This is a guest post from David El Sabawy - a student from Mississauga, Canada.  In today's post, David meditates on the role of God's grace and how it's His grace that "fills the void" when we so often fall short.  If you too are interested in guest posting on my blog, please visit my Guest Post guidelines for more info.

A good friend and I once had a conversation about sin and temptation, and he said something to me that I will always find incredibly profound. He said, “If you deem yourself unworthy of God’s grace, then you are judging the just Judge.” That phrase hasn't left my mind ever since.

It's true.  God sent His son to die on the cross so that we may all be able to live in paradise forever, so who am I to say that I am not worthy of this love?  Yes, you do need to be humble and not act like you are more privileged, but at the same time, we need to understand that forgiveness and grace are GIFTS, and not RIGHTS.  I feel many times people blame God because, in a terrible and twisted way, we feel entitled to His grace and love.

But we aren’t.  We are gifted so greatly with His unconditional love.

“I do not set aside God’s grace, because if righteousness could come through the law, then Christ died for nothing!” (Galatians 2: 21)

That's the truth.  No excuses. Christ died to save us, so never for even one second can we discount the grace of our Father. This stuck with me because we need to take into account that all this has already happened for our benefit. Jesus already died on the cross, and nothing will change this.

The sacrifice was made, but what now?

Well, there’s another part of this verse that helps put things into even more perspective. St. Paul makes the argument that if we could be saved by some means through this world, then there would be no point of Jesus’s death. The statement itself is blaspheming the idea that such a thing is even possible. The simple explanation: Christ did not die for nothing, Christ died for everything.

“We know that since Christ has been raised from the dead, He is never going to die again; death no longer has mastery over Him” (Romans 6:9)

Christ died to save every single one of us. He conquered what we can never defeat: death.  

How beautiful is it to know that our Master has such a level of grace that He sacrificed a part of Himself for us?

Fr. Anthony recently gave a sermon in Niagara about “Resetting for Christ”, and in this talk, he spoke about the various challenges that God Himself had to overcome just to be able to live like a human being.  He gave an example of what life must have been like for the "boy Jesus."  For example, maybe when Jesus was in 5th grade, another child would behave rudely to Him or even flick Him in the ear in class (as 5th grade boys are known to do).  What would Jesus do?  Jesus restrained Himself from responding and resisted the urge to let the boy know who He really is.

It may not seem like a big deal, but none of us have ever been in a position of such power. This is a small example of how difficult it can be to adjust from being eternal, to being human.  It is unfathomable how much grace this takes - to have that great a level of humility.

But thanks be to God for that grace because what I have learned is that when it comes to our relationship with God, it's His grace that makes up for what we cannot overcome. Fr. Anthony said it this way: “The goal isn't to never get dirty, but to always clean yourself up and show up to your wedding clean.”

God’s grace is so vast and wide that He knows we will fall, but His grace works for us in incredible ways, to guide us to cleanliness again.

Moral of the story?  Be thankful for God’s grace and never think you’re not worthy of it because we were made in His image and that image is perfection.

We were made to strive to the level of perfection that Jesus showed while on earth, but thankfully God is prepared in case we don't ever reach it.  God’s grace fills the void.