Defending the Faith
Friday Highlight – Receiving Grace … Confessing Sin … Loving My Enemy
There are many theological ideas, concepts, and beliefs that are unique to Christianity. For example, the incarnation, where the divine God of the universe takes on flesh and comes down to dwell with us. Or the atonement, where the supreme and sovereign God of the universe takes upon Himself our sin and rebellion so we might experience forgiveness and new life. A third example is that God Himself spoke creation into existence from nothing: not merely that He took what already existed and morphed it into something else. Instead, there was nothing; He spoke, and it became something.
These are all foundational truths to our Christian faith and help us to understand the character and nature of God but there is no Christian theological belief that is more foundational than the concept of grace. Our entire relationship with God is summed up and defined within the context of grace. Grace is a gift that we could not earn or convince God to give us. Yet He gave it to us anyway. Even from the very beginning of creation, before the fall, God’s creative act was a gift of grace. He didn’t have to create. He didn’t have to establish a good garden for Adam and Eve to live in, but he did. He did it out of an abundance of love and his character of goodness. These very actions were gifts of grace to Adam and Eve. For you and me today, when we wake up and draw breath, those are gifts of grace from God. When we enjoy a good meal, take delight in the beauty of a sunrise or a sunset, those are gifts of grace from God. When we walk in abundant eternal life because of Christ’s finished work on the cross and his victorious resurrection, those are gifts of grace from God. Our entire relationship with God is defined by grace that we have received from Him. And this foundation of grace makes it possible for us to be able to go before our Father, who has demonstrated his love for us in such radically generous ways, so that we could confidently confess our sins, failures, and shortcomings to him, knowing that, in his character of goodness, he won’t reject us, but instead he will receive us and forgive us.
This is significantly different than every other religious system or philosophical worldview, not only of the ancient world but of our world today. Everything else has the foundation where moral behavior earns you your position and status, either in front of a watching world or in front of the deity you claim. You must clean yourself up; you must make yourself good enough; you must do enough right in order to receive the acclaim of those around you. This process is exhausting, and it never ends. And it leads us to a place of great insecurity because we’re never quite sure if we have done enough.
Yet in Christianity we hear and experience the very opposite. The God of the universe, just and right, truth and majesty, has come to us and made it possible for us to be redeemed, reconciled, and made new. We did nothing to convince him that he should do that. Instead of earning we have been given everything. That is: our new identity and status before God are based on what we’ve received from Him. So when he says that we are forgiven, we can have confidence that we are forgiven. When he says that we’ve been given eternal life, we can have security in that eternal life. When he says that we’ve been given an indestructible hope, we can have confidence that nothing can take that hope away. Everything we have is rooted in and sustained by Him. Instead of exhaustion, we experience abundance and peace. That is why we can confess our sins, failures, and shortcomings to him with confidence because we have already received grace from him.
Grace from God is not only transformational in our relationship with God, it is also transformational in our relationships with one another. It, again, is the very foundation of how we are to relate to one another as Jesus’s people. Because we are a people of a lavish reception of grace, we are to operate out of that reception of grace. This helps us to be humble, caring, loving, and concerned for those around us. It helps us to be able to offer truth in a way that speaks to hearts and minds and merely doesn’t cast judgment that crushes and demoralizes. It allows us to walk a mile in another person’s shoes so that we might be able to empathize with them in their struggle and come alongside them to support them and help them. The theologian Miroslav Volf explains the tragic consequences of when we don’t allow this foundation of grace to infiltrate our relationships, writing, “Enormous problems happen when we exclude our enemy from the community of humans and when we exclude ourselves from the community of sinners – when we forget that our enemy is not a subhuman monster but a human being, when we forget that we are not the perfect good but also flawed persons. By remembering this, our hatred doesn’t kill us or absorb us, and we can actually go out and work for justice.” [1]
In this light, the ongoing and regular practice of confessing our sins becomes an opportunity for us to receive grace from God and positions us to be distributors of grace to those around us so that they might experience the very same hope that we have in Christ Jesus.
[1] Miroslav Volf – From “Exclusion and Embrace”