GRACE is a topic that few Christians like to fully investigate because in the end it is difficult to accept. Most Christians are perfectly fine accepting being saved by grace but then they step back and are more than willingly to sign on the bottom line that they would rather be exempt from living by grace. Why is that? Well…grace displaces ourselves from God’s scales  of reckoning and most of us would rather not let that happen. We would rather be burdened with the task of earning or ruining our equity in God’s eyes. Now some might say, “No, I don’t believe that. Nothing can change the way God looks at me.” However hypocritical it is then, those very people go home and act like their godliness and good works are the basis for God answering their prayers or bestowing blessings upon them. They act as though their supposed “holy” lifestyle induces God to remunerate good unto them and grant them his favor. They make their works a good show in the flesh, but ironically, even more so in the spirit. They are misled into thinking that their smug obedience now commends them to receive certain compensation from God like a good little schoolboy who did all his homework and then asks for a piece of candy in return. For those who pursue this perverted path, they despise grace and erect the idol of works to merit God’s benefaction.

Those who refute grace by leaning on their obedience love law (rules) and they love tallying their adherence and faithfulness to them just like Pharisees. But grace usurps our power to tabulate a ledger and throws all the books into the fire to be burned. Grace keeps no score; score does not even mean anything to grace as if grace could be swayed because the number of check marks beside your name. If you believe there is any corollary to God’s favor with how well you pray, how many people you preach the Bible to, how nice and loving you are to everyone, how many times you sin or refrain from sinning, if you are on enough committees at church, how often you are jealous, angry, lustful, resentful, etc (and the list can go on), then you are trying to earn God’s favor and grace has long since been chucked out the window on a back country road somewhere. Rather, grace is independent of our ability to uphold and follow commandments, grace is above the feeble efforts we make to do what is right, and grace is beyond influence by our reckless and irreverent habits of trying to bribe God into doing something for us because we claim to be faithful.

Most Christians who are comfortable with their “works-based” faith do not even realize they subscribe to such propaganda. Moreover, the alarming problem with discarding grace for a reward system is that we now become culpable for everything. And no matter how good we think we might be, no matter how holy we claim we are, we fall incredibly short of achieving our own fanciful expectations. We just cannot cut it no matter how hard we try and those who would argue against such a claim are self-righteous fools who are addicted to control and relish in their faulty sense of self-acclamation.

But oh how we like to sit in the judge’s seat and read our testimony and list of accomplishments and call the verdict as we see it. The sad outcome is that with this sort of false reasoning we have made the Christian faith into a self-help clinic for behavior modification with an incentive program. We wrongly attach improper conclusions to obedience in order to justify our pleas and expectations for God to cater to our every whim. The only thing this does is run us farther away from grace by feeding our narcissistic tendencies and impelling us to claw at our self-entitlement to God’s blessings.

We like to call the shots and send in our rewards card to cash out on our prizes when we feel it is due. Faith has become all about us and grace is merely a bygone notion we once thought about on the day we first believe and were saved. Since then, it seems we have lost sight of grace and have drowned ourselves in searching for and acquiring a life that consists of the abundances we send off for in our “God, Give Me What I Want” mail-order rebate.

Why have we become so obsessed with self-perfection at the expense of the well-being of our soul and forfeiture of the grace that God give us? Performancism has taken main stage and we have shoved everything else behind the curtain so as to place ourselves in the spotlight. We like to look at how much of the truth we know, gauge how spiritually mature we are, and define the degree to which we believe so as to make us feel that we are in control of the way God dispenses his good will toward us. We have turned Christianity into an enterprise of behavior moralism that revolves around what we can do and ability to stick with the program. Tullian Tchividjian rightly said, “The sad irony of our lives is that our desire to be in control almost always ends up controlling us.” [One-Way Love]

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating for lawlessness or that obedience is unnecessary. I am simply denying the premise that so many Christians adhere to and practice…that obedience earns them God’s favor. You see, obedience can be achieved in two ways:

1) By Law — law demands obedience and it forces everyone to follow its rules and do what is right but no one can follow them perfectly and no one really wants to be coerced into following them anyway, and thus, if the law were gone, who would still obey them? In the end, the result of law is that you get what you deserve…PERIOD!

2) By Grace — grace inspires obedience and it draws people to desire to follow and do what is right, not of necessity but on account of affection, for people will choose to obey in response to the undeserved favor they receive and they will in turn come to love obedience, not spurn it.

Real grace is so immense and the thought of it so lofty that its true form is as frightening as it is freeing. Christians are often hesitant to behold such a noble and inspiring treasure because we are so awestruck by the possibility that we are unworthy to receive what is given. But even more deterring is the fact that we cannot affect it or change it and so we would rather be under the harsh slavery of law-abiding so we can have our hand in the mix and make a difference if so choose. But it is in this offensive reality of grace where we are helpless to generate God’s favor, but we come to him and love him for who he is and yield ourselves to his will simply because we receive what we do not deserve. As Tchividjian also affirms, “I’ve never actually met anyone who has been truly gripped by God’s amazing grace in the Gospel who is then so ungrateful that they don’t care about respecting or obeying him.” [One-Way Love]

Grace can never be over-stated. By its very nature God’s grace is the greatest expression of magnificent magnanimity the world will ever see. It is unequalable! And many of us do not realize that we do not understand the unequalable goodness, kindness, and love contained in God’s grace. This ignorance has led to a blindness that continues to spread to all who are pressured into performing for Christ rather than prevailing in Christ. I whole-heartedly affirm the words of John Newton, “Although my memory’s fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.” [Amazing Grace]

“Only when grace is still ‘amazing’ to us does it retain its power in us.” [Sinclair Ferguson, Expelling Worldliness with a New Affection]

In this blog category of “Amazing Grace” I hope to be able to share some of my journey into experiencing God’s indescribable, undeserved, and unexpected favor and the freedom from the bondage of legalism that God’s people have been called to inherit and enjoy.  ~ JW

P.S. I want to share one of my favorite songs about grace: “This is Amazing Grace” by Phil Wickham.