Originally written for the Connections Church blog 12/13/2010

Eph 2:8-9 – “⁸ For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. ⁹ not as a result of works, that no one should boast.”

“Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift” is what Paul proclaims in talking about the grace of God in us, and what a gift it is!

For much of my life I’ve struggled with having the proper understanding and view of grace, and because of this I’ve struggled with the proper view of sin and thereby my need for Christ. You see, I was very fortunate to grow up as a Christian kid knowing and believing in Jesus from a very young age.  However, with that I also grew up with an overwhelming sense of ‘the rules’ or an easier way to put it is what you can’t/don’t do as a Christian.  I don’t know about you, but what ‘the rules’ did for me was make me want to go right up to the line of what I knew was wrong but not cross it or cross it quickly and come back for fear of trouble.  This opened me up to a tremendous amount of confusion and struggle as I grew up, because I believed in God and His love for me but everything about Christianity made me feel increasingly worse about myself.  I had a wrong perspective of grace!

It’s amazing how many voices are in this world telling us what not to do (the knowledge of good and evil at work), but how few voices that know what is right to do. And the reason is a wrong understanding of the grace in which we are called to stand.

See grace, like any aspect of God, is first a part of His being (who He is by nature) and thereby is demonstrated in His doing. Because of this it is impossible for grace to be something to where God just unconditionally and repeatedly gives us a free pass for our sins, since God can never (because His nature is Holiness) condone sin in any way.  Rather, grace is an invitation to you and to me to come and be like He is.  This is where I was tripped up for so much of my life, as a ‘Christian’.

In my sincere attempts to please God, I set out from a young age to follow ‘the rules’ only to realize quickly and repeatedly that I am terrible at it! So therefore I could only view myself in a very low manner for my basis of self-evaluation (the rules) kept telling me I stink at life.  Combine that with my understanding that God does not condone sin and I was feeling pretty hopeless and so I would quit trying to follow the rules (deeper sin, not God’s plan).

Funny thing about the Bible, it tells us that following ‘the rules’ would do that to us: 1 Cor. 15:56 “… the power of sin is in the law.”

For brevities sake, I will summarize (reference Romans chapters 5-13) that the law is given by God and is therefore holy, yet we know that we cannot follow the law perfectly and are thereby separated from the Holy nature of God described in the Bible. This is why we need grace!  Again grace is God’s invitation to come to be as He is, and from this new being we will then do the works that Christ did (true holiness).

The trap that we often find ourselves in is doing good works that do not come out of our ‘innermost being’ where the Holy Spirit (God’s greatest demonstration of grace) is dwelling!

Here are some excerpts from Galatians chapter 3 in the Message Bible that so eloquently describe this:

^11-12The obvious impossibility of carrying out such a moral program should make it plain that no one can sustain a relationship with God that way. The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him. Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you. Habakkuk had it right: “The person who believes God, is set right by God—and that’s the real life.” Rule-keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule-keeping, a fact observed in Scripture: “The one who does these things [rule-keeping] continues to live by them.”

 ^13-14Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. Do you remember the Scripture that says, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”? That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross: He became a curse, and at the same time dissolved the curse. And now, because of that, the air is cleared and we can see that Abraham’s blessing is present and available for non-Jews, too. We are all able to receive God’s life, his Spirit, in and with us by believing—just the way Abraham received it.

There is so much more that can be said about what I’ve come to learn about true grace (which I hope to share soon in future posts), but I encourage you to investigate more into the grace of God (His invitation to you to come and be as He is) for therein lies all the promises we so often seek for Him to ‘do’ for us.  Remember He does simply out of who He is (His being, His nature – the ‘I am’).

I pray that we will all come into a full understanding of this invitation so that we may be agents of grace in this world, inviting others into their true ‘being’ in Christ!