Saving grace, restraining grace and common grace. What is the difference?

Grace has many meanings, but in a Christian context it is distinguished from mercy.

The grace of God is the love of God to those who do not deserve it Rom 11:6.

The mercy of God is the love of God to those who are in a miserable condition Ps 136:23.

Wages are what we deserve, what we have earned by our work. Works are contrasted with grace that we do not deserve, what we have not earned Rom 11:6.

God’s grace manifests itself in different ways to different people.

Saving Grace

“For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.”

Ephesians 2:8.

The Holy Spirit imparts saving grace in His effectual calling of sinners out of darkness into God’s marvellous light 1Pe 2:9. This is because of Christ’s redemptive work – “out of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace” Jn 1:16.

Restraining Grace

Restraining grace is different. Saving grace is experienced only by the godly, who thereby becomes saints of God. However, restraining grace is experienced to a greater or lesser extent by everyone within the orbit of Christianity. Restraining grace is a general effect of the Christian Gospel upon sinners. It restrains them from exhibiting the native wickedness of which they are capable. The UK is losing restraining grace, which explains the increasing corruption and violence in the land, which I discuss here.  Media commentators ask each other about the cause and solution to this growing lawlessness in the land, but they miss the mark. God’s restraining grace is being judicially withdrawn, which is intimately related to the loss of the Christian Gospel and its fruits. Some people think that the restoration of cultural Christianity is needed; so far so good but cultural Christianity needs real Christianity behind it.

Common Grace

Common grace is different from saving grace and restraining grace.  It is not confined to where the Gospel is. It arises from the fact that God is good and everything He does is good.  Jesus teaches us that “God makes His Sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” Mat 5:45. James tells us: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” Jam 1:17.

Common grace is manifested in all the good things in this life.  When secularists preach the natural goodness of man, they are actually speaking about the goodness of God working through mankind.

When atheists complain that the bad things in life “prove” that there is no God, they are blaming God for the devil’s work.

Grievance politics

We live in an era of grievance politics when many people want to portray themselves as victims.  Such people are liable to focus on the things that are going wrong in the world and to blame God for it, or to use it to justify their lack of belief in God. When they have obliterated God from their thoughts they need to find someone else to blame, such as the right wing, or the left wing, colonialists or imperialists, or whatever. 

Secularism teaches the false notion that all the good things in life come from man himself “and not from some supernatural source”. This proof by assertion may satisfy its devotees and its promoters, but it will not help them when they will have to give account for their unthankfulness to God for all the good things which they enjoy.

The Bible joins “unthankful, unholy” together 2Tim 3:2.

The loss of common grace

Those who deny God’s common grace will eventually discover its effect if and when God withdraws it.

Journalists sometimes speak of “a living hell” in war-torn cities.  War veterans who battled through Passchendaele described it as a living hell.  Almost all war veterans speak similarly, if they speak at all, because the experience of war is so bad that many will not speak of it. There is plenty of evidence and experience to describe life where common grace is minimal and is being withdrawn.

The contradictions in human experience can puzzle even the godly until they find the explanation from God Himself – Ps 73:16-20 and Ecclesiastes 2:26.

My previous blogpost described the process in losing God’s restraining grace. There is a process; it is not arbitrary. Isaiah 58 documents the religious decline in Israel, followed by the moral decline in Isaiah 59.

God’s judgements come with plenty of warning Jer 44:4-5, but they are often ignored.

The greatest warning comes from Jesus Himself.

“If you do not believe that I am the Messiah, you shall die in your sins.”

Jesus Christ in John 8:24.

You will be on your own, to give your own account to God Rom 14:12. “Prepare to meet thy God” Amo 4:12.

Sinners will discover the benefits of restraining grace and common grace too late, when they arrive in a lost eternity in hell – too late they will realise God’s forbearance with them for the whole of their lives in this world.  It is only after a lifetime of demonstrable proof that they are incorrigible sinners that God says: “Enough is enough” Lk 14:24.

They will sadly learn too late what the loss of God’s restraining grace really means, when they are left to their own resources.  It is so bad that God does not call it life, but death.  It will be worse than “the living hell” that war correspondents write about.

It does not have to be this way.  God is good and “God so loved the world that He gave only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” Jn 3:16.

Will you make use of this in Time, or will you continue to grumble and act the victim?

May God bless you to make the correct choice.

Links:

6 Jan 2026: if Britain is bad, what about other countries? Foreign nationals in the UK are three times as likely [at 19:34 hrs] to be arrested for sex offences. They make up 9% of the population but 26% of sexual offence arrests. One might expect foreign nationals to be more careful to be law-abiding, so why is this not so? This is analysed as cultural differences; rather, this is code for lack of Christianity. Jacob Rees-Mogg gave some more statistics [at 20:08 hrs] and discusses the subject further at 20:32 hrs.