Mister Preacher: The Trouble with Grace

I’ve seen love, and I’ve seen its black, bloody demise. And when you’ve seen it die, watched it putrefy and grown nauseated from its stench, powerless to run away, you’re apt to start doubting it was all that great to begin with. Sometimes the people we trust the most do something so selfish it leaves us slack-jawed and shattered. 

Even if you’ve made it this far without any major disappointments in the love department, you are certainly aware that love is imperfect, and that too can eat away at your faith in it. 

I suspect this is a large part in why we have trouble with God's grace.

Grace is all-encompassing forgiveness, based nothing on what we do, but on Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. God longed for connection with his children, and made a way to hold us in his arms again, completely clean and accepted. Don’t take my word for it: 

Romans 8:1 says, “So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.” (NLT) and Ephesians 2:9 says that salvation is “not by works, so that no one can boast.” (NIV) 

Those are pretty clear statements about the nature of what it means to be saved, and yet we choose to zero in on the verses about God’s standards. When we become New Creations in Christ, by grace alone, our hearts are changed within us. We desire to do God's will more and more. But it doesn't add to our salvation one bit. But we seem to want to make God a monster, always ready to strike his children down. The more dreadful we make God, the holier we feel about our self-righteousness. We’ve clearly adopted a very unhealthy no pain no gain attitude about Christianity that puts our 'good works' at its center.

But, again, I can see why. The love’s too much.

No other experience in the world begins with victory as does the Gospel. That throws us for a loop. We want there to be a catch. We believe that there has to be, because everything in our personal experiences has had catches. Nothing has been free. We can’t accept that we are completely forgiven, so we feel this nebulous guilt and shame. 

We feel like we must do something to atone. 

One thing we do is make arbitrary rules to hold up as markers of true faith:

True Christians don’t dance, 

 smoke, 

  cuss,

   or watch television. 

    True Christians vote a certain way. 

     True Christians read a certain Bible. 

  
Then we have this tangible thing to feel pride in—something we can brandish as a badge of honor that arrogantly says, “I did this for you, God!”

But I get it. 

All the love in the world? Complete forgiveness of sin? Nothing on my part but acceptance? Surely there’s something I must do to earn my keep.

The problem with God's grace is that it’s so big that we can’t wrap our minds around it.We're scared of it. Afraid that it's going to create a bunch of people who take advantage of it.

That's just not true. Once we're Christians, God’s standards do a good job of reminding us what it means to live a loving (or if you prefer, moral) life. But they don't give us any power to do them. I believe that it is His grace—that amazing act of love on the Cross, on our behalf—and His Spirit within us that births desire to reach for those standards. 

It’s not stern sermons, or the end of the moral whip that encourages us to be more like Jesus. It’s seeing His love for us and saying, “That’s who I want to be like.” It’s knowing that no matter how unloving we may sometimes act, or how often we get it wrong, we will never lose God's love and acceptance. God is working in us to make us more like Him. But if we never get to that ideal place, God doesn’t love us any less. 

So, it's okay that it's more than we can imagine--so big you can't wrap your head around it. Fall into it. Dive into God's incomprehensible grace and let it cover you instead.

Free Beer CC BY-SA 3.0 Tom Morris