I will live by the light of the glory you shine on me
I will live by the grace that you offer so freely
The beauty and outrage of Grace has been screaming through my spirit recently. We're pretty comfortable with it, right? Since we were born we've been repeating back the verse that says, "By grace you are saved, through faith…" We get it. Right? Grace. Getting what you don't deserve. Hmmm. Well that feels like a nice definition for situations like when you're still kinda hungry after you finish eating and then someone offers to pay for desert. You're super-thankful but that is ultimately just a nice gesture. Grace is so much more than that. Grace isn't just getting what you don't deserve, it is an upheaval of every natural law…like if gravity just got the day off. Grace slaps religion in the face and sends the law of retribution home without pay. We boast in the Cross! Why? Because we are righteous in His righteousness! We are holy by His holiness! Nothing could change it, stop it, cancel it out, add to it or take from it. Glory grace! Revel in it!
"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." 2 Cor. 5:21 (ESV)
I love how Robert Capon says it:
“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace-of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the gospel-after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection your bootstraps-suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.” -Robert Capon, Between Noon and Three (as quoted in Brennan Manning’s, The Ragamuffin Gospel)
Grace should knock us off of our feet! Let it! There's nothing you could do to reach heaven by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. All it takes is Grace. We receive Grace by Faith. And Faith is not of ourselves! Faith itself is as much a gift of God as is grace or salvation itself! Romans 12:3 tells that God Himself gives us each a measure of Faith. Galatians 2:20 tells us that "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." Hah! How great is that? Our Faith is not our own! So we can't muster it up ourselves! REST. Rest in Jesus' righteousness.
When grace is so good, why do we turn to religion? I don't know. Grace is pretty unnatural. It is definitely supernatural. But if you feel bad, stop. That's guilt. Jesus came to free us from guilt! If you've forgotten grace, you're in good company. The Isrealites rejected the rule and relationship with God in favor for the Law (which is good and perfect, but leads to death). Jesus came to change everything. But then in Galations 2 we see that Peter, who walked daily with Jesus and had already been empowered by the Spirit, turned away from His blatantly God-given freedom (given in Acts 10) and had to be called out by Paul. He left the feedom of the Grace of God in favor of the perceived safety of law-living with the Judaizers! Paul knew that outrageous grace was worth protecting. Then the Church turned back to the time-honored tradition of legalism. God used Martin Luthor to change that (PTL!) and reformed theology was rediscovered. When I look around me though, I see a lot of legalistic self-help "pull yourself out of the pit" kind of beliefs, maybe not orthodoxically, but definitely orthopraxically. ERR ON THE SIDE OF GRACE!
I've been drinking deeply and intentionally of Grace for a few months now. And it has messed me up. Want a drink? Be careful! It's really strong. And anything you try to add to it to water it down or make it easier to swallow will just mess it up. Drink it straight!
Here's my challenge to you: Give God the chance to teach you His grace. Holy Spirit is our teacher, afterall (John 14:26). And just for a little perspective, one verse about God's grace, when it's truth was unlocked to Martin Luthor, TOTALLY flipped the human religious system on its head and changed the history of the Church forever.
Thirsty yet?
