Grace lies at the heart of discipleship. It is God’s grace – his kindness, love and favour – freely given to us (Luke 1:30). Grace is undeserved and nowhere is this more explicit than in God’s free gift of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our sins (Ephesians 2:4-5).
In his very popular book, What’s so Amazing about Grace, Philip Yancey writes,
“…grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us.”
So grace is a gift, not a wage. And this is really important because our human inclination is to try and earn our salvation. Yancey continues,
“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more—no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”
For so many Christians, even for those of us who have been practicing our faith for many decades, we continue to try and earn God’s love. Often, we don’t really believe that we are truly forgiven and loved by God, and so remain in a kind of religious posture of winning God over in the false belief that He doesn’t really love us. It’s astounding how often we can hear the story of the good Samaritan, or meditate on verses like John 3:16 “For god so loved the world…” and know the doctrine of grace, but not really believe it in our hearts.
Yancey says, in his opinion, that the two major causes of emotional problems amongst evangelical Christians are the failure to understand and receive God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness for themselves, and secondly, the failure to live graciously towards others. Grace has become an espoused, rather than actual, belief.
It's actually very normal to believe in grace and to not believe it at the same because faith always exists in a context of doubt. We spend the whole of our lives wrestling with this tension. To give you an indication of how hard it is to truly believe in God's grace in your heart, Tim Keller spent the whole of his ministry in New York focused on conveying the power and reality of God's grace to people who were living out their various self-salvation projects.
The good news is that even when we are struggling to believe in grace, when God gives it to us, it has a way of working in our lives to transform us – so we can actually observe it at work. Keller writes in Center Church,
“True grace always results in changed lives of holiness and justice.”
So, if you are gradually changing and becoming more Christlike, then that’s proof that God’s grace has been given to you and is having an ongoing transformative effect.
Sometimes, we can fail to see how we are growing in godliness because we overly focus on our sins. This is why we need each other. Grace plays an important role in the community as well as in the individual. I often ask the people who know me best if they have observed me growing in my faith. I also like to volunteer my observations and encouragements to others. But you can only do this in a context of love and trust.
This culture of giving and receiving grace under the umbrella of God’s grace is what motivates us to keep going in our faith for the long haul (Acts 11:23).
Peter Carolane
Senior Minister
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