Eager Beavers and Grinning Drunks

Great quote from Brennan Manning’s essential All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir, pg 193-94:

My life is a witness to vulgar grace–a grace that amazes as it offends. A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up a ten till five. 

A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party no ifs, ands or buts. 

A grace that raises bloodshot eyes to a dying theif’s request–“Please, remember me”–and assures him, “You bet!” 

A grace that is the pleasure of the Father, fleshed out in the carpenter Messiah, Jesus the Christ, who left His Father’s side not for heaven’s sake but for our sakes, yours and mind. 

This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us. 

It’s not cheap. It’s free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the orthodox foot and a fairy tale for the grown-up sensibility. 

Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. 

Grace is enough. He is enough. Jesus is enough.

His Cup of Tea

Trust Him. And when you have done that, you are living the life of grace. No matter what happens to you in the course of that trusting - no matter how many waverings you may have, no matter how many suspicions that you have bought a poke with no pig in it, no matter how much heaviness and sadness your lapses, vices, indispositions, and bratty whining may cause you - you simply believe that Somebody Else, by His death and resurrection, has made it all right, and you just say thank you and shut up.The whole slop closet full of mildewed performances (which is all you have to offer) is simply your death; it is Jesus who is your life. If He refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, He certainly isn't going to flunk you because your faith isn't so hot. You can fail utterly, therefore, and still live the life of grace. You can fold up spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be safe. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for Him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you His cup of tea.

- Robert Capon

A Mere Repair Job

From Gerhard Forde as quoted at Mockingbird Blog:

I think that most of our talk about [sanctification] represents the bad conscience of the old (moral or immoral!) being who has not really been put to death and so is worried because salvation as a free gift seems too easy and cheap. Since the old being has not died, the law is still in some sense in effect, and so sanctification becomes merely a repair job on the old, a progress according to the law, a transition from vice to virtue for the continuously existing being. To avoid the charge of “cheap grace” we talk very seriously and grandly about sanctification. The result, however, is only that a good deal of cheap talk replaces the cheap grace.

Consequently I watch very closely the way in which we talk about sanctification. To begin with, the problem lies in what we think such talk is supposed to accomplish. There is quite a difference between adequately describing sanctification and actually fostering or producing it. The description may be quite true, nice, accurate or even enticing, but it may be accompanied with an inadequate understanding of how to effect such things evangelically. We can end up preaching a description of the sanctified life but doing little or nothing to bring it about.

Preaching a description is deadly and usually counterproductive. It is like yelling so loudly at your children to go to sleep that you only keep them awake. You have to learn to sing lullabies. Or it is like telling your beloved that “love means thus-and-so, and if you really love me then you would do thus-and-so.” While the description may be true, it’s not likely to work. More often it will have the opposite effect. Instead one has to learn to say, “I love you, no matter what.”

“Faith without works is dead,” we are reminded. Quite true. But then what follows is usually some long and dreary description of works and what we should be about, as though the way to revive a dead faith were by putting up a good-works front. If the faith is dead, it is the faith that must be revived. No amount of works will do it. Whatever may be accomplished by such hollering about works–though it may even be considerable–does not really qualify as sanctification, that is, true holiness.” (pg 77-78)

Does God owe us?

Fred Meuser on Martin Luther's intolerance for righteousness based on a person's works:

Not only indulgences, pilgrimages, alms, repetitious prayers, and other so-called churchly good works felt Luther’s lash, but also every innate human impulse to make God somehow indebted to us. Luther knew not only the Scriptures; he also knew people. From the way in which, year after year, he glorified God’s undeserved grace despite our unworthiness, we can conclude that it was as hard for the Wittenbergers to say “Yes” to God’s judgment on their lives and “No” to the urge to bargain with God as it is for us today. The frequency and clarity of Luther’s words makes one wonder why he needed to say it so often, but they also give us a bit of comfort in our need to speak repeatedly to the perversions of the gospel in our day.

Luther himself said:

If you preach faith [and assurance] people become lax…But if you do not preach faith, hearts become frightened and dejected…Do as you please. Nothing seems to help. Yet faith in Christ should be preached, no matter what happens. I would much rather hear people say of me that I preach too sweetly…than not preach faith in Christ at all, for then there be no help for timid, frightened consciences…Therefore I should like to have the message of faith in Christ not forgotten but generally known. It is so sweet a message, full of sheer joy, comfort, mercy and grace. I must confess that I myself have as yet not fully grasped it. We shall have to let it happen that some turn the message into an occasion for security and presumption; others…slander us…and say [that by preaching so much of Christ] we make people lazy and thus keep them from perfection. Christ himself had to hear that he was a friend of publicans and sinners…We shall not fare any better.

All his idea, All his work

It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.

Ephesians 2:1-10
The Message

Is Weak Faith Still Faith?

From The Reason for God by Timothy Keller:

"The faith that changes the life and connects to God is best conveyed by the word "trust." Imagine you are on a high cliff and lose your footing and begin to fall. Just beside you as you fall is a branch sticking out of the very edge of the cliff. It is your only hope and it is more than strong enough to support your weight. How can it save you? If your mind is filled with intellectual certainty that the branch can support you, but you don't actually reach out and grab it, you are lost. If your mind is instead filled with doubts and uncertainty that the branch can hold you, but you reach out and grab it anyway, you will be saved. Why? It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.  

 

Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. This means you don't have to wait for all doubts and fears to go away to take hold of Christ. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to banish all misgivings in order to meet God. That would turn your faith into one more way to be your own Savior. Working on the quality and purity of your commitment would become a way to merit salvation and put God in your debt. It is not the depth and purity of your heart but the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf that saves us."

From All of Grace Blog:

  

This illustration is gold. Christ is the actor. He is doing the action, the saving itself. I confess how much I treat my faith as a spiritual resume I add to every day. I realize this in how much I think about my faith throughout the day, and not the author of my faith, Jesus. Keller's words resonate so powerfully to me because of how much I think about what I should do, rather than what Christ has done. My desire to want to essentially save myself is only evidence of my unbelief that my Savior will actually save me. May we rest in the security we have in Christ alone, who is certain to save those whom he has called. May we fix our eyes on Jesus, who has given us faith as a gift, and promises to carry us in it for all eternity.

We Can Get a Cat When Mom is Dead

This is a another good post from Jon Acuff. I am worried a lot these days about Christians who are saved by faith deciding later to add "saved by works" to their resume. Doesn't this not only harm only themselves but also other struggling Christians and, even worse, non-Christians (Pre-Christians) who hear this week after week in our churches? Paul wrote: "For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law." (Romans 3:28) and "But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace." (Romans 11:6)

Here is the Post from Jon Acuff:

The other day my 6-year old daughter L.E. and I were hanging out in our home office. I was writing and she was playing “Tap Fish,” on my iPhone, a game that for the most part is just a way to teach your kids about death. Seriously, those virtual fish are more fragile than Bradford Pear trees and those things fall down in your yard if someone sneezes vigorously. (Home office? Daughter? Bradford Pear tree? Whoa, that was like a suburban dad reference hat trick!)

Out of nowhere, without looking up from the iPhone, L.E. said, “Oh hey, I became a Christian yesterday. I forgot to tell you.”

Turns out that at Vacation Bible School she had gone forward during an altar call and given her life to Christ. Wow, amazing times at the Acuff house. I was thrilled and walked into the kitchen to talk with my wife about it. Along the way I passed our 4-year old McRae coming out of the bathroom. I said to her, “Hey, I just heard L.E. is a Christian, are you a Christian?”

Without missing a beat, and with a melancholy that surpassed even that of the live in Paris version of the Counting Crows song “Round Here,” she said

“No, I’m not a Christian, I don’t pray very much.”

Now clearly, you can never really be certain what’s going to come out of a four year old’s mouth. A few months ago she said, “We can get a cat when mom is dead.” (Technically that’s true since my wife is allergic to cats.)

But when she said that, it caught me off guard because of the way it framed something I think a lot of us Christians secretly believe. Put simply, “I’m not a real Christian because I don’t do ____________ very much.”

Is it possible I am raising the only four year old in the world that believes in a works based faith? Where did I go wrong? How did the amount of prayer equate to Christianity to her?

I think the reality is that all too often we try to make grace fit the cause and effect model of life. Although she is four, McRae is certainly well versed in that principle. For instance, if she eats all her vegetables, her chances of getting a treat after dinner dramatically increase. There’s a cause and effect. There’s an action that has a consequence. This idea is drilled into us over and over again. And then we grow up, and we try to get grace to act the same way. We try to make mercy behave the same way. We try to make the gospel read the same way.

But it won’t, will it?

In grace, we get something we don’t deserve.

In grace, we get something we can’t earn by our actions.

In grace, we get something we can’t control or manufacture or manipulate.

So then what do you do when you find yourself with a list of “actions necessary to be a real Christian,” that you might have been carrying since you were four years old?

I think the only thing we can do is something I talk about all the time when I get to preach. Put simply, I think we have to believe in something that feels unbelievable, and that’s the gospel. And if I could summarize the gospel in four words, do you know what they would be?

Be sick. Be loved.

Be sick, come with your broken life or your regrets or your failed dreams or huge hopes. Just come. Like the prodigal son don’t try to get “clean enough” before you take those first few steps toward repentance.

And in that, as you be sick, know that you will be loved. In that moment God is going to love you. And change you and grow you and transform you in ways that don’t make any sense. In ways that transcend our simple human understanding of cause and effect.

That to me is the four-word gospel.

Be sick. Be loved.

Be sick. Be loved.

Be sick. Be loved.