Psalm 67:1-2 “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.”

There is a whole world view contained in that sentence. Asking God to be gracious to us is more than a request for God to be kind to us, to do something nice for us. If you ever listen to radio personality Dave Ramsey greet his callers, when they ask him “how are you?” his stock answer is “better than I deserve.” Better than I deserve. That’s God being gracious.

A Christian doesn’t approach God and say, “Just give me what I’ve got coming to me.” That would be insane. What I’ve got coming to me is really, really hot, and really, really uncomfortable, and lasts forever and ever. I have offended God with my life, and with my attitudes, not the least of which is the idea that somehow, I deserve better than I’ve been getting. Asking God to be gracious is a way of saying, “I get it. I haven’t been banking all kinds of favors that you owe me, and now I am calling some of them in. It’s a blessing that you haven’t decided to squish me yet, because every day I am giving you more reasons to.”

But there is a more important part of this world view behind our prayer for God to be gracious. It is our complete confidence that he is! We don’t approach him in utter terror. We don’t come to him as a last resort because we are just that desperate. This is the God whose every dealing with us is always, only love.

He doesn’t just send us a Savior. He comes here himself to rescue us. He doesn’t just put up a stiff fight to deliver us from our sins, and dig deep into his pockets to finance the operation. He dies in our place, he lays down his life as the payment that sets us free from all our sins deserved.

Maybe you heard of an evangelical movie series around the theme, “God is not dead.” A college student clashes with his atheist professor about the existence of God. It’s true that he is not dead, but at the cross he was dead when Jesus breathed his last, dead until Easter morning, all because God is gracious, all because God is so intent on loving me and saving me that there is no price too high for him to pay. In Christianity, everything begins with grace, like this prayer, which understands from the very first words just where we stand with God.

There is a very specific application of God’s grace the psalmist is seeking when he asks God to be gracious to us: “that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.” Some food companies claim a “secret ingredient” makes their products taste so good. Colonel Sanders had his secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Coca Cola has carefully guarded the recipe for their soft drinks for over a hundred years. McDonald’s had the special sauce on their Big Macs. You may remember the movie Fried Green Tomatoes which coined the phrase “The secret’s in the sauce” to describe a very disturbing barbecue in the story.

Here we are, blessed with special powers to cope with life now and the promise of an exceptional life to come, because we have this “secret ingredient:” the gracious God who loves and saves us. Can we keep this secret to ourselves? We aren’t in a competition with the rest of humanity. Letting them in on the secret takes nothing away from us. How can we let them be lost?

So we pray for missions and mission work. We pray for God’s grace and blessing so that his ways–his loving, saving way of dealing with us– can be known everywhere, among all nations. We pray for God’s grace because this task is bigger than us. There are billions of people to reach, and we seem so few. We get distracted by all the other things we think are important. But is anything more important than the eternal fate of souls Jesus purchased with his own blood? Pray for God’s grace to reach all the nations.