Grace is one of those concepts that wears at me. Maybe it does you as well, I don’t know for sure. I don’t know if I’ve ever really understood it, and every glimpse of it I get only confuses me more. How can grace work? Is it really the only thing that can save us? And what does that salvation look like?
I understand salvation by works; it makes sense to me. Weigh my deeds, and if the good outweigh the bad then everything’s cool. i can live with that. I can even live with the more common evangelical version of grace, which goes something like this:
God: Hmm, looks like poor Brother Adso there has really messed up his life. He is all tangled up in sin, so I’ll provide a way out. [SFX: harp strings] There. Now he can be saved.
Brother Adso: Thank you Lord! Truly you are gracious to give Your son so that I may be saved!
God: You’re welcome, for I am truly gracious. Now here’s the list of rules you need to follow to deserve My grace.
Brother Adso: O Lord, I will obey Your law!
God: That’s all I ask. That, and that you be truly miserable when you fail.
Brother Adso: [sighs sadly and makes a note to never ever fail, especially where anyone can see him.]
I don’t know where I absorbed that, or if it just comes naturally to all of us. Legalism is certainly “the knowledge of good and evil” – perhaps we have all taken it in, written in our genetics, as a consequence of the fall.
“If it says TGGTCGAAC
Then you might get the cancer
If it says GTCACGACAGG
Then you shouldn’t eat shrimp or nuts
If it says TATACACATATCCTCGT
Then you’ll probably wish that you didn’t know”
as Jonathan Coulton might put it.
I’ve been reading Robert Capon’s Between Noon and Three, and it’s really making me nervous. I keep finding myself thinking, “Wait, that can’t be right,” and then realizing that it is. Grace scares me, because of how open it is. I want some boundaries. I want some rules. Not necessarily to control my own behavior (I’ve been me long enough that I pretty well know what I’m going to do, including how I’ll fail, in any given situation) but to constrain others. And, even more importantly, because if there are limits on God’s grace, then perhaps mine can be limited as well.
I’m not good at showing grace to others. When I read a response like Wade Burleson’s to an attack on his family, I don’t know how he does it. I don’t think I could in his place. In fact, just reading about it made me mad enough to want to try and track down the email sender and explain to him or her the error of his or her ways. And I don’t even know Wade or his children.
How can I understand God’s grace, when even human grace is so foreign to me? I keep running across examples of grace, and situations that show me how ungraceful I am. I’m certain that this is God moving in my life, and I’m so afraid I’ll miss it. I want to see His kingdom come to pass in my life, the kingdom of grace. I just wish I had some idea of what I was wishing for.
