Gospel Practices in Hard Seasons
The term “means of grace” refers to those helps or means that God gives His people to strengthen them for their pilgrimage in this world. There is something quite precious about the fact that God knows our weakness and condescends to us in His vast mercy to provide for us a set of spiritual “crutches” to aid us on our way.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust. (Ps. 103:13–14)
Reformed churches have especially emphasized three means of grace: prayer, the Word of God, and the sacraments. Prayer is the God-given channel by which we communicate our need and dependence to God, through faith in Jesus Christ, expecting that He will provide for our “every need . . . according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19). Prayer finds its basis in the Word, both in the reading and hearing of the Scriptures, but especially in faithful preaching, as Christ communicates Himself to us through the ministry of those sent to herald the message of salvation (Rom. 10:14–17). The Word is then confirmed to our hearts in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which continually apply the promises of the Word to our hearts and assure us, as the Spirit works personally within us and corporately in the church, that God is with us. He will never leave us nor forsake us because we are His children who can never be snatched from His omnipotent hand (Heb. 13:5–6; John 10:28–29).
How the Means of Grace Help Us to Hope in Christ
God gives us the means of grace because we need them. The worship of the old covenant was a more visible and physical approach to God—comprising what the Apostle Paul calls “weak and beggarly elements” (Gal. 4:9, NKJV). The tabernacle system provided God’s people with earthly types and shadows that enabled them to dimly glimpse the heavenly realities to be fulfilled in the incarnation, sinless life, atoning death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In the new covenant, we now have Christ, the substance of all that was promised to God’s people while they were still under the tutelage of the Law (Gal. 3:24–25). Now that Christ has come and has begun His mediatorial reign as Prophet, Priest, and King at God’s right hand, we no longer need a form of worship that is so tethered to the old creation, which is passing away. Our worship lifts us up to Christ in heaven, who prepares us for the new creation we will enter when our Lord returns in glory (Col. 3:1–4). But while we wait for that great day, we do so as those who have not yet obtained these things (Phil. 3:12–16). We remain groaning creatures in a groaning world, even as we wait eagerly for the fullness of what has been promised to us: the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:18–23). Yet as we groan and wait, we have the promise that God will give us His Spirit to help us in our weakness (Rom. 8:26).
In seasons of difficulty, temptation, loss, and grief, how do you hold on to a God you cannot see?
We are weak because we are human. Even Jesus, the perfect Man, was dependent upon His Father and needed the means of grace. Jesus relied upon the Spirit in His sinless use of the means of grace, and God strengthened and sustained His Son in His work of securing our redemption. Jesus is now our sympathetic High Priest, to whom we may confidently draw near to find help in our times of need (Heb. 4:15–16). He shared our physical human weakness and dependence on God without being a partaker of the moral weakness of sin. God has promised His Spirit to help us in our weakness too (Rom. 8:26). He has given us everything we need to live for Him and His glory in this world.
The means of grace, therefore, are God’s way of providing us the help we need for running the race of faith. Not only do we need them because we are human, but we need them because we are sinners. We need them because we live in a world that still groans under the effects of Adam’s fall and because we are tempted to forget God and forsake Christ. God knows us, and His knowledge of us is a loving knowledge, a Fatherly knowledge. He knows us so well and loves us so much that He provides for us the means to remember Him in our weakness and to return to Him even when we fall repeatedly into the deepest pits of misery and sin. If you are like me, you know what it is like to be “prone to wander—prone to leave the God I love.”
In seasons of difficulty, temptation, loss, and grief, how do you hold on to a God you cannot see? By reassuring yourself, through prayer, the reading and hearing of the Word, and by the sacraments, that God is still your God, that Christ is still interceding for you in heaven, and that the Spirit is still at work in your heart. Therefore, rejoice, even in your sufferings, because through them all, your heavenly Father is producing in you a hope that cannot be put to shame (Rom. 5:3–5).
