In March 1972, my family moved from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Merriam, Kansas. I had just turned 1 year old. My parents had had a rocky start in their marriage. For my mother, a new Christian, and my father, still running from God, our move to Kansas City was both a new start and a last chance. Three weeks from the day we moved in, we received a knock on the door.

Neighbors Mike and Cindy Couch had walked across the street!

Almost three decades ago, I had not understood God’s grace the way I recognize its power on my life now. The pursuing, transforming, enduring, yet mysterious and hovering presence of this unmerited favor of God is both capturing and captivating. In addition to the Word of God being the primary channel to a foundational understanding of God’s grace and its mysterious workings, my familiarity with literary works has brought a level of erudite awareness about the workings of grace.

My wife, Debbie, gave her life to Christ on the second Sunday of November in 1988. She had just graduated with a degree in communications, was working an exciting new television job in Seattle, and was preparing to marry her college boyfriend. For a 22-year-old, the pieces of life were falling into place quite nicely. Yet something was still missing.

God’s grace, and only this grace, can offer salvation to humanity. “So God created mankind in his own image…male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Humankind disobeyed and corrupted their original relationship with God. In our fallen state, we can do nothing by ourselves to recover this image and our original relationship with our Creator. No effort we make can restore the image of God in us. Only grace can restore us to a new relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Everything begins and ends with grace.

Is “Prevenient Grace” Biblical?

The task of establishing the idea of “prevenient grace” from a New Testament perspective may be challenging because the term itself does not appear in the New Testament or in the whole Bible for that matter. The term is theological and presents a Wesleyan understanding of God’s grace that goes before, enabling (but not forcing) sinners to respond to faith. In other words, while Christians generally believe in God’s initiative of grace, Wesley opposes the idea that prevenient grace irresistibly brings a person to faith in Christ.

Interwoven throughout the fabric of the Old Testament is the life-giving and hope-filled confession of faith: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 145:8, ESV). From narratives (Exodus 34:6-7; Numbers 14:18) to prophets (Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2), from psalms (Psalm 103:8 145:8-9) to sermons (Nehemiah 9:17, 31), this testimony to God’s grace undergirds the faith of the Old Testament. The Lord’s freely-given, non-coerced favor was no mere afterthought in the testimony of our biblical ancestors.