[1]

The church has a secret. Christians have a secret too.

 If you read my last post, you’ve heard a glimpse of that secret. Grace is the means by which we are justified and made right with God. Grace is also the means by which we continue to live in God’s favor for the rest of our lives - regardless of our sin (including future sins). It sounds nice doesn’t it? That is, until we realize the possible outcomes of this message.

Paul says in Romans 5 that the law (the 10 Commandments, most notably) was added so that sin might increase. But, where sin increases, grace increases even more.

This is starting to sound pretty dangerous. If people catch on to the fact that God will not stop loving them no matter how badly they screw everything up; that if they break each of the commandments multiple times a day (adultery you say? murder you say?), God’s redeeming love will not be cast away from them - chaos will unfold all around us.

Churches usually deal with this secret a couple of ways. One way is to misunderstand the secret and then tell people that it doesn’t matter at all what they do. They shouldn’t feel guilty about their sin, because God loves them anyway. They shouldn’t change any behaviors, because God wants to meet them right where they are and stay with them right where they are. This message starts to abuse grace and we’ll talk about the correct alternative in a little bit.

Another way churches deal with this secret is to be scared of it. Out of this fear (usually of losing control), churches will want to put lots of parameters around this secret, until it fits nicely into this box called “duty.” They emphasize all of the rules in the Bible until the Bible stops being a living breathing Word, and becomes a dry book of do’s and don’ts. What happens? People believe that in order to be a Christian, you have to fit within a specific checklist of behaviors, and if you step outside of those bounds, your salvation should be suspect. So, people sin (as we often do) and they want to hide it (possibly for years), because God must not love them, and the people around them definitely won’t love them either. We kill grace.

Neither of these ways of handling the secret is correct. To find an answer for both “grace abusers” and “grace killers,” Pastor Don pointed us to Romans 6. “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”

If we understand this passage (and others) correctly, we will begin to realize that real Christians still sin, but that we don’t have to stay there - in fact, God put his Spirit in us so that we CAN’T stay there. The focus of our Christian lives should be the cultivation of the Spirit living in us and working through us. God has handled the sin, and will continue to handle the sin - we need to trust him on that. For churches, it’s not our job to beat each other up over how much we fail, but instead to encourage one another to live in the reality of our new identities.

I like the way this sounds for my life. No stress. No heavy burdens. Just living in the freedom of God’s love. But I don’t like the way this sounds for my neighbor. It’s possible that they could hurt me or sin against me? Yes. They can ask for forgiveness and I have to graciously forgive them as God graciously forgives me? Yes. OK, but how many times do I have to do this before I can write them off and give them the boot? “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven (or seventy times seven) times.”

This grace thing is going to be tough. Living honestly with my struggles in the midst of a community of other believers who have real struggles, in the hope that the Holy Spirit will work through us to make us more like Jesus? Are you willing to try it? Will you take the risk?