Yesterday I kicked off a little fun series about the Reformation, which feast always coincides with the celebration of Halloween. I never can understand why children would rather run around eating candy dressed as Darth Vader than sit and meditate on the mediatorial work of Christ. Children are so impossible.
Today I want to carry on talking about Sola Gratia, and, just so you don’t end up very disappointed, I’m not going back for a history of the Reformation, nor even to what each of these were pointed toward or against all those many centuries ago. I think they are still relevant now, and misunderstood, and the Christian person, meandering through the vagaries of the evangelical industrial complex, might be helped by them.
Grace, for instance, is flung around at Christian homeschool mothers like a weapon to lop them off at their knees. Have grace, trust in God’s grace, extend grace, don’t do it without grace. You can come away from a time with other Christians carrying a strange burden of guilt and sadness. For many many years I would see or hear the word ‘grace’ and say aloud to myself, “I don’t even know what that means.” And even if I did know, did understand, how would I get it, or give it.
Sola Gratia, or, as we would say in English, Grace Alone, is not some tool that you can use to make your Christian life better. As usual, it’s not about you. If you are constantly going around in your Christian life trying to get something good for yourself, you are always everywhere going to have a hard time understanding what the bible is about or what anybody is saying. Grace is about what God is doing and who he is, not about you and what you can extract from him.
Grace Alone, in particular, is about the gracious work of God to save sinners. He decided, for purposes of his own (to glorify himself, but who wants him to do that) to create and then, when that creation sinned, to redeem that creation. The creation didn’t want to be created in the first place, and then, when it sinned, it didn’t particularly want to be redeemed, but God did it anyway, because he wanted to. It is for his own glory. Grace is the word God put on his own redeeming purposes and action. Paul says it this way, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9
“Have been” is awfully horribly passive. You have been saved by grace. And lest you leap about to object, he goes on to say “this is not your own doing.” Really, you can’t do it yourself. You cannot go out and acquire grace like you acquire a packet of dubious chicken from Aldi. You can’t muscle it out of God, or pay for it with your reasonably good intentions. And, in the mire of human weakness, you can’t even really extend or give it to another person. You might be able to for a while, to be gracious, to let her off the hook, but eventually your own cumbering person will overtake your efforts and you will withdraw your gracious hand in a fit of hurt, or exhaustion, or anger. You can only do it so far.
Grace is not just the grease that makes your life tick along more smoothly. Actually, I wouldn’t even say it is that, God not being interested in the relative easy comfortable trajectory of your existence. It is a matter of salvation. It is the difference between life and death. Either God gives you grace, and you live, or he doesn’t give you grace, and you perish. Either you are judged on the merits of your own work and you perish, or you are judged on the merits of Christ’s work and you live. That is the substance of grace. He gives grace as he wills, for salvation.
‘Not your own doing’ is the part that is the most impossible to understand. Surely there must be some part that is your own doing. Surely there must be something that you can contribute, something that God took and shaped and gave back in a slightly better form. The desire to boast, to take credit, to be seen to be okay in yourself, overwhelms the ability of even the Christian to understand Grace.
Grace, no matter how we feel about it, is never deserved. It isn’t given to you because you should have it. It is given when you shouldn’t have it. It is given to the person who least deserves it. If you are given grace by God, and you grasp hold of it by faith (which we will talk about one of the other days this week, as my whimsy takes me) you are accepting and acknowledging the humiliation of utter failure. You are letting it be publicly known that you completely and totally failed to do what you should have done, indeed what you expected of yourself to do, and instead Christ did it for you.
And that is why I think the great lure of the Christian life isn’t actually that great and why the self help heresy is the succulent peach so much of western Christianity is sucking on. It creeps in everywhere, both into the sermons of hip, cool, horn rim spectacled millionaire pastors, and into the quiet, hidden, every day strivings of the poor unknown Christian who decides to sweep the floor on Sunday after church in the hopes that God, and maybe at least one other person, will notice and take some negative points off the great big good behavior chart in the sky. Which person, when trudging home in the ugly snow, mutters, ‘nobody appreciates anything I do’. The Nobody includes God because he is not going to confer salvation to that poor sinner for staying to sweep the floor. He is only going to do it on account of the pure and perfect work of the Son….so that No One, neither the rich nor the poor, can boast.
Being in the place of a begging poor person is no fun. The child putting on a pretty princess dress and putting out her bucket for a sweet piece of free candy is not the picture of God extending grace for salvation. Take off the pretty dress and take away the bucket and make it a dead person, a person on her way to Sheol, on the way to actually walking there, because she wanted to go there, and then God coming to her, arresting her entry to the land of the dead, wrenching her out, and causing her to live. And then she mutters that he didn’t notice her good qualities, or tries to pretend that she had thought of turning around and going back the other way. It’s not cute. It’s humiliating. But it is life, instead of death, the saving hand of God to drag her out of the pit that she dug for herself, for the glory of God. And it’s enough.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In