I just finished What's So Amazing About Grace?, which is a favorite. Grace is something so incredibly difficult for me to understand and accept. We live in a world where everything we have must be earned, and yet we also belong to a parallel kingdom where our works don't matter and absolutely everything is a free gift. One of my biggest struggles is living between those two. When I mess up, I typically panic way out of proportion with the offense, because I equate consequences with punishment, and making something right with being someone who is wrong. It's so hard to step back from a situation and look at it with a rational eye, acknowledging what happened and what will be necessary to fix it without somehow cutting myself down. This is just as hard when it comes to other people. I am a champion at not showing grace to others. Especially when it comes to people not meeting their responsibilities, since I am a very responsibility-oriented person. If someone else can't do what they are supposed to do, I do not want to clean up after them. It's like major surgery to get my head out of that mindset and into the mind of Christ. My flesh is very ungracious when left to its own devices.
This is quite a joyless existence. That major surgery is always worth it because there is great reward and rest when I finally am able to accept grace, either for myself or for someone else. Yancey points out that the word grace comes from the Greek root "charis," which means "I rejoice, I am glad." When we are able to embrace grace in our lives, we are free to rejoice. We no longer feel the need to police ourselves and others, and a lot of pressure lifts away.
Yancey focuses on the parables that Jesus tells, and how "unfair" they are by the world's standards. If you read them closely and notice the economic principles Jesus founds them on, they are laughable. What father welcomes home a son who disrespected him and squandered his life savings? What shepherd leaves 99 sheep behind so he can track down one wayward lamb? And what church treasurer believes that a poor widow's coins are a greater contribution than a rich man's tithe? Often we read these stories in search of a moral, a bit of wisdom to live by, but they don't work this way. Every one of them ends with someone committing a wildly irrational act that utterly fails to teach anyone in the story the valuable lesson we religious folks are hoping for. Instead, they teach us to expect something that we by no means deserve, for no reason other than that the Giver is generous to a fault. As Yancey says, "We are accustomed to finding a catch in every promise, but Jesus' stories of extravagant grace include no catch, no loophole disqualifying us from God's love. Each has at its core an ending too good to be true - or so good that it must be true."
Perhaps the most compelling parable Yancey dissects is that of the workers who come throughout the day and are paid the same. This story ought to shock us, but I'm afraid we've heard it to many times for that to be the reaction. The interesting thing, though, is not that the employer in the story is so unfair in his wage distribution, but that we (those church folks again) tend to see ourselves as the workers who have been laboring all day. We read the story and we say, with a self-congratulatory sigh, "It's a good thing God lets in those people who don't come to know Him until they're on their deathbeds. I guess those of us who have been working for Him all our lives just have to accept that they'll be let into heaven too, even though that isn't fair. To that Yancey says: "We risk missing the story's point - that God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell." Yeesh. Maybe we aren't the laborers who have been working all day. Maybe we are just like those who come at the last minute and get a day's wages for an hour's work. Or maybe we are more like those who get eternal, abundant life for spitting on the One who offers it to us.
Yancey addresses "grace abuse" as well, that age-old question of how far we can go with our sin and still be accepted by God? He emphasizes the fact that grace isn't free. It's free to us, but only because someone else has paid for it. "Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost." If this is true, the last question we should be asking is how much can I sin.
One part towards the end of the book was intensely convicting for me. I've realized that I have a tendency to be legalistic not only because following rules is pretty easy for me, but because I find a great deal of comfort in them. That's partly why I did so well when I was a student at Word of Life Bible Institute, because there are so many rules there that it's easy to know whether you're doing well or not. I have a lot of love for WOLBI, but at the end of the day that may not have been the best thing. It built on the sense I already had that I was accepted by God when I followed His rules. The problem with that way of thinking, besides the fact that there's no room in it for grace, is that it's actually not connected to obedience at all. If I know all the rules to the game up front, I can easily find ways to follow them and still pursue my own desires, and I never once have to ask God what He wants from me, or wait to find out what direction I should go. Yancey says, "At first glance legalism seems hard, but actually freedom in Christ is the harder way ... When living in freedom, I must remain open to the Spirit for guidance." I do not like remaining open to the Spirit. He might at any given time tell me to break a rule I've been following all my life and never intended to stop following (see Acts 10 for an example of this). I'll venture to say that MOST of the rules we live by are man-made, more specifically us-made, and though we might live as though God handed them down, He didn't. They might be more or less consistent with Biblical principles, but they aren't unbreakable rules, and therefore we might be asked to break them at any given moment. That. Is. Terrifying. I want to live in my safe little rule cave where everything is predictable and I always know what's coming. Well, I happen to serve a God of grace, and that is not how He works. Because I'm not saved by the rules I follow, I'm never sure what He will ask of me. I can be sure that it's always for my good, but I won't necessarily know how up front.
Lastly, Yancey tackles the difficulty of living under grace in a political world. The church is constantly tempted to side with political powers in order to accomplish its goals. The irony is that just as often the church's goals begin to run counter to those of the kingdom. Yancey points out, "[Jesus] went up against a rigid religious establishment and a pagan empire. The two powers, often at odds, conspired together to eliminate him. His response? Not to fight, but to give his life for these enemies, and to point to that gift as proof of his love." We have all been members of both that pagan empire AND that rigid religious establishment. It's a word to the wise that we guard ourselves against belonging to either, since both were equally guilty of murdering an innocent man.
The hymn "Amazing Grace" sounds as old as some of those parables because I've heard it so many times. Chris Tomlin's cover of the song from a few years ago helps me hear it with new ears. His chorus is: "My chains are gone/I've been set free/My God, my Savior has ransomed me/And like a flood/His mercy brings/Unending love/Amazing grace."
Amazing, indeed.
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