How to Receive More Grace When You’re Running Low

When your strength or patience runs low, the usual move is to push harder. You grit your teeth, skip the rest, and promise yourself tomorrow will be better. Where does that leave you? Frustrated, tired, and worn out.

Scripture points to a different source. Grace is God's provision for everything you need, and it doesn't run out. So where are you expecting your next bit of strength to come from?

Humility means trusting God, not your own strength

Humility is not calling yourself worthless. It means believing what God has said: He gave you the gift of righteousness, He loves you, and He lives in you. Pride is the opposite. Pride walks in your own strength, your own understanding, and whatever you feel is true at the moment.

James 4:6 (NKJV) says, “But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: ‘God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble.’” More grace is available. The question is whether you will receive it by trusting God or keep leaning on yourself.

You may think you are believing and receiving while mental resistance is working against you. Culture resists. Doubt and unbelief are all around, and some churches teach unbelief. A lot is competing for your heart. Humility clears that out so you can simply believe God’s Word.

Pride shows up when you decide to do it your way. The resistance you feel is not God pulling His love back. Your pride is creating that resistance. When you make yourself your own source, doors of opportunity, favor, and blessing begin to shut. Are you worn out because you are trying to carry everything yourself?

Knowing God multiplies grace and peace

Grace and peace don’t just add up. They multiply, and the multiplier is knowing God. Peter wrote, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Peter 1:2, NKJV).

Knowing God is a living relationship, not a pile of facts you memorize. Romans 12:2 describes a mind that is renewed instead of shaped by the world. As your mind is renewed to His true nature, His goodness, His promises, His gifts, and His love, grace and peace multiply.

What does that look like in practice? Spend time in the Word. Bring Him your questions. Tell Him what is troubling you, and be honest about it. He is your Father, and you can talk to Him the way a child talks to a loving parent. Answers come through the Word, through prayer, and sometimes all at once when the light comes on.

Maybe you hang back because you are too aware of your own failings. Staying away from God for that reason is pride, and God resists the proud. Walk and talk with the Father instead, and submit to the gift of righteousness.

As you pursue knowing Him, peace, joy, and love for people keep growing. The knowledge of God is not finished when it begins. Grace and peace keep multiplying as you come to know Him more.

Cheerful giving opens the door to all grace

Giving is one of the places grace flows. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, who had been generous to believers in other parts of the world, and he told them what God does for a cheerful giver:

“So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.” (2 Corinthians 9:7-8, NKJV)

God makes all grace abound, so you have what you need and plenty left over for good works. God loves a cheerful giver for a reason. God is a cheerful giver. He gave His only Son (John 3:16), and Jesus came so people could have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

When you choose to be a cheerful giver, the fear of giving and the fear of not having enough lose their grip, because you have taken on God’s own nature. Giving is not only about money. When you pass on what God has given you, you receive more love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness to pass on. Then you give those, and you receive more again. The cycle keeps going because the supply comes from Him.

Grace produces a life of service, not strain

Grace makes you productive, and it does not work you into the ground. Paul described his own labor this way: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, NKJV).

Paul was not working to earn God’s favor. He was working in the gospel because grace was working in him. So much came out of him because so much was coming into him through his fellowship with God.

A believer can love God sincerely, pursue Him, and still live on a thin understanding of grace. When grace becomes real to you, life moves into a different dimension. It is not a grind of proving yourself. It is the outflow of what God has put into you, and it does not come with heartache and suffering.

Everything Adam’s sin brought in, including suffering, sickness, pain, and heartache, has been overcome by grace. It sounds almost too good to be true. That is what the gospel is: good news.

God lifts up the humble, and He sets the timing

Humility leads somewhere. Jesus said, “For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11, NKJV). Jesus did not say the humble will do well. He said they will be exalted. Exalted is more than barely getting by. At the least it means a good, abundant life full of love, peace, and joy.

So don’t judge another person’s walk with God by what you see from the outside. In many cases, God is exalting people in public for what has gone on in private. You don’t know how many years of cheerful giving, sowing, and coming to know God are behind them, or how many challenges they have gone through by His grace. Stop criticizing them, and look at your own walk with God.

James adds, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up” (James 4:10, NKJV). Humbling yourself does not mean making yourself a worthless worm. It means submitting to the grace of God through Jesus, which meets every need you have abundantly.

Peter says the same thing: “Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time” (1 Peter 5:6, NKJV). God wants you exalted, and the timing is His. When He lifts you up, the evidence of His blessing shows in your life.

Related reading: How God’s Word Works in You and Knowing God’s Goodness Makes Faith Stronger.

When you feel worn down, ask where you are getting your strength. If the answer is your own effort, that is the pride God resists. Grace does not run out, and the timing of your lifting is His.

Go deeper: watch Free Indeed, Episode 157 on YouTube.