Tag Archive - grace

Who You Are, At Peace with God

April 6, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Spirituality & Prayer with 9 Comments

Yesterday I had one of those marvelous moments of the information age. Reviewing documents before heading to a meeting I got a Facebook chat pop-up that went something like, “So, professor, how do we experience God’s pleasure?”

After stalling by asking such questions as, “What do you mean?” and “Isn’t the pollen count murder on the nose?” I started working through the challenges she was facing as a youth pastor.

Our children too often hear messages of where they have failed. There is a chorus around them suggesting, indicating, sometimes even directly saying, that they have failed, that they are not good enough, that they need to achieve more, that they need to be more.

And within such a chorus, it is easy to ascribe a voice to God. If this is how all the people “up there” see me, then this must be God’s view, too.

As we talked through the challenges she was facing, I began to wonder if the answer she and her youth group needed at this point wasn’t “peace.” How do we know God’s pleasure in us, his approval of his, his delight in us as his children?

One significant part of the puzzle, it seems to me, is the discovery that we are at peace–knowing that God accepts us in the beloved son, we know, too, that we are God’s beloved daughters and sons. And in that knowledge, we rest.

Here is where the pastoral payoff of Luther’s angst-ridden conscience comes to the fore. We are all too often confronted–by voices around us or, just as frequently, by voices within–telling us that we are not good enough. And it is only natural that when we so conceive of ourselves as “not good enough” that God becomes one source of the common chorus of voices.

So we need to change our internal monologues, and change the message to the body of Christ around us.

Stop beating yourself up: God loves you. Stop talking to yourself as if you’re a stupid failure. You are embraced by God into the very person of his dearly beloved Son.

And stop talking to your children, and the children around you, and your pastor, and your parents, and your spouse, as if they are consistent failures. We must be to one another messengers of peace. And this, in turn, means being messengers of grace.

In Jesus Christ we are forgiven. And loved. And cherished. And celebrated.

Thanks be to God.

Grace on the Ground

March 16, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

A final foray into this month’s Christianity Today takes us to the moving story of Chris Rice, chronicling the low-point and turning-point of his famous partnership (and friendship) with Spencer Perkins.

Their efforts at leading an interracial Christian community had pushed them to the breaking point in their relationship with each other. Before chucking everything and parting ways, they called in some mediators to help hold them together. Spencer had an epiphany:

“Yeah, yeah, I know all about grace, I thought… Grace is God’s love demonstrated to us, even though we don’t deserve it. But in all my 43 years of evangelical teaching, I never understood until now that God intended grace to be a way of life for his followers… Sure, I knew that we were supposed to love one another as Christ loved us. But somehow it was much easier for me to swallow the lofty untested notion of dying for each other than simply giving grace to brothers and sisters on a daily basis, the way God gives us grace” (36).

I take two things away from this. First, all the talk about “dying” might not have the payoff that I might hope. Of course, if someone “gets it,” it will be a powerful motivator and metaphor, but someone can hold onto the idea that we’re supposed to die for each other and use that as an excuse not to live for one another. Spencer confesses to such a short-changing of the gospel here.

The other thing, though, is that we must keep coming back to the idea that means by which God forms us into a people when he calls us to himself in Christ determines our identity as God’s people, which in turn delineates what it means to live as God’s faithful people. We are a people saved by grace–and therefore we are to be grace to one another. We are a people saved by the self-giving love of Christ and therefore we are to give up our lives in love of one another. We are a people saved as God lavishes forgiveness upon us, and we are called in turn to be a forgiveness people, forgiving one another from the heart.

Any idea of “grace” or “forgiveness” or “self-giving” or “cruciformity” that does not immediately call us to be for others what we have received from Christ is a selling-short of the faithful life to which God calls us. If we have received grace from above, we are called to be grace on the ground here below.