I take advantage of a contemporary and careless assault on the definition of grace in order to show you, from Scriptural context, that grace means precisely what the word itself tells us it means, shouting its definition from passage after passage: "The unmerited favor of God!"

The main mistake of Clyde Pilkington is substituting the definition "unworthy" for "unmerited favor of God." These are not the same.

Christ is a worthy Being, while we are unworthy beings, but this is incidental and has nothing to do with the MEANING of grace, which does not take worthiness into account AT ALL—whether spectacular worthiness or spectacular unworthiness.

In Luke 2:40, the unmerited favor of God is said to be on Christ. In his mind, Clyde substitutes "unworthy" for "unmerited favor of God," determines there is no way that Christ could be unworthy, and so deduces from this that grace can't be the unmerited favor of God.

No one is saying that Christ is not a worthy Being. It's just that the phrase "unworthy" does not belong anywhere near the definition of grace. It's misleading.

Grace (the favor of God) is simply the favor of God that is not gained by works—either spectacularly good works (Christ's) or unspeakably bad works (ours). True, if anyone would be WORTHY of God's favor, it's would be Christ, and if anyone would be UNWORTHY, it would be us. But again, "unworthy" is NOT grace's definition, which is why Clyde needs to stop substituting "unworthy" for "the unmerited favor of God."

The thing that we have in common with Christ is that neither of us merit grace. Why? BECAUSE GRACE IS NOT BASED UPON MERIT.