What’s So Confusing About Grace?
Friday, June 6th, 2008They were just asked to explain what grace meant and now the room of teenagers was struggling to come up with an explanation. Maybe you could blame it on the impending heat wave or the fact that the adolescent brain effectively shuts down for the summer beginning in June, but the answers given were of the mark.
“What is grace?” seems like an easy enough question, especially for a group of young evangelical-minded Christians. One suggested grace might be “forgiveness”, while another offered the kind of incoherent rambling answer you’d expect to hear if the student had slipped into a daydream during world history class and had just been unexpectedly called upon by the instructor and was now trying to answer without really knowing the question. Most just tried to quietly blend into a wall or a couch, hoping they wouldn’t be asked to answer. After minutes of failing to produce an adequate response to a seemingly simple question, a more knowledgeable older Christian stepped in after the students naively challenged him to come up with a sufficient answer.
“Grace is getting something you don’t deserve from someone who doesn’t have to give it to you”, he responded, quieting his young critics. Of course this older Christian knew the answer to this elementary question. Grace is all over the bible - it is what makes Christianity different from all other religions, gives us eternal life, and makes our Christian life work! In fact there’s a nifty little acronym to remember what grace is: “God’s riches at Christ’s expense”.
Grace is the gospel message, God’s plan to save us from ourselves. As Paul puts it in Romans, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Grace isn’t about what we’re doing or did, rather it’s about the fact that we can’t do it and need God to do it for us. As the book of Ephesians famously says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
On this level, it is easy to explain grace. But, grace is still hard to understand. As humans, we’re programmed with pride and the feeling like we deserve certain things. Surely, if I was in God’s position, there’s no chance I’d send my son to die for a bunch of ungrateful, obnoxious creeps who are just going to spit on and mock his sacrifice anyway.
When I received a large, flat-screen television from my parents this past Christmas, I struggled with the gift. There was no denying I wanted what was in that huge cardboard box, but there was no way I could have afforded to purchase it myself. Worse, there was no way I could possibly repay my parents back with a few measly “thank you’s” and the much less-expensive gifts I would soon be embarrassed to give them. It was a humbling experience, much like God’s free gift of grace. There’s no way we can afford to purchase ourselves out of death, yet Christ comes along and pays the price for us. When we accept it, it with the knowledge that there’s no chance we’ll ever repay him.
Some refuse to accept God’s grace because it feels so humiliating to admit inadequacy. Others spend the rest of their lives feeling obligated to try to reimburse God for his free gift, a notion that makes no sense, but happens anyway. After all, if it’s free, there’s no cost, right? Maybe we’re just used to our culture where “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and there’s always a catch. It’s absolutely puzzling – along comes God and offers eternal life with no strings attached, yet most humans flat out refuse his offer! Why?
Grace is hard to handle for most; even the Christian “saved by grace” faces the seemingly constant temptation to live the Christian walk based on his or her own righteousness, not on God’s grace. In this vein, Paul rebukes the church in Galatians asking, “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” We read that spiritual growth is by God’s grace, just like salvation was.
Phillip Yancey wrote a good book called “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” In it, Yancey struggles to explain grace, instead relying on examples of what grace looks like in action. When I read, I felt completely inadequate to practice grace in my life. More often I operate like a bank’s general ledger: keeping track of the wrongs and rights I perceive people doing to me, and then writing out my own actions in payment to the corresponding person accordingly. So, in a lot of ways, I’m in the same “confused about grace” boat as the perplexed teenagers I was sitting in the room with.
Grace is a radical idea straight from God. Based on grace, we are able to walk directly into the throne room of God himself confidentially. As the writer of Hebrews, who I again surmise to be Paul, says:
Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water…
Due to Jesus’ sacrifice and his blood we are able to have direct access to God, which happens “through the veil, that is, His flesh”. As Christians, we’re baptized into Christ, and God sees us exactly as he sees Christ. We enter the throne room of God clothed in Jesus, essentially as Jesus. On one level, grace is so simple - without it we can’t have salvation, sanctification, or glorification. All three of these are the result of letting God work in our lives, not our own works. Why does God want to take us to eventual perfection? Why does he save us from death and give us a lasting purpose? The answer is he loves us, but why does he love us so much? It is hard to fathom. One thing is for sure: without grace, we’d never even get close to God’s throne, with it we can approach it with confidence.
