Hope with Grace – Part Six

“Hope with grace”. What a great truth. But do we grasp the fullness of grace and therefore the fullness of hope? If our understanding of grace is diminished then our hope is weak.

We talk of grace, we think about grace, we read of grace – we then think that we understand and know grace. Then something happens; an event, a conversation, a criticism or a disappointment and our reaction is far from gracious – we have to conclude that our comprehension of the grace of Jesus Christ will be forever deficient.

Tim Keller in a conversation with Russell Moore, reflects:

“…if we believed with all of our heart, everything that we profess with our mouth and our head, we would be perfect… but we don’t… so God continues to work with very broken people and people that need grace every day, every minute, every second.[1]

The magnitude and truth of grace is simply beyond human comprehension. that the Creator of the Universe; the sovereign God considers our sin to be so horrendous and grotesque that the only possible cure is the sacrificial death of His Son does not fully register in our minds.

Because I do not see my sin in the same deep and tragic ways that God does; then I cannot see grace in all of its totally undeserved, generous beauty and purity either. Our human problem is that deep in our minds we think that God maybe used overkill; we just cannot see or admit that we are the sinful creations that He labels us. We argue from a basis of modern psychology that such a self-image is not good for our esteem; and that maybe God’s judgment has been overstated. How we need His grace to deal with such appalling arrogance; how dare we think that our assessment is more accurate than God’s…

This diminished understanding of grace is reflected in how tritely we talk about it and even try to dispense it! So often we use grace as cheap forgiveness instead of a powerfully strong agent that defines reality and enables change… grace’s purpose is nothing less than total righteousness and holiness yet we see it so often as a way of wiping out, or neutralising the penalties of our selfish sinning…

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was concerned that our view of grace is weak:

“…cheap grace is the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner, who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves…”[2]

That last sentence has become a real challenge for me… We have taken something that only God can freely and graciously give and reinterpreted grace as a right that we can claim and dispense to ourselves. And what do we see as the goal? That we might not feel condemned. God desires so much more from us than that we experience a personal relief from condemnation.

Serious stuff.
Blessings, Brian

 

 

[1] Russell Moore – A conversation with Tim Keller about “Hope in Times of Fear” April 2021 https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/a-conversation-with-tim-keller-about-hope-in-times-of-fear/

[2] Bonhoeffer D The Cost of Discipleship Collier Books : Macmillan, New York, (1963) p44