Scripture
Readings
A family was talking to their pastor after worship
and their little girl piped up and asked, “Pastor, just who is this amazing
Grace that we sang about today?”
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| A gracious home above Vantage, WA September, 2014 |
And the whole concept that grace should always, and
only, be amazing should tell us something about ourselves that we don’t like to
admit. The awful truth is that we don’t understand grace, and it is very hard
for us to believe in it, or to accept it.
For instance, in English, and in a lot of other
languages, we use the concept of grace for the purpose of thanks; and this is a
good thing. Grace is a word we use to designate a prayer of thanks. We say
grace at a meal (if we remember to, or have someone to remind us) because God
has done something for us by providing for us, and so it is only right to give
him thanks. God deserves it.
We thank people for what they have done. We thank
people because they deserve thanks.
In an odd turn-around of this, if we have been taught
to be really “nice” people, we have also been taught to not accept thanks
graciously, even though we have been carefully taught to say “you’re welcome”.
When someone thanks us, or even praises us, our mind races around to find some
way to make an excuse for what we are being thanked for. We try to explain it
away, or justify exactly why we don’t deserve to be thanked or praised.
In Spanish, when you do something for someone, they
say “thank you”. They say “gracias” or “grace”. Then the polite thing for you
to say is “de nada” which means “it is nothing”; as if you haven’t done
anything worth mentioning. This shows the gallantry and generosity of the
Spanish culture. It also shows the confusion that human nature feels about real
grace.
Even though grace is amazing, it can be embarrassing.
But you might not think that.
We talk so much about grace, as Christians, and we
say how wonderful it is to receive the grace of God. I’m not sure we really
believe this. How can we say that we love grace when God gives it to us on a
divine scale, and yet we get embarrassed by it on a human scale, when one of
our fellow human beings offers to help us? Because, helping someone, expecting
nothing in return, is exactly the same thing as giving them grace. Why is it
embarrassing when people help us, but not when God helps us?
When I was twelve, we moved to a new house; and the
yard was all dirt and star thistles and it was my job to hoe up all those
thistles. Here I was slaving away and not very happy about it, when this
gnarled up, stooped over, little old man, with arthritic hands, named Jose came
over from next door. Jose saw me out there hoeing all by myself and he came
over to help.
I still remember his hands. I saw them as he started
to hoe beside me. I had never seen such twisted hands.
All I could do was say to him, “No sir, no sir; I can
do it. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I can do it.” And, finally, he let me do it
myself, and he went back home. I was confused about grace.
We are confused about grace. It’s no wonder that,
when we finally do understand it, we find it to be amazing; not just in our
talk or our singing, but in fact.
Grace is amazing because it is beautiful. The
original New Testament word for grace is the Greek word “charis” and the basic
root meaning of charis is beauty, or loveliness. The original Old Testament
words for grace are “chen” and “chesed”, and the basic root meaning of both
these words is the concept of beauty and loveliness; although “chen” has come
to mean favor, and “chesed” has come to be interpreted as loving kindness, or
steadfast love, or unfailing love.
“Chesed” is the grace word used in the psalm: “Have
mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love.” The origin of these
words for unfailing love was beauty.
Even our English word “grace”, itself, has that same
root meaning. When we say that a woman moves with grace we mean that she moves
with great beauty and loveliness.
It is only by understanding the grace of God, in
terms of an amazing beauty and loveliness, that we are able to understand the
meaning of grace at all. Grace is a gift because it is an action (which God
takes on our behalf) that reveals his infinite beauty and loveliness to a
degree that completely amazes us.
When we experience grace, it has nothing to do with
us. It has everything to do with the beauty and loveliness of God. It has
nothing to do with our worthiness, and everything to do with the worthiness of
God. When we experience the worthiness of God, our own worthiness is swallowed
up by his, and it disappears in his. And our being swallowed up and
disappearing into the worthiness of God is no injustice to us. We lose nothing
by it. We are only enriched by it. This is grace. It’s beautiful.
Surely even an achievement is a kind of gift. If you
write a good poem, your pleasure is not in your achievement but in the vision
at the center of your poem. If you have the skill in mechanics to build an
engine, surely your pleasure in your skill is swallowed up when you put that
engine in a boat, or a car, or a truck, or a plane, and you drive it, or you
fly it, and you feel the power and the smoothness of that engine at work.
Your skill is swallowed up in the pleasure of the
gift. The better the gift, the more thankful you feel. The best gifts direct
you beyond yourself, no matter how much your participation has been a part of
it. You want to enjoy the gift far more than you want to claim credit for it.
There is a way of living and understanding the
meaning of our life that is called “grace alone”. It is a way of living your
life, and understanding your life, from the point of view of everything being a
gift; seeing the goodness of all the gifts, and being able to be properly
amazed by the greatest gifts.
It is all about beautiful gifts. The meaning of our
life, our relationships with others and the commitments we share, our
relationship with God and the promises that bind us to him, are all about
grace, and grace alone. This means that the most important thing about our life
is not our skill, not our achievement, not our maturity, not our ability, not
our self worth, not our savvy or wisdom but the grace of God. It is about our
experience of all these things as gifts from God.
This is not to say that skill, achievement, maturity,
ability, savvy or wisdom, or even our own worth are not important. They are
important.
We, ourselves are of infinite worth to God. We are
worth a cross to God. But what we have, (and what we are) are not the way we
come to God, except through thanks. They are not the way we come to others.
They are not even the way we come to ourselves, except through thanks.
We come to God. We come to others. We even come to
our selves, through the experience of life as a gift that is full of the gifts
of God.
What people are able to do with their hands, and
their minds, and with their backs and shoulders and legs are amazing. I try to
never underestimate what anybody accomplishes.
I served a church in southern Idaho Snake River .
They had no water on their place for the home, the farm, and the livestock. The
grandfather had to take a wagon load of empty water barrels by mule team, a
day’s journey to the river. It took them another day to get back, and this gave
them water for one day. Then the process had to be repeated.
A minister visited a farm, and it was a beautiful
farm: the fields, the home, the machinery, everything. The minister said, “What
a beautiful farm God has given you.” The farmer replied, “You should have seen
it when God had it to himself.”
There is great beauty in achievement and worth, but
there is an even greater beauty in the gifts that we haven’t earned and cannot
earn. The truth is you can only work with what God has given you, because you
have not brought yourself into this world. You have not given birth to
yourself.
Life in the kingdom of God
The Bible is full of pictures of grace.
We have read Psalm fifty-one. The great Old Testament
King David wrote this psalm. David was God’s key person in his time and place.
David is so keyed to God’s plan that God was born, in Jesus, as the Son of
David. David was the eighth son in a huge family, and he was fated to be that
family’s spare boy. He was fated to stay with the sheep all his life.
In the human way of things, David was not needed. But
the Lord did a divine thing. The Lord worked by grace. The Lord called him from
the flocks to be the future king; the replacement for a king who had failed.
David did not really want to be king, and he never
tried to be king, but the Lord, through many hardships, brought him into the
kingship. God called David a man after his own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), and all of
this seems like the highest level of success.
But then David lusted after the wife of one of his
most faithful officers. David committed adultery with this woman Bathsheba, and
arranged the death of the faithful husband. David was accused and exposed openly.
He broke down and saw himself as he was: a sinner in need of grace, a sinner
unworthy of any grace at all. (1 Samuel 11-12)
But David prayed for grace. This psalm is his prayer.
And his prayer was answered.
“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your
unfailing love.” (Psalm 51:1) The phrase “unfailing love” here translates one
of those Hebrew words for grace, and for beauty, and loveliness. David asked
for God to take action, on his behalf, in a way that he could never deserve,
and never repay.
Justice is a beautiful thing, but justice would have
killed David. So David asked for something more beautiful than justice. He
asked for an amazing grace; a scandalous grace (it’s true) but an amazing
grace. David admitted that he deserved nothing but the judgment and punishment
of God: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your
sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you
judge.” (51:4)
David prayed “have mercy” when he had no mercy on the
woman’s husband. David prayed “according to your unfailing love,” after he had
turned his back on his duty of love and grace to others.
David prayed “according to your great compassion,”
when he had had no compassion at all. He knew that he was asking for something
that he did not deserve.
The story of David’s life (as we read it in Samuel)
tells us that the Lord answered his prayer for grace by giving him grace.
The grace of God in David’s life gave David what he
knew he needed above all else: “Create in me a pure heart O God, and renew a
steadfast spirit within me.” (51:10)
The grace of God would make David’s heart pure again
so that he could do what he had failed to do. David would try to see his life
as full of the gifts of God and live accordingly. He would try to treat others
with reverence, with the reverence due to them as gifts of God in their own
right.
The truth is that David would never succeed at this
very well. Many times he would just be awful. But it was his aim to live by
grace. It was his desire to live a life that was changed by grace whether he
succeeded or not. David sometimes lived a life that showed a gracious heart. He
lived in a way that drew the love and sacrifice of others because he, himself,
often overwhelmed them with his own sacrifice.
After his failure, David knew he did not deserve any
real peace of mind ever again, but he prayed for it anyway: “Restore to me the
joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.” (51:12)
This is the beauty and loveliness of God that Paul
writes about when he says: “God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ
even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.
And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms
in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:5-6) The beauty of this action by God, on our
behalf, is grace.
Only grace would allow David to live fully as a
servant and a child of God. Paul teaches us that it is the grace of God that
lifts us up “into the heavenly realms” which means the capacity to live life in
the freedom of the power and the presence of God, through Christ. The grace of
God gives us the drive and the freedom to become gracious.
John tells us that the coming of God in the flesh, in
Jesus Christ, was full of grace and truth. (John 1:14) This grace gave us the
power to see God, and to be reborn and recreated as brand new children of God,
who are born by the will of God. (John 1:12-13, 18) And God’s will for us is
grace, and his grace gives us wills like his own.
There is a time when everything in our life is grace;
even though we have earned nothing. When we are babies and little children we
can’t do anything for anyone except to need grace; to need love, and nurture,
and endless (tireless and exhausting) care, and direction. When little children
experience neglect instead of care, there is a neediness within them which
often follows them all their lives.
Sometimes neighbors, and relatives, and other
concerned people can step in and give them a new start and a new life. This is
grace.
One way or other we can generally only give what we
have been given. We give what we have received. We can only give grace when we
have received grace.
No matter how independent we think we are, or ought
to be, we can only build a good life on the foundation of having learned, at
one time in our life (at least), that everything is a gift; everything is grace
and grace alone. There is never a stage in life where you can become an
abundant giver (a passionate, uncalculating giver) without continuing in a life
full of grace, in which it seems that you live by grace alone. Sooner or later
we will find ourselves in a place where we can do nothing but receive grace.
Even in the Bible, the word grace is a strange and
confusing word. When we study the Bible it is easier to find grace in the New
Testament than in the Old Testament.
There is plenty of grace in the Old Testament,
though. Otherwise the people of Israel
But the simple, clear word for “grace” is very rare
in the Old Testament. The Bible itself tells us to expect this.
John, the writer of the gospel, tells us that the
clearest thing to find in the Old Testament was the law. The clearest thing was
the challenge to try living by the law and by earning your own way.
John tells us that Jesus helps us to see more of God
than the law alone. Jesus helps us to see everything that God would give us
through grace, beyond the law. John says, “For the law was given through Moses;
grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God,
the One and Only, who is at the Father ’s
side, has made him known.”
John tells us that God, the Word, became flesh. He
uses the word flesh, instead of the word for human or man, because the flesh is
the weak, central core of human nature.
The flesh is the part of human life that wears out
the soonest. The flesh represents us as frail people, as rebels hiding in the
in dark. The flesh represents us as people who cannot understand what it means
to receive and welcome Jesus; as people who will not come and live in the light
of God, who gives us life.
Jesus became flesh. He identified himself with all of
human life (the best and the worst). But he went beyond that. Jesus was aware
of our need, and so he identified himself, most of all, with the undeserving
heart of human nature; the failing, sinful heart of human nature.
Jesus not only identified himself with humans at
their best, but at their worst. This is important.
This is why the cross is beautiful and lovely in all
its awful horror. God, in his grace, goes the distance with us. God goes with
us infinitely beyond any notion of worthiness or deserving.
God deals with the darkness in us until that time
when we are truly free, until that time when he will put all the darkness away
in a new heaven and a new earth.
Grace alone means that there is no other story. God
is never done with us, or with grace. The story of grace is the only story; and
it never ends. After all, isn’t the good news of the gospel beautiful because
it is the heart of a never-ending story?
It is a story where there is joy because everything
is a gift, and the story only leads to the discovery of gift beyond gift,
beyond gift, beyond gift: “one blessing after another.” The Bible calls it
“grace upon grace”.
Everything will be grace and grace alone. This is the
good news of the gospel.
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