In the New Testament, grace is nearly always translated from the Greek charis. That word includes the idea of a gift freely given. But it also carries this beautiful concept: “the divine influence upon the heart, and its reflection in the life” (Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible).
This divine influence, which Christ Jesus so perfectly manifested, makes God’s love tangible to us. Mary Baker Eddy called the grace of God “the effect of God understood” (Christian Science versus Pantheism, p. 10). Grace softens the heart and humbles us. It makes us more patient. It tempers our thoughts and actions and erases judgment and resentment. And grace causes us to forgive as God forgives—not by condoning or dismissing sin, but by seeing instead the absolute, spiritual purity and innocence of God’s child, God’s likeness.
Mrs. Eddy spoke of grace as impartial, as a miracle, and as “reviving and healing” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 257). She attributed her discovery of Christian Science to grace, quoting Paul when she wrote that it was, “the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of His power” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 108). And she told a student of the need to “feel the Love that never faileth,—that perfect sense of divine power that makes healing no longer power but grace” (Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, p. 167).
