Dangerous Grace

From  a classic post by Michael Spencer at iMonk: Grace Is As Dangerous As Ever

...Real grace is simply inexplicable, inappropriate, out of the box, out of bounds, offensive, excessive, too much, given to the wrong people and all those things.

When God’s grace meets us, Jesus has to order away the accusers of our conscience. Satan. Religion. Parents. Church members. Culture. Morality. Legalism. Civility. The oughts. The shoulds. The of course we know thats. The I’d like to but I just can’ts.

Jesus orders them away so he can tell us that grace is doing what only grace can do, and we must go and live in the reverberation of forgiveness. We must live with the reality of grace when it makes no sense at all, can’t be explained and won’t be commodified or turned into some form of medicine....

...at the heart of true Christian experience is this inexplicable, annoyingly inappropriate, wondrously superlative experience of Jesus saying, “I don’t condemn you. Go and live your life.”

He says it to the divorced. To the expelled. To the unemployed. He says it to criminals. To perverts. To the damaged and the worthless. He says it to cutters, to whores, to greedy businessmen, to unfaithful husbands, to porn addicts and thieves. He says it to the lazy, the unholy, the confused and even the religious. He says it to you and to me.

It’s how he changes lives, and it’s as dangerous as ever.

Six

Epic wisdom from Paul David Tripp - Six Kinds of Grace:

...You need it. You can’t live without it, but you can’t purchase it and you can’t earn it. It only ever comes by means of a gift, and when you receive it, you immediately realize how much you needed it all along, and you wonder how you could’ve lived so long without it.

In a fallen world, populated by selfish, lost, fearful, and rebellious people, it’s the one thing that everyone needs. And you can only give it to someone else when you have first been given it yourself, because you can't give away that which you don't have.

You see, God’s grace is the most powerful force in the universe, so I would have to argue that it's the most beautiful word in the universe. It reaches you where you are and takes you where God wants you to be. It has the power to do something that nothing else can do: transform you at the causal core of who you are as a human being - your heart.

OVERUSED & UNDER-DEFINED

Grace, however, is also one of the most overused words in the church. I'm afraid that we use all these theologically beautiful words without knowing what we're saying.

So you may be thinking “Okay, Paul, I get your definition that grace is the freely-given love, forgiveness, acceptance and help of God. I get that there's nothing I could ever do to earn it, but I’m not sure I understand what grace looks like.”

Today I want to write about 6 different types of grace. I don't believe that these are the only variations of grace, but for the sake of this Article, I'm only going to focus on these six.

1. FORGIVENESS

First and foremost, there's the grace of forgiveness. We all do wrong - the Bible calls that sin - and that leaves us guilty. Guilty people need to be condemned and punished unless they're forgiven and declared guilt-free.

Jesus Christ went to the Cross to carry our sin and to bear our punishment so we could experience radical, comprehensive, and complete forgiveness. In Jesus Christ, we're forgiven for everything we’ve ever done in the past, everything we now do in the present, and everything we'll ever do in the future.

2. ACCEPTANCE

God not only forgives us through grace, but He welcomes us into relationship with Him. He invites us into His family. He adopts us as His children, and because of that, we now have this Father-child relationship with Him where we can come to Him.

We can sit on His lap and bring our needs, concerns, and failures to Him, and He responds as a loving and kind Father. Sin once separated us from God; by grace, we now have acceptance.

3. PRESENCE

Like acceptance, the grace of God's presence means that our Father is not distant. In fact, God is present with us wherever we are, whomever we're with, and whatever we're doing.

The Bible tells us that God, in His grace, has made us the place where He dwells. It wasn’t enough for God to forgive us - He literally unzipped us and got inside us by His Holy Spirit, and so He is with us all the time.

Drunk on Grace

I think I have quoted this before, but it's worth repeating. I need to hear it again and again!  From Robert Capron:

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case....

... In Jesus’ death and resurrection, the whole test-passing, brownie-point-earning rigmarole of the human race has been canceled for lack of interest on God’s part. All he needs from us is a simple Yes or No, and off to work he goes. If we say Yes to something wrong or No to something right, he will reconcile it all by himself. Not only can he handle it, he’s already handled it: he has all our messes fixed in Jesus–right now, even before we make them. All we have to do is trust his assurance that losers are his cup of tea. In fact, it’s precisely our attempts to be winners that he warns us about: ‘He who saves his life will lost it; he who loses his life for my sake the Gospel’s will save it.’....

…there is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom?

HT: Internet Monk

Grace is....

A collection of wonderful Twits (Twitter messages) on GRACE by Paul David Tripp - @PaulTripp:

It is always timely and is never inappropriate - GRACE.
It always meets you where you are and takes you where you need to be - GRACE.
It never misses the point and will never run out - GRACE.
It has divine power to do for you what you could never do for yourself - GRACE.
It guarantees you a future that you could have never earned on your own - GRACE.
It's provision for the moment and hope for all eternity - GRACE
It offers you a kingdom that is greater and more glorious than what you could ever construct on your own - GRACE.
It's bad news about you coupled with the very good news of the cross - GRACE.
It's love, even when you're the most undeserving ~ GRACE.
It's daily strength for what you' ve been called to do ~ GRACE.
It's not just forgiveness, but a brand new identity as well ~ GRACE
 It not only forgives, it progressively transforms - GRACE.
 It fulfills very promise and delivers every provision - GRACE.

My response to all of this: Grace is not just how we get in. Grace is where we sit, how we stand, the way we walk and where we are going.

Radically Unbalanced Grace

"Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace- “don’t take it too far; keep it balanced.” The truth is, however, that a “yes grace but” posture is the kind of posture that perpetuates slavery in our lives and in the church. Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no “but”: it’s unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. As Doug Wilson put it recently, “Grace is wild. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows the banks. Grace messes up your hair. Grace is not tame. In fact, unless we are making the devout nervous, we are not preaching grace as we ought.” Grace scares us to death because in every way it wrestles control out of our hands. However much we hate law, we are more afraid of grace."

From The End Of Control Is The Beginning Of Freedom – Tullian Tchividjian: 

Forgive Because Forgiven

More from Brian Zahand's Unconditional:

"...when Jesus calls us to extend forgiveness in a radical way, we are not expected to do so through gritted teeth, but out of our own experience of being forgiven. Jesus and the apostles seem to believe that being a recipient of the infinite love of God should create within the forgiven sinner a wellspring of infinite capacity to forgive. We forgive out of our experience of being forgiven.  We love infinitely out of the reality of being infinitely loved.  We love with the love of God and forgive with the forgiveness we have received. We turn the other cheek because Jesus prayed from the cross, 'Father, forgive them.'  And the forgiven them turns out to be us.  Jesus only calls us to give what we have received - unbounded forgiveness."

From Brian Zahand, Unconditional?: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness, page 29

Tripp on Grace

Quotes From Paul Tripp on the Grace of God:

The unrelenting power of transforming grace is greater than the unyielding idolatry of your wondering heart.

Jesus did for you what you couldn’t do, so that you could give to him what you couldn’t give apart from his grace-your whole heart.

Face it, you and I don’t need to be tweaked, you tweak a poorly written sentence, you and I need to be radically rebuilt by grace.

Grace frees you from the weight of the law, not so you would despise the law, but so you would use the resources of grace to keep it.

Grace frees you to live horizontally what you’ve given vertically. While others hope to get, you can celebrate what you’ve been given.

Grace calls you to abandon your reliance on you because God knows that true righteousness only begins when you come to the end of yourself.

Grace: No love greater, no forgiveness more complete, no hope more secure, no peace more permanent than are found in Jesus.

Grace tells you all the things about you that you don’t want to face, while assuring you that they have all been covered by the cross.

Grace doesn’t excuse your sin, rather it pays the price for what is inexcusable.

Grace means you don’t have to hide what’s already been forgiven, or fear what’s already been defeated, or earn what’s already been given.

From Timmy Brister's Paul Tripp on Twitter on Grace

Escaping Default Mode

"Christians who know the gospel in principle and who have been changed by it nevertheless continually revert to works-righteousness and self-salvation in a myriad of subtle and not so subtle ways. A basic insight of Martin Luther's was that 'religion' is the default mode of the human heart.  Your computer operates automatically in default mode unless you deliberately tell it to do something else.  Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel, your heart will go back to operating on the religious principle unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.  This then is the basic cause of our spiritual conflict, lack of joy, and ministry ineffectiveness.  We believe the gospel at one level, but at deeper levels we continue to operate as if we are saved by our works."

    - Tim Keller, Gospel in Life: Grace Changes Everything, pages 18-19

(Have I mentioned lately that I love this book?)

All of It, All of Me

"My humanity, my sin, it's all me.  And I need Jesus to love me like I really am: brokenness, wounds, sins, addictions, lies, death, fear...all of it.  Take all of it, Lord Jesus.  If I don't present this broken, messed-up person to Jesus, my faith is dishonest, and my understanding of faith will become a way of continuing the ruse and pretense of being good."

     - Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity, page 149

We Can Only Give After We Receive

“It takes grace to give grace, takes hope to give hope, takes love to give love. I can give these to you because Christ gave them to me.”

            - Paul David Tripp,

Hat Tip: Of First Importance