eyes on Jesus. The way we do that is through his word.

Aging is not so bad. I have experiences with life that only time can give. I can look back over decisions, both good and bad, and see the grace of God. It provides a steady confidence in looking to the future. Not because I expect things to go smoothly from here on out. Life has taught me that hardships are still ahead, and the battle with sin still rages. Instead, I understand that God and his word can be trusted. It is the rock upon which we are to build our life, and when the winds blow and the rains fall, we will not be shaken. Fifty years of my life attest to the faithfulness of God and the truth of his word. None of it was deserved; it is fifty years of grace.

-D. Eaton