The Law of Grace

So summarizing what I have been learning about grace…

Grace is…

Unnatural. It runs against human nature to be gracious. Grace is sacrificial one way love; we are naturally self-centered and conditionally love. That is why grace is always so surprising, refreshing, and why it stands out. It is not natural but supernatural.

Counterfeited. Grace is something everyone wants and everyone hopes to find, and because it is so valuable it is often counterfeited.

Intimate. Grace can’t be given from a distant and indifferent heart. It is too costly for the giver, and the effects too personal for the receiver. Grace is intimate and personal.

Transformative. Grace frees, restores, revives, and heals. It does not leave you the same.

The Holy Spirit not only applies Christ’s righteousness to us (justification), but also gives us the ability to overcome and let go of sin and to grow in godliness (sanctification). Therefore, Christians are expected to live differently, to live in such a way as shows that they have been supernaturally changed.

While we are new creatures with a new heart, it is in a “now and not yet” kind of way. The old heart is not gone. Original sin is not gone, cured, or uprooted. Its terminal effects are stopped. It is forgiven. It no longer defines who we are. But we can’t ever be rid of sin this side of the grave. Therefore we should not be surprised when Christians sin, even when they (or we) sin big.

What should make Christians stand out is not so much the absence of sin (which is impossible) but the presence and practice of grace in response to sin; both to our own sin and the sin we see or experience in others.

Jesus placed a high value on the presence of grace as a reliable sign of true godliness. Jesus was recognized to be from God because He was full of grace and truth (John 1:14). Biblical righteousness includes being gracious and merciful. Micah 6:8 (NIV) says, He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

In a real sense, it was the lack of grace that concerned Jesus about the Pharisees. Matthew 9:11-13 (NIV), When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” This seems also be the point of Jesus’ parables of the Unmerciful Servant (Matthew 18:21-35), The Lost Sons (Luke 15:11-31), and The Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14).

More particularly, the parables of The Lost Sons and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector also teach that no matter how moral and upstanding our life may look, if we are not also gracious and merciful we are in very dangerous territory. If you are not loving mercy as you act justly, you are not walking humbly before God.

Being gracious does not mean never pointing out when a person sins or is wrong or has offended you (though I think 1 Peter 4:8 should seriously cut down how often we do). It means that we are not going to let that sin or offense or wrong keep us from relating to him or her in love. Our love for one another is not to ebb and flow based on behavior. God’s love for us is a gracious love, therefore our love for one another should also be a gracious love.

Take a look at how Jesus treated Peter. In Matthew 16:16-20 Peter acknowledges that Jesus is the Messiah and is praised by Jesus for recognizing it and tells him that this was a special blessing from His Father, and that God was going to build His Church on him. Awesome! But in the next verse as Jesus starts to explain that He needed to suffer, die and rise again (Matthew 16:21), Peter stands up and says Never, Lord! To which Jesus responds, Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men (Matthew 16:23). Chapter 17 begins with Jesus taking three of His disciples (including Peter who just messed up royally) up a mountain with Him where they witness the Transfiguration. Peter’s previous failure did not result in Jesus keeping him at arm’s length.

When Jesus told the disciples in Matthew 26:31 that they were all going to fall away when He was taken by the Pharisees that night, Peter says I never will. Jesus calls him on it and tells him to the contrary he would not only deny Him once, or twice, but three times. And even with that advanced warning, he does just that!

We tend to look down on people who don’t have it all together. We tend to avoid or push off people who have hurt or offended us. We get frustrated when people don’t listen.

What would we do with Peter in the church today? Yeah he gets some things right, but he gets a lot of things wrong. One minute you love what he has to say, and the next you feel like Satan himself is tempting you with what comes out of his mouth. And on top of all that failing, sinking, falling, and waffling, when you need him most, he denies he even knows you and runs away. I don’t think he would fair too well. Who would want to put up with that?

Jesus did. In fact, after the resurrection, according to Mark’s account of the resurrection what does the angel say to Mary 1 and Mary 2?

But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ” (Mark 16:7, NIV).

Jesus was willing to call Peter on the carpet—sometimes painfully so. But Jesus’ love for Peter, His friendship with Him, His commitment to him, and His promise to build His Church on him was never effected by Peter’s blunders or his blabbering mouth. Peter was not handpicked by Jesus because he was a star student of Torah or because he a paragon of virtue or even because he showed particular promise. Jesus picked Peter, loved Peter, and discipled Peter because His Father said, “I have given you Peter. Love him.”

My mentor Charlie Jones used to say “I have been learning that what you hear doesn’t really do you a whole lot of good. Because if it did you would be a whole lot better than you are! Is that right? That’s right!” Peter is a pretty good example of that…and so am I come to think of it. And if you are honest, so are you.

Law (God’s or manmade) can only do two things: 1. tell you what is expected, and 2. Show you that you fail at it. That is it. God’s Law tells us what is good and right and how we ought to relate to God and one another. That is good, and that alone makes it worth knowing. But God’s Law then shows us that we are all guilty of breaking it; not only once or twice, or here and there, but everywhere! The one thing Law cannot do is produce the righteousness in us it witnesses to.

Romans 8:3 (NIV), For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh,

Hebrews 7:18-19 (NIV), The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.

Yet we often act as if the best way to get people to change is to convince them that they are wrong, teach them what is right, and tell them to work to make it right. Duty is a poor motivator. When we are operating primarily from a motivation of duty we will do what is necessary to look good. However, we will go the extra mile for someone or something we desire or love.

The irony is that when you practice grace sin loses its allure as well as its poison. When we know that we are accepted and loved not because of what we say and do but just because God chooses to love us, we no longer need to worry about being worthy of God’s love. Therefore grace frees us to love obeying the law. Duty only leads to legalism. Grace leads to devotion.

I believe the Scripture teaches that there is a law of grace. The law of grace is that sin decreases when grace increases, and sin increases when grace decreases.

Could it be that the problem of sin in the church is not because people are not striving hard enough but because they are striving out of duty instead of grace? Could it be that the reason our Churches are struggling so hard at dealing with sin in the lives of their parishioners is not because they are not talking enough about how the Christian should live, or because their people are not understanding it, but because there is not enough people (and pastors) practicing grace in response to it?

Methinks it may be so.