John Jackson, superintendent of a Methodist mission in London’s east end, tells how not long ago he was walking along a street in Whitechapel when he saw in a shop window a notice which caught his eye and stirred his imagination. The notice read: AMAZING GRACE! SUPPLIES EXHAUSTED! COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!

The reference was, of course, to the popular record. Never before, to my recollection, has a great hymn been at the top of the Hit Parade.

Thank God, supplies of His grace have not run out!

Amazing grace! Grace is always amazing. If it does not amaze us, we do not really know what it is.

1. Saving grace is amazing.

“Grace … came by Jesus Christ,” John tells us (1:17). Everything about Jesus was gracious. His personality was gracious! “The Lord is gracious” (1 Peter 2:3). His teaching was gracious: “They wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth” (Luke 4:22). His whole redemptive ministry was gracious: “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.” (2 Cor. 8:9).

2. Sustaining grace is amazing.

Recently I purchased a ball-point pen in a Christian bookshop. I was in urgent need of the pen, and although the assistant at the counter warned me it wasn’t a good one and offered indeed to let me have it for nothing, I insisted on paying for it, as no other was available. The assistant was right. The pen was a dud. At least a dozen times I tried to coax it to write, but without success. Then I looked at a text printed in gold lettering on the pen. The text was: “My grace is sufficient for thee”!

3. Saintly grace is amazing.

It is a reflection on the quality of our common and commonplace Christian living that when a really Christian act is performed, it fairly takes our breath away. We are amazed at it. George Bernard Shaw used cynically to say that there has been in human history only one Christian, and that He got Himself crucified. It is scarcely an exaggeration. Most of us who bear His name are so monstrously unlike Him. Ghandi, a non-Christian, shames us. There was a Christlike amazingness about him. “It was his life that proved to me,” wrote K. Matthew Simon, “more than anything else that Christianity is a practicable religion even in the twentieth century.”

Many years ago, in old London, a young Christian girl married a man who was an avowed atheist. She dearly loved him and hoped to win him to a belief in God, but her hopes were in vain. Later, when children began to come to them, he made a bargain with his wife. She was to be allowed a free hand in the religious training of any girls that might be born but he was to have complete control of any boys, and neither was to interfere with the other in religious matters.

The first child born to them was a boy, and the mother shuddered as she heard the father pour his blasphemous teachings into the childish ears. Later a little girl came to bless the home, and quite early in life the mother began to take the little one to Sunday School and church. The wee girlie learned the sweet hymns of childhood, such as “Jesus Loves Me” and often sang them to her brother. The parents’ agreement did not bind the children, and the brother proved an apt pupil as his little sister told him the stories she learned in Sunday School of the Saviour who loves the children, and seeds of faith and love were sown in the little lad’s heart.

One day, however, when the boy was about seven years of age, he was taken suddenly ill. The parents were stricken with grief when the physician said that there was but little hope of the boy’s recovery. The father who except in the matter of religion, was a loving husband and a kind father, was as a man distracted, for his boy was as the apple of his eye.

He called the best physicians, and himself stayed by the boy’s bedside day and night; but nothing could save his child. The little lad grew weaker, and one evening touched his Daddy’s hand and said:

“Daddy, the doctor said I was going to die, didn’t he?”

“Oh, my boy, don’t talk like that! You must get better, Daddy can’t spare you yet,” sobbed the father.

“But, Daddy, I know I can’t get better. I am going to die, and I want to ask you a question.”

“What is it, my boy?”

“Daddy, whose faith shall I die in, yours or mother’s?”

The grief stricken man turned his head from the child unable, or unwilling to answer. His religion was being tested to the full. Would it stand the test? Now was his chance to deny the existence of any hereafter. Surely there was nothing to be afraid of!

“Daddy, I’m dying. Whose faith shall I die in, yours or mother’s?”

He who had boasted that there was no God, no Heaven and no Hell, dare not deceive his dying child, so he shouted with fierce earnestness:

“For God’s sake, my boy, die in your mother’s faith. Don’t die in mine.”

Unless your religion is good enough to commend to your children, whether for this present life or the life beyond, it is not worth having.

—T. DeCourcy Rayner