Grace changes what punishment cannot.
It is the GOODNESS of God that changes us.
Many people believe that what truly transforms a person is discipline, harshness and punishment. A patience that eventually reaches its limit and demands reform. And while this may create a temporary shift in behaviour, it is not the way of God, and it never reaches the depths of the soul.
The way of God is far more powerful.
When we give God every right to judge us, every reason to turn away from us, every justification to abandon us, yet we turn around and find Him still present, still steady, still extending mercy, still offering unearned grace, still loving with a patience that knows no end. This does something within us that punishment CANNOT touch.
We do not change because fear pressures us.
We do not change because guilt crushes us. We do not change because duty forces us. We change because we encounter a love that should not exist, yet DOES. We recognise that after all our sins and all our failures, God spared the rod and gave us grace.
And that revelation begins to soften the hardest places within us.
The heart melts in the presence of such undeserved kindness.
The soul awakens when it realises it has been pursued with a love that refuses to let go.
Punishment produces the first kind of change: the passing moment when a person says, “I NEED to change.” But grace produces the second and deeper kind: the confession that rises from a transformed heart which says, “I WANT to change.”
It is only the GOODNESS OF GOD that has the power to reach the innermost being and make a person new.