Written By Shauna Jones // EEW Magazine Online

**When the wounds are fresh and the betrayal cuts deep, mercy can feel impossible, but it’s what grace requires.** *Credit:* Delmaine Donson/Getty

At a Glance

Grace is not a reward for good behavior; it’s an unearned gift from God that none of us deserve (Ephesians 2:8–9).
Many Christians fall into the trap of “gatekeeping” grace, deciding who is worthy of compassion, forgiveness, or inclusion.
Scripture reminds us that only God can judge the heart (Matthew 13:24–30), and our job is to extend mercy, not withhold it.

Grace is a word we hear a lot in Christian circles, but sometimes it can feel more like a theory than a lived experience. It’s easy to forget that grace, at its core, is a gift we receive, never something we earn or can give out on our own terms.

Sometimes, though, we fall into the habit of deciding who deserves kindness, understanding, or forgiveness. We might not mean to, but pain has a way of making us cautious with our compassion. It can tempt us to keep a mental tally of who’s “in” and who’s “out.”

But the truth is, that’s not our job to do.

Take Kendra’s story. When she discovered her husband was unfaithful, her world fell apart. The support she expected from her church community faded quickly. The women she’d prayed with for years grew silent. Instead of finding comfort, she found herself isolated and quietly blamed for things that weren’t her fault.

What stung even more was seeing her church come together for someone else, a man who had battled addiction and made plenty of mistakes in public. People surrounded him with love and grace, just when he needed it most.

Kendra couldn’t help but wonder: why wasn’t that same grace available for her?

That confusion slowly turned into bitterness. She started to judge who was “worthy” of grace in her own heart, drawing lines she never meant to. If someone messed up in a certain way, she figured, maybe they needed consequences more than comfort. Maybe they needed a lesson, not a lifeline.

It took time and a lot of honesty for Kendra to see what was happening. She realized she’d started to treat grace like something she could guard, as if it belonged to her at all.

The Gentle Reminder

If you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone. It’s easy to slip into protecting our hearts by rationing our empathy. But the gospel offers a different path.

Ephesians 2:8–9 (NIV) says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Grace isn’t a reward for the well-behaved. It is a gift for the undeserving. And if we’re honest, none of us qualify. Not one. When we start keeping score of who “deserves” grace, we miss the heart of what Jesus did. He never made it about who checked the right boxes. He saw people, in all their messiness, and loved them anyway.

Jesus consistently broke cultural norms to extend grace to the "wrong" people: a woman caught in adultery (John 8); a thieving tax collector (Luke 19); a violent persecutor of Christians who later became the apostle Paul (Acts 9).

If grace were based on merit, these stories wouldn’t exist. And neither would ours.

“Grace isn’t a reward for the well-behaved. It is a gift for the undeserving.”

The nature of grace is this: it offends the religious and rescues the broken. It reaches into the pit and says, “You still belong to God.”

It says, “You’re not too far gone.”

And it says that to everyone.

Not just to people we like or understand.

How Do We Live This Out?

If you ever catch yourself struggling to offer grace, it might help to pause and ponder:

1. Remember your own need for grace. Reflect on your past, your flaws, your secret struggles. Romans 3:23 reminds us, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Before you judge someone else’s fall, remember the many times God caught you.

2. Trust God to sort things out. In Matthew 13:24–30, Jesus shares a parable where wheat and weeds grow side by side. When workers offer to pull the weeds early, the master says no, because doing so might uproot the good with the bad. The message? We don’t always know the whole story or who’s who, and that’s okay. God sees hearts more clearly than we ever could. Our role is to love without bias and trust Him to handle the rest.

3. Choose compassion over comparison. Luke 6:36 calls us to be merciful, just as God is merciful. That means our job isn’t to measure others against ourselves, but to extend the same mercy we so desperately need.

4. Offer grace first. God did that for us. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). If Jesus could love you in your mess, you can love others in theirs. If Jesus could meet us at our lowest, by His Spirit, we can do the same for others.

Grace isn’t ours to ration or restrict. We don’t get to decide who’s too broken, too complicated, or too different for God’s love. That’s not our burden to bear. If anything, grace reminds us that we’re all on level ground, and all in need of the same mercy.

So next time you're tempted to hold back forgiveness or empathy, maybe pause and ask: What would it look like if I let grace flow a little more freely, both for them and for me?

Also ask yourself: If God dealt with me the way I’m dealing with them, where would I be?

Then, by the power of the Holy Spirit, choose grace. After all, we’re all learning, and we’re all in need of grace, every single day.

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