PRAISE FOR THE ROMANCE OF GRACE

When people talk about grace, listen carefully. I've listened long enough to listen for certain things: “buts and brakes.” We often speak about grace with a thousand qualifications, revealing a paralyzing fear that grace will be taken too far. Our greatest concern, it seems, is that people will take advantage of grace and use it as a justification to live licentiously, so we Christians end up saying more about what grace isn't than we do about what grace is. It is time, as Robert Farrar Capon put it, to get drunk on grace. Two hundred-proof, defiant grace. That's what you get here in Jim's book. No “buts” here. And you won't feel the tapping of the brakes either. You won't see a list of qualifications, and you'll get no “footnotes.” What you'll encounter is grace unmeasured, vast and free. It'll frighten you and free you at the same time. After all, that's what grace does. Thanks, Jim! Drink up…

—Tullian Tchividjian, Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and author of Jesus + Nothing = Everything

In The Romance of Grace we are confronted with a truth that we may have previously rejected. It seemed too easy to embrace. It lacked obligation on our part and contradicted accusations we have given credence to for the majority of our lives on earth. Yet herein lies the truth—“Not that we loved God, but that God loved us.” This book will help to right the plumb line in your life.

—David Collins, author of Out of the Box, founder of Canadian Food for the Hungry International

So often we turn our faith in Christ into a forcing mechanism, which doesn't work in any event; and if anything, produces disillusionment or hypocrisy. Jim McNeely is hammering home a different point, a point without which Christianity as an American phenomenon could collapse from an eviscerated credibility. The Romance of Grace is about saving our religion. I believe that unless we heed its call, to put grace absolutely without condition and frontally as the be-all and end-all of the Good News, we will lose completely, and not just in “the eyes of the world” but in the failure of well-intentioned religious lives that tried to love and never knew how.

—Paul F. M. Zahl, author of Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life

The radical, scandalous, real grace of Jesus Christ shines from this book. McNeely drills down to the core of Christian living and finds the incredible love of a God who alone is good. The Gospel in our lives is not only a treasure experienced at conversion but a gift for daily living, altering desires and restoring hearts. Grounded in Scripture and rich in contemporary illustrations, grace is revealed as bringing assurance and restoration and relationship. How refreshing, true, and needed in a Christian culture that has lost the romance of grace. Take in this book to breathe the air that love breathes, and rejoice with grateful freedom in the wonder of grace.

—Dax Swanson, Pastor of Grace Church Bellingham in Bellingham, WA

McNeely's ideas in The Romance of Grace are inspired, and the way he makes the point creative. One technique in particular stands out—at times, the book almost seems like it's enacting a Law-Gospel dialectic. He speaks unflinchingly about our need or duty to do something as humans, and the language of these sections is always quite demanding, such as the idea that God wants ALL of us, and we must surrender to Him. Then he immediately makes the point that we can't do it ourselves, that it's not about us, and that God loves us unconditionally. Exploring how a theology of grace relates to love, beauty, and aesthetics is a wonderful enterprise, and The Romance of Grace is a serious contribution both to Protestant thought as a whole and, for us, to the way we approach Christianity.

—David Zahl, Mockingbird Ministries, editor of The Mockingbird Blog

Copyright 2013 Jim McNeely III

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To my wife, Betty McNeely,

the most grace-centered

person I know.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No book comes about without the help and cooperation of others. I could never have written this without the assistance and encouragement of many people, probably more than I can remember.

First, I am grateful to my wife, Betty McNeely, who—besides being my soul mate and best friend—is my best debater and the sounding board for all of my theological speculations and ideas about spirituality. She is the most naturally grateful and grace-centered person I know, keeping me real while encouraging me to dream big and to think fresh. This book would have been completely impossible without her help and is dedicated to her.

Thanks to Lee and Rosemary Connors, senior pastors at Dakota Creek Christian Center. They let us come in and teach, sing, and dream about the incredible message of the romance of grace. I will forever be grateful for their unhesitating support and encouragement throughout this project. Thanks to everyone at Dakota Creek, all of whom have embraced the message of The Romance of Grace with open arms and have been a tremendous encouragement to me in every way.

Thanks to Dax Swanson, my wonderful friend and fellow grace addict. Most people challenge me to not go too far with the idea of grace; he challenges me to go further and deeper with it. It is amazing to watch him work through pastoring a growing church from a genuinely Gospel-centered perspective. He has made deep sacrifices to follow Jesus, and I'm sure his reward will be very great.

Thanks to David Collins of Paradigm Ministries in Abbotsford, B.C., for the stimulating discussions and conversations and for taking my ideas and insights so seriously. I am blessed and humbled to know you—a beautiful believer full of much wisdom.

Thanks to David Zahl, first for dreaming up Mockingbird Ministries. He has been amazingly supportive and encouraging about this book, and his suggestions really helped shape it in substantial ways. It has been a joy to get to know him, and I can only hope that Mockingbird continues to prosper and grow. The entire Zahl clan is simply amazing.

Thanks to Lori Higham, who went the extra mile as my editor to make this a far better book than I could have made it on my own. Thanks also to Maria Leahy, who helped clean things up before Lori saw the manuscript. Thanks to Greg Simanson for the great cover art, to Katherine Sears for convincing me to submit the book to Booktrope in the first place, and to the whole Booktrope team for rethinking the way books should be published.

Thanks to my men's group friends in Everson, Washington, who have plodded slowly through the scriptures with me at Master's Blend every Saturday now for over five years. Many of the insights in this book were born from discussions around that table. Thanks to Si Halbert, Louis Gierke, Dave Wilson, Rob Meyers, and all the men who have come and gone during that time.

Peace, honor, grace, and love

in Jesus' name to all who read this,

Jim McNeely

FOREWORD

In many ways, The Romance of Grace began in a restaurant in Everson, Washington. Our men's group met every Saturday to delve deeply into the Bible, and what we came to see in those Scriptures exceeded our highest expectations: we found grace. Abundant, undeserved, amazing grace. This book is a testimony of that grace and of our incredible God who so freely gives it.

In reviewing the notes I jotted down at Master's Blend, where our men's group would meet every weekend, I saw themes begin to form and take shape. I started a blog (www.thereforenow.com) to share these exciting insights with other believers, but it began to go further than that—and my first book, The Romance of Grace, was born.

To keep up with news concerning The Romance of Grace, including speaking and musical event schedules and further insights about the radical gospel of Christ in our everyday lives, please visit the Therefore Now Ministries website at www.thereforenow.com. You can also follow me, Jim McNeely, on twitter at @jwmcneely.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

The Kingdom Ruled by Desire

Chapter 2

The Two Kinds of Good

Chapter 3

Beyond the Coercion of the Law

Chapter 4

Grace Is the Air Love Breathes

Chapter 5

Living under Grace

Chapter 6

The Grace We Don't Want

Chapter 7

Temptation, Desire, and Predestination—Oh My!

Chapter 8

Gift Culture—Living for the Desires of Others

Chapter 9

A Sense of Wonder: The Centrality of Gratitude

Chapter 10

Grace and Desire in the Godhead

CHAPTER 1

THE KINGDOM RULED BY DESIRE

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it (Matthew 13:44–46, NKJV).

IN ONE OF MY FAVORITE MOVIES, The Princess Bride, Buttercup has submitted to an obligatory, loveless marriage to Prince Humperdinckin an ill-considered scheme to save her beloved Westley from harm. As the wedding approaches, she has a dream in which an old, unpleasant woman shrieks at her:

THE ANCIENT BOO-ER. Boo. Boo. Boo.

BUTTERCUP. Why do you do this?

THE ANCIENT BOO-ER. Because you had love in your hands, and you gave it up.

BUTTERCUP: But they would have killed Westley if I hadn't done it.

THE ANCIENT BOO-ER. Your true love lives. And you marry another. True Love saved her in the Fire Swamp, and she treated it like garbage. And that's what she is, the Queen of Refuse. So bow down to her if you want, bow to her. Bow to the Queen of Slime, the Queen of Filth, the Queen of Putrescence. Boo. Boo. Rubbish. Filth. Slime. Muck. Boo. Boo. Boo.[1]

Like Buttercup, we have a great lover who saved us and has promised to come for us. Yet we treat His love like garbage, as though it were nothing. We settle for less than true love. We walk with the voice of the Ancient Boo-er in our ears, accusing us of settling for misery—and for no good reason. We have romance in our hands, knowing that our true love lives, and we give that up for nothing but petty fears, useless obligations, and secret shames. Truly, our great sin is not stealing or adultery or anger or false oaths—our greatest sin is that we give up true love. We fall short—not of our obligations, but of glory (Romans 3:23). We make a thousand decisions because of fear of the futile opinions of others, opinions that lead us down the path to a dungeon of loveless entanglements. We wake up and go about settling for small, unsatisfying pleasures, knowing full well that we are made for a greater fate, that we are born not just for adventure but for true affection. However, just as in the movie, our great lover persists in His devotion to us, and our failure to trust Him is not the end of the story.

The greatest commandment is to love God with our whole being—with all of our heart, with all of our soul, and with all of our mind. Yet love cannot be commanded. If one of us picks up a small child and shakes him harshly and demands that he love us, he may eventually pretend love to avoid further abuse, but he will not really love us—he will hate us. A man cannot hold a gun to a woman's head and command real love; although her life depends on it, she cannot help but despise him for it. Love cannot be forced; love is altogether unable to be touched by such demands. In the face of coercion, love remains effortlessly defiant. It is not without truth that we are said to “fall” into love; we cannot by pure reason or moral fortitude force our way into love. In that same way, romance with our Creator is born not of coercion but of grace. It is His kindness that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4).

So, how do we stop living by mere obligation? How do we escape from the “prison of ought” and enter a life driven by true romance? How can we begin to abide in love again?

To begin to consider these questions, we are going to examine two of Jesus’ parables—the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl of great price. If we take these two little parables from Jesus seriously, we realize that the kingdom of heaven is not primarily about morals and virtue. Rather, it is all about raw, greedy, genuine desire. There are two distinct parables here about two different people who find something they badly want. Both of them go to extremes to obtain it. Although at first glance the two stories are similar, they are in fact very different, like two bookends or a left and a right hand. In what way are they so different? The first parable is from the human perspective; the second is from the divine perspective.

THE HUMAN PERSPECTIVE: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AS TREASURE

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field(Matthew 13:44 NASB).

In the first parable, we have a man walking through a field he does not own. One might say he is trespassing, poking around a bit. Unexpectedly, he finds a treasure hidden in the field. No one else knows about the treasure; no one else sees it. Everyone else looks at this field and says, “What a worthless, scrubby, rocky piece of land!” It is such a bad parcel that the owner doesn't even know there is a treasure in there somewhere; evidently, the field appears so worthless that he has never ventured forth to look around. However, our man, by sheer accident, trespassing on land that he does not own, has found it. It is invaluable treasure, the fortune of a lifetime. He is thrilled! Note that perhaps he should have gone and told the owner, but that isn't what he does, because he is greedy for it. He wants the treasure badly; he really wants it. He is not thinking in terms of morals or of rationality. He is thinking in terms of emotion and desire.

And here is the key: “From joy over it” he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field, the whole field, which no one else wants. He accepts the worthless, scrubby parts of the field, too, just to obtain the treasure hidden within it. He sells everything, sacrifices everything, out of joy. His joy leads to sacrifice because he has perceived the hidden value in that field that no one else can see.

We might imagine that our sullen service, dismal self-sacrifice, and martyrdom achieve some kind of merit for us. Conversely, they achieve for us only dismal self-sacrifice and sour-pickle living. I remember a friend frequently complaining that he didn't spend enough time in prayer or that he skipped his morning “quiet time.”

What is the problem with this mind-set? The problem is not the discipline or the attempt to regularly spend time with the Lord. The problem is the focus: we must first find our treasure. We must perceive the gold hidden in the field. Then, from joy, we will be able to arise and awaken the dawn, seeking wisdom as we write poetry flowing from our souls—because we do it all out of joy and desire. In the parable, the man sold everything he had. He sacrificed all, and he did it out of joy. We must first find our treasure, and then sacrifice will flow from us like a river. Importantly, we must first stop all our ridiculous posing and fake sullen service—our focus on self—as we seek this hidden gold. Until we have truly perceived and apprehended this treasure, nothing else will make any sense.

THE DIVINE PERSPECTIVE: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AS PEARL MERCHANT

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls and, upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it (Matthew 13:45–46 NASB).

The nature of the treasure of this parable may shock us. If we read the first parable carefully, we see that it says the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure. Yet in the second parable, the kingdom is compared to the merchant who seeks the pearl, not the pearl itself. It is of paramount importance that we make this simple observation: the kingdom of heaven is not the pearl in this parable; it is the guy seeking the pearl. In the first parable, we have some bumbling fool who trespasses and stumbles over a treasure quite by accident. But here we have a merchant who is an expert, and who is always searching—in fact, searching his whole life—for this great pearl. He knows pearls. He is an expert. He knows what he seeks. This person is like the kingdom of God. In other words, God is the merchant.

If God is the merchant, what—or who—is the pearl? Here is the crux of the matter, the amazing fact. We are the pearl. This is the intent of the message: we are a rare and sought-after treasure in the eyes of God. He sees something unseen by our own condemning self: not failure, but beauty. He really, really likes us. He wants us; He perceives enormous beauty and wealth in us. He has become greedy and jealous over us because He is consumed with strong and passionate desire for us.

I will never forget the moment when this first dawned on me. I was going through a number of difficulties; my business was failing, and I had the dreadful task of laying off my trusted and devoted employees who had sacrificed much for me. I had many other problems going on that were even worse. It was a bad time. Meanwhile, in a men's Bible study, we were going through the parables of Jesus and had just discussed His story of the pearl. As I was taking a shower, I was pondering this seemingly dull and familiar parable when it suddenly hit me: He is the merchant and I am the pearl. Me! I'm the pearl. That means He went and sacrificed all to get me, not just because of some weird theological obligation but because He wanted me and saw great worth in me. When that truth hit me, I cried so hard that my stomach muscles hurt. A switch had turned on inside somewhere, and I finally understood: God really desires me.

I should be clear about something here. I am not saying that God in His grace has condescended to love us despite being repulsed by us. We do not deny that we are horridly sinful and that we are on the wrong side of justice. Yet what I am saying is that, despite all of that, God sees in us something that He greatly desires, something that gives Him joy. It is not from pity and groundless mercy alone that He has sacrificed everything to obtain us. His love, according to this parable, includes the idea that we have great value. We are a pearl of surpassing value that He is willing to do anything to obtain. If we perish without knowledge of the truth (2 Peter 3:9), we are a grievous loss in His eyes.

This is the definition of grace: God, by His own initiative, likes us. There is none of this nonsense about “loving but not liking” with God. In fact, He is extremely taken with us, to the point of sacrificing all else to have us. We are not battling an attitude in God in which He is constantly ready to condemn us and reject us, ever focused on our flaws and shortcomings. Rather, He sees something wonderful in us. He has dealt definitively with our flaws, sins, and shortcomings because He wants these things swept completely out of the picture. He is excited about us. We are very greatly loved, even as we presently stand. God has joy over finding us! It was from joy over it that He sold all that He had:

Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2 NASB, emphasis mine).

THE COSMIC ROMANCE

In both parables, we have sacrifice—deep-cutting, sell-everything sacrifice. However, this is not the sacrifice of a grudging, martyr-syndrome obligation; it is one born of real desire, of intense greed. These parables tell of individuals who see what they want very, very clearly, individuals who couldn't care less what others think. They see something that no other sees. They have reckless passion because they have seen something of surpassing value that they want. And they go for it. They sell everything to get it.

In fact, the kingdom of God is like an intense cosmic romance, a coming together of the two genuine desires, with a sacrifice born of utter disregard for everything else in the world. God's forgiveness doesn't stem from a duty or obligation. Rather, He forgives because He so greatly loves us that He is willing to sacrifice all else to obtain us. The invisible intelligence that has caused the universe to spring into existence—the One who has caused life in all its complexity and mystery and ferocity and wonder to spring forth—has been searching the universe, and He has found me. I am His pearl; I am the one He loves. I am important, far more important in His eyes than I could have imagined. He has done shocking and seemingly insane things to open up a relationship with me. He is crazy about me.

Paul refers to this cosmic romance when he teaches about the marriage relationship. Even our sexuality and earthly romance is but a picture or shadow of the love Christ has for the church and the church for Christ:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31–32 ESV).

In context, Paul has urged husbands to love their wives, which is reminiscent of Jacob's love for Rachel:

So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her (Gen. 29:20 ESV).

We tend to think that God's purposes toward us are mainly about coercing us to become morally acceptable and good. If our theology does not primarily lead to virtuous patterns and behaviors, we think it is wrong.

The truth is that morals are good only because they service love and promote the greater enjoyment of godly pleasures. Morals are not the ultimate objective in and of themselves. We may have eaten from the tree of good and evil, causing us to see everything colored in terms of morals, but that is not the rubric under which we were originally intended to live. Picture God as a man who is ravaged by love for a beautiful woman. Such a man's first thought is not, “How can I get this woman to be more practical and virtuous?” His main thought is, “How can I get this woman to fall in love with me?” God doesn't primarily want our morals; He wants us to fall in love with Him. Love for God is, after all, the main commandment in which all the others find their roots. Morals were important enough to send Jesus to the cross, but we are the joy for which He endured the shame.

I am walking today—and you are too, if you have seen your treasure—as one who is greatly loved by the God who is real. In His eyes, you and I are pearls worthy of sacrifice. To God, you and I are easily worth dying for. God sees something in us that no one else sees, and He is the only expert whose opinion matters. No other is in love with us the way He is. Forget the focus on being good. We are not good. It doesn't work on that basis anyway. Let's worry about real desire and walk in the joy of being the ones who are very greatly loved. This is the soil and the seed that bears all other fruit. Grace is not just a doctrinal position. Grace does not focus on us primarily as sinners. Grace starts with a very great and a very intense love, a God-initiated love. All doctrine, all atonement, all virtue, all practice, stems from the fact that God loves us; any teaching that obscures, neglects, or denies this truth is damaging and in error. In our salvation and fellowship with the Lord, we are not just “getting right” with Him. We are entering a cosmic romance with a passionate lover, and He is interested in our heart's truest desire. His deepest objective isn't to make us more moral; it is to get us to love Him back. Virtue is the fruit, not the root.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10 ESV).

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. And He [Jesus] said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23–24 ESV). How does that work in conjunction with the message of this chapter? Does it invalidate it?

2. If God is crazy about me, shouldn't things be going my way a little more often? Why do I still seem to have so many struggles and problems? Maybe this is all just a nice fairy tale. Maybe it isn't really true. How do I know that I am really God's pearl?

3. In the parables, both the treasure hunter and the pearl seeker had to abandon all else to obtain the objects of their desire. Is that an essential truth? What does that mean to me in a practical sense? Must I sell all and live naked in the woods? What does this joyous abandonment look like in practice?

4. Is love really more important than morals? Does this idea promote moral license? How does a love relationship with God lead to the fruit of behavioral virtue?

1 The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner (1987; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD.

CHAPTER 2

THE TWO KINDS OF GOOD

And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17, NIV).

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it (Genesis 3:6, NIV).

HERE IN GENESIS 3:6 IS THE FIRST TIME we see the concept of “good” divided. What do I mean? If someone says, “I'm being a good girl,” she means she is not cheating on her diet, overspending, smoking, or something of that nature. It is a moral good—she is denying herself something she likes in order to do the right thing; thus, she is “good.” On the other hand, if she decides to have that hot fudge sundae, she isn't being a “good girl,” but she might say, “Mmmm, this sundae sure is good!” That is what I mean by the division (two meanings) of the word “good”—there is both a moral and an aesthetic concept of good. In Genesis 3, we see what was previously a unified understanding of good split into the moral good and the aesthetic good. At first, this seems like a semantic accident, but in reality, the representation of these two concepts through this one word is most profound and finds its roots in Genesis 3:6.

In the beginning, Adam and Eve were free to eat from any tree. All that was pleasurable was also all that was good. The one forbidden fruit was also the one undesirable fruit. How do we know this? Because there was a point “when the woman saw” that the fruit was good, pleasing, and desirable, indicating that before this moment, she had not seen it as “good,” and thus her idea of the good had previously been unified. The fruit was forbidden, and Adam and Eve had naturally viewed the forbidden fruit as undesirable. Until the serpent lured Eve, only that which was moral had ever been perceived as desirable; there was no division of the good. There was no concept of a moral good and evil apart from aesthetic desirability and undesirability, because evil had no aesthetic allure. There really was only delicious and disgusting. This is the state in which God intended us to live.

Now we live in a world in which it is alien to even the most zealously righteous person that the moral good could actually be the clearly desirable thing; rather, the moral good is set against the aesthetic good. Pleasure is universally wrapped up and intertwined with the forbidden and with destructive selfishness. From food and eating to addictive behaviors to sexuality, our desires are constantly drawn to the forbidden. I believe that, for many, the steam goes out of the marriage relationship because their sexuality is based on the fiery desire of the soul for the forbidden. Within marriage, sex becomes acceptable or even mandated; it feels like duty, and desire flies out the window. This is pure speculation and certainly the reality is always more complex, but this identification of desire with the forbidden is a real factor.

THE GENESIS OF THE CONSCIENCE

And so we live in a world where our desires are constantly confronted with the call of the forbidden. This is the voice of the serpent everywhere, calling to our fallen nature, reasoning with us about the desirability of sin. As Paul says,

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned… (Romans 5:12 ESV).

Temptation has power because it draws on this very truth. Like God, Satan is more interested in our heart than in our health or our finances. It is our heart—our true desire—that is the great and sought-after treasure. Advertisers know this and use it to lure men to desire their products, using fantasies about power, sex, and wealth. Every love story tells the tale that the heart's desire is paramount.

The will has entered into the human psyche to help us survive this assault on the heart. The will holds firmly to what is proper, what is moral. It imposes control over the wild and uncontrolled heart. Yet in the original Eden, there was no need for division between the “will” and the “desire.” Adam and Eve did not have to worry about the pressure to do what was right despite what they wanted to do. What they wanted was also what was right. In the garden, there was no notion that anything desirable was wrong. Only among fallen individuals is the will necessary because it steers us to what is right and gives us the strength to choose that which the heart and its desires are set against.

In the garden, prior to the fall, this dependence on the will was not necessary. Once the desire for the forbidden entered, at the suggestion of the serpent, the moral and the aesthetic good were split. Then our conscience was born, and we entered the prison of ought. We became entangled in obligation, taking up residence in that place of interpreting things from the perspective of the knowledge of good and evil. We began to need to discern what we ought to do, not simply do what we loved, because our desire was drawn to the destructive. The world was suddenly filled with wrong things that we craved, with opportunities we wanted that we ought not to pursue. Thus, if we do the right thing, we do it against our foul heart, which constantly wars against all that is right.

The mistake many people make is believing that the aim and object of Christ is to strengthen our will. A stronger will, it is thought, leads to greater sanctification. However, the fact is that this kind of effort is exactly what Paul describes as the “flesh.” The flesh does not only entail carnality; it also entails the intention of the un-graced, un-gifted person—by strength of unaided will—to do what is right. What Christ actually seeks is the death of the will, the death of the flesh altogether. He does not see hope in a remodel. He wants to bulldoze and build from scratch.

THE NATURE OF THE LAW

It bears saying that what the law really does is press notions of right and wrong on the unwilling person, setting him against his desires. The law insists on the moral good, even though the inner desire is for the forbidden. This is the heartbeat of what is variously called “legalism” or “pharisaism.”

Whether the voice of moral correctness comes through the conscience (Romans 2:14–16) or through the written law (Romans 2:17–24), the pressure to resist the inner desire and instead comply with the moral indicative is what Paul would call the law. Of course, no one ever comes right out and says, “Oh, yes, I'm very legalistic, I'm a total Pharisee!” There are people who top any scale for legalism and yet do not see themselves as legalistic. However, in imposing moral codes that are inconsistent with their inner desires, they divide their inner man between moral and aesthetic good. They then believe this division is the essence of true faith. That, dear readers, is legalism. How many instances there are in literature and popular culture where this repression of the true desire for the sake of obligation leads to evil! In this division of moral good versus desirable good, the emphasis on morals over desire is what makes religion seem so colorless and lifeless. It is not that the will must be strengthened; rather, it is the heart that must be purified.

The aim of Christ is not to “up the ante” with a more stringent moral code. He does not want to help us put a better leash on the old dog. His aim is to bring the good of morals and the good of desire into unity within us. His aim, in fact, is to kill this devotion to morals, this identity that is the voice of the will, and to replace it with an entirely new kind of person. The purpose of the written law is to bring this division into sharp relief.

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight since through the law comes knowledge of sin (Romans 3:19–20 ESV).

When someone goes to the dentist complaining of a toothache, the first thing the dentist does is pull out an evil-looking, sharp metal probe and start to poke around. “Does this hurt? How about this?” Is the dentist some kind of sadistic monster? I've always thought so. However, we all know that the dentist pokes around the mouth not for the purpose of inflicting pain but rather to find the problem tooth in order to heal it. The programmer tests his code, seeking to break it, so that he can fix the bugs. Jesus preaches a stringent moral code to fish out this inward division—to diagnose us as sick—so that He can bring us to a place of healing and transformation.

Someone whose mind is still set in the divided universe—where moral good is set against desirable good—looks at the offer of grace, and says, “You mean all is forgiven? Now we can just do anything? I can just sin and sin and sin that grace might increase?” To the divided person, the liberty of desire looks like a green light to sin. What he is missing is that what God really offers is not simply release from guilt but rather a healing of this division of “good.” This is His ultimate goal: to return us to our original state in the garden, where what is desirable coincides with what is right. The healing He seeks for us is not that we have the freedom to sin without consequence but rather that we experience freedom in our true inner being to actually desire what is right. He wants what is morally good to become what is aesthetically good in our true inner selves. When Paul defends the liberty we have in Christ in Romans 6, he explains that the obedience we now produce as Christians is obedience from the heart:

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness (Romans 6:17–18 ESV).

THE SHAPE OF THE HEALED DESIRE

Imagine that God intends to restore us—to heal this terrible wound, this gaping division in our inner souls. Imagine that He wants to remove this need for something called the will, this necessity to constantly go against what we want and do what we do not want in order to attain morality. Imagine that God wants to refashion us somehow so that our real desire does not run against what is right. What, eventually, would this healing, this obedience from the heart, look like? What kind of world would the kingdom of God look like if it really did come to earth? It would look like grace! That's right. Unbelievably, the impossible dream of living an idyllic existence in which the desire and the will are in perfect harmony within us, where the moral good and the aesthetic good are one and the same, is the world He wants us to enter right now. The main characteristic of the new person we become in Christ is that this rift between moral good and desirable good is removed. Our true self, the newly born person we are in Christ, does not have this division.

If we are thinking clearly about this, our minds are fairly screaming an objection: “Hey, are you saying that, as Christians, we become sinless? We're not sinless now! We don't just become Christians and then lose all desire for sin! What are you saying?” This reaction is ironic coming from those who resist the message of radical grace—because through this very message, we are admitting that, as Christians, we still stand in need of forgiveness and mercy. In fact, by thinking through and asking these kinds of questions, we end up going through Paul's reasoning in Romans almost point for point. Romans 7 makes sense only when we can say, “Hey! I thought I was this new creature, dead to sin! Why do I still sin? What is going on around here?” This is the context of Romans 8, which says there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The solution to our foibles will never again be to go back to the punishing coercion of the law, imposed on our recalcitrant desire. The solution is always that we are 100 percent justified and desired by God and that He is seeking our love. He won't settle for anything less than a great love responding freely to an even greater love.

Our true self is born of the Spirit, but our fleshly mind does not always remember this! Yet the fact remains that our new self doesn't just agree with the law; it actually loves God. Remember Jacob who, in his devotion to Rachel (Genesis 29:20), expressed that seven years of work was nothing because of the great love he had for her?

The old self agrees with the law but desires other things, and it views all obedience as drudgery to be escaped. The serpent still has its hooks in the flesh of the old self; its whispered promises still have sway over the flesh's desire. Thus, the mind is set on the flesh, and this mind, which reverts back to imposing law on the unwilling human desire, must fail. Conversely, the mind set on the spirit, the new man, instinctively does the things of the law out of a genuine desire for the things of God.

Jesus is onboard with this idea. In fact, He made it up, and I lifted the idea from Him. The parables Jesus taught us about the kingdom of God are all about desire and passion. The man finds the treasure, and from joy over it, sells his possessions and makes his sacrifices. Have you ever felt that something was missing in reading that Jesus said everyone who sins is a slave of sin while also saying that if the Son shall set you free, you shall be free indeed (John 8:34–36)? Have you ever thought, “Hey! Where's my freedom?” Moral good without the desire to do good is still a desire for evil—one that is merely thwarted. And living in a state in which your desire is thwarted isn't freedom; it is torture! In a way, sinners who do what they want are much happier than religious, moral people who do what is right but try never to do what they want. Real healing, real grace, real power for living comes when we change over to the universe of grace. To those on the outside, it looks like the freedom to sin, because their desire is still wrapped up in the forbidden. But to those who enter grace, the hope is that the power and attraction of the forbidden begins to die off; then is when we begin to learn to live with a true passion, a true desire, for the living God. Thus the division in us, this split of the good into two halves, unites in our truest self, and we start to learn what it is to live in accordance with the reality of this love with a single mind and a whole heart without shame or remorse.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Many people think the root issue behind The Fall is that we want to be like God, that we want to make idols of ourselves. Does this conflict or harmonize with the idea that at The Fall, our formerly whole sense of the good was split into the moral and the aesthetic good?

2. If the essence of the law is that it presses unwanted moralistic behaviors onto an unwilling heart, enforced by the threat of punishment and consequence, is the law evil?

3. If the gospel has the power to impart a healed desire, an understanding of the beauty of virtue, why does the Christian still struggle with sin? Is this concept of the transformation of the soul, the new man who is raised and the old man who dies, even true at all?

CHAPTER 3

BEYOND THE COERCION OF THE LAW

For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed (Romans 6:14–17, NASB).

IN THE MOVIE GROUNDHOG DAY, Phil Connors is an egocentric television weatherman who is forced to visit Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for the annual Groundhog Day celebration. He soon finds that he is repeating the same day, Groundhog Day, over and over. At first he is bewildered and frightened, but soon he realizes that no matter what he does, there are no moral consequences to his actions whatsoever. He can philander, live recklessly, break the law, and pretty much do anything he wants; no matter what, he wakes up to the same Groundhog Day again. There are no consequences. He imagines that he is a completely free man.

However, he soon realizes that this is not freedom but a prison. He attempts to end the cycle by trying to kill the groundhog, which doesn't work. Killing himself doesn't work either. After enduring a time of complete depression and helpless misery, his producer Rita suggests that he try using the opportunity to improve himself.

He then proceeds to learn how to play the piano, ice sculpt, and speak French. This proves unsatisfying as well, so he tries to really win the love of Rita. Even this doesn't work, so he turns to helping others just because nothing else makes him happy. When he finally learns that serving others is life's chief joy, he actually does win Rita's love, and both the day and the movie end.

Contrary to popular belief, grace—100 percent forgiveness and acceptance, get-out-of-jail-free, fire-insurance, sloppy-agape, free-gift grace—is the essential foundation for true virtue. This does not mean the teaching of grace is against the law. It is not what theologians call “antinomianism.” If I tell you that you must get from Los Angeles to Hong Kong and then I lend you a unicycle, you can obediently and diligently start pedaling away, but you will drown before you make it. Does that make Hong Kong a poor destination or unicycles evil? Of course not! You just need a different vehicle for this particular situation. It is the same with the flesh, grace, and true change. If you are serious about personal transformation and sustainable, behavioral, heart-level holiness, you need to know that you are not going to even get close to that holiness without grace. Your flesh is a unicycle to Hong Kong, while grace is a Mach 5 fighter jet. Under grace, you are going to get there quickly and with extreme prejudice.

There is an aspect of the gospel that may have been lost amid other arguments, one that is crucial to understanding the relationship between grace and behavioral virtue. Law assumes the heart will not willingly go along with its edicts and that coercion produces the desired virtue. It assumes there is nothing in the person except the fallen desire for the forbidden. We are enormously attuned to these assumptions. Without a sense of obligation or duty, without fear of the negative consequences, we assume that all will naturally go wild, pursuing harmful pleasures. We are so used to this way of looking at ourselves that we imagine this is what it means to be human. We can't even imagine truly living from the heart and thereby being holy and virtuous. This is the nature of slavery: a person is pressed into servitude and remains there for fear of punishment. When we do what we do because we are coerced by fear of punishment, we are basically slaves even though we appear to do right. This spiritual slavery is clearly contraindicated in 1 John:

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love (1 John 4:18, NASB).

GO YOUR WAY AND SIN NO MORE

Nothing illustrates this relationship between great mercy and great liberty like the following story:

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. And early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. And the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. “Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” And they were saying this, testing Him, in order that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And again He stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And when they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the midst. And straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” And she said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go your way. From now on sin no more.” (John 8:1–11, NASB, emphasis mine).

There are a thousand sermons in this story, but we are going to focus on the last verse. Here, the scribes and Pharisees are trying to trip up Jesus, to prove that His compassion and grace are lawless and evil. They want to prove that grace is all wrong. They bring a woman who was caught in adultery to see what He will do. After powerfully and ingeniously dismissing the vindictive crowd, he addresses the woman. In the end, He doesn't say to her, “Follow Me and sin no more.” We often want to make it say that; we want to read a strong moral indicative into His statement. We want Him to rebuke her. Instead, He says, go your way. He wants her to go her way. It must be her autonomous decision—the way of her heart, her love—that goes the sinless way. This has to be her own choice. It is His intention that mercy produce an autonomously chosen holiness. In being rescued, in being shown great mercy, she is given free will.

The intention is not that she go her way and sin. Nor is it that she be coerced against her will to sin no more. Anything other than her free choice and sinning no more is less than Jesus’ best intention for her. Her “way” and her “sinlessness” were to be one. Jesus intended for her that the mercy extended to her produce this result: that her autonomous choice be holiness. He intended through extending mercy that the split between the aesthetic good and the moral good be reunified.

What is this relationship between mercy and freely chosen holiness? We are about to look at this principle in great depth, but we see it in microcosm in this story. There was truly no condemnation for this woman. No one on earth was worthy to condemn her except One, and that One chose not to condemn. The only way for her to go was the way of her own choice because no condemnation remained to coerce her to do otherwise.

Jesus was saying to her, “Take your freedom; none of these people condemned you, and neither does God. Your secret is out, your shame is public, and your redemption is equally public. No one on earth is worthy to condemn you, and the only One who is worthy to do so does not condemn you. Being free from condemnation altogether, you are now beyond all coercion and fear. You can no longer be manipulated by your shame. Take your freedom and, being free, seek the greater value of holiness.”

Holiness imposed on the unwilling heart is not freedom; it is coercive slavery. Punishment and coercion were what the stone throwers wanted for her—but not Jesus. Complete lack of condemnation from all sides, though richly deserved, is the open door to truly autonomous and sustainable holiness. Only radical and scandalous grace can produce a freely chosen repentance.

The only door to less sin is freedom, and the only door to freedom is mercy. This is why the sinners flocked to Jesus like moths to the flame. Jesus says this to each of us:

“Is there no one worthy to condemn you? I who am worthy to condemn do not condemn you; instead I died for you. Who, then, condemns you? There is therefore now no condemnation. Go the way of your freedom and heart's desire, freely choosing to sin no more.”

LAW PRODUCES REBELLION? REALLY?

The New Testament teaches us that the moral law is not merely impotent in leading us to righteousness; rather, it actually incites us to rebellion and disobedience. In Romans 7, Paul writes the following:

I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died (Romans 7:7–9 NKJV).

This passage is widely quoted to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the law to make us righteous, but one must ask the question: Really? Telling someone not to commit adultery somehow leads them to commit adultery? How does that work? It really doesn't seem to make much sense at all. It would seem that if you tell someone to do something, the person would at least be a bit more inclined to do it. What in the world is he talking about? If we can't simply explain some course of action to a person to encourage him or her to do it, how can we ever ask anyone to ever do anything? Is Paul completely insane? This just doesn't quite make any sense, does it?

Actually, it does make sense. We all know it in the hazy depths of our soul somewhere, but it bears some unpacking. Let's suppose that it is true that we bear a divided understanding of the good and that our aesthetic sense is rooted in the forbidden. That means I've probably already been thinking about or pursuing or even practicing the very thing that the law forbids, and I have been in some way avoiding the thing the law asks me to do. The law to me is all distastefully bland and dull and intrusive.

But there is more. The law does not appeal to our desire because it was drafted with the understanding that our desire is drawn to the forbidden. Because of this, the law was designed to appeal not to our desire but to our fear. It spells out patterns of behavior and the negative consequences that will ensue if we disobey. It says, “Do this and you will be blessed; do otherwise and you will be punished.” However, desire is stronger than fear, and the profit motive is more powerful than the obligation motive. We inherently understand that we have transgressed the law, and that we will at some point and in some way continue to do so. Our conscience is very clear about our past transgressions, and the law does not alleviate this. In fact, it condemns us all the more. We know that the guilt of our past secret sin is not vaporous and passing away with time; instead, it is as solid and real and present as the ground under our feet. Our conscience looks at the law and understands perfectly that it rightly condemns us. We understand that, in all truth, justice stands against us. We don't enjoy the fact that the law spells this out with great eloquence and power. We are not inclined to reflect on the gravity and consequence of our sins; we are inclined to run away.

So, how do we respond? We hate the law. We hate the affliction our conscience presses upon us. We are desperate for peace, for some distracting pleasure. We are desperate to have our desires gratified somehow, and that objective certainly doesn't lie in the path of what is right and good! Against fate, against justice, against the terrible destiny and punishment that our conscience and the law agree are ours, we must exercise our strength and genius and creativity and beauty and every resource we can muster to snatch some pleasure from the world. The law is from God, and we will find no help or favor there. Here is what we all inherently know: God really is love…and we are selfish haters, and, if He is good at all, He must stand against us. There is no pleasure to be found in His holiness. There is only condemnation, and rightly so. We cannot face that we ourselves are unjust; we must put some salve of pleasure over the wound. At all costs, we must forget our own sin and condemnation so that we can muster some joy in our times. Yet the law reminds us of these awful and unpleasant truths and robs us of joy.

And so the law comes and says you must behave thus. You must not covet, you must only want what you have or what you can honestly come to possess. You can smell the condemnation in this tenth commandment. You can feel your powerlessness to obey it. And so you run, doing anything to find some pleasure in the world against fate, because you know the truth. You have already failed; you are full of coveting, and it fills you with murderous, lustful rage. What's worse, you have learned to cover these things over with civility and an elaborate mask of lies. By trudging through your routine, you can almost make yourself forget these failures and disappointments. Yet you love these things the law is telling you that you cannot have. In the end, the wanting is more powerful than the moral obligation, and, while you may by an act of will prevent yourself from taking the forbidden thing, you are powerless to stop your heart from loving it. Because it is forbidden, it represents wild and unimaginable freedom and pleasure. So many others have such happiness with this forbidden thing, and you are denied it. You are prevented by no less than God! If only you could be free to do as you wish, but alas, you must not.

Weighed down by our miserable obligations, full of love for the very things we shouldn't love, secretly full of seething anger and deferred hope and desire, we soldier on—useless and morose—as whitewashed tombs. The law's demands may be right, but we hate them from the very bottom of our heart. Indeed, according to Scripture, the purpose of the law is to show us that these things are so (Romans 3:19–20). Who indeed will release us from this terrible fate (Romans 7:24)? The law really is right, but it really does produce rebellion. The law is a dentist's probe that finds the bad tooth and produces the pain in the great abundance that the dull ache belies. We hate pain, so we stay away, and we wait until the ache is really bad before we seek a solution. The law is telling us that we are much sicker than we want to acknowledge, and we really don't want to think too much about that!

GRACE—THE ONLY HOPE FOR TRUE VIRTUE

To have any possibility of achieving true virtue, we must enter the universe of radical, scandalous grace, because true virtue involves obedience from the heart, not obedience from coercion. The only real virtue is the virtue in which the moral good is chosen because it is seen as united with the aesthetic good. The moral good must be loved, not hated and obeyed out of fear. The moralistic man hates his morals and does what is right out of fear by the imposition of the will, an imposition that comes from the opinions of others or from the judgment of God. By doing this, he is deferring his truest hopes and desires and walks with a sick heart:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life (Proverbs 13:12 ESV).

Obedience with a reluctant heart is not true obedience; it is hope deferred. So, whereas the fear of the legalist is that radical grace is an invitation to sinful license, the reality is that the only possibility for true virtue from the heart is to stand in grace. If we have the genuine choice to select the moral good, we must be able to choose it solely because we view it from the heart as the aesthetic good, because we love it.

Why do I say that radical, scandalous grace is the only possibility for true virtue? In Christ, through the propitiation in His blood, the full wrath of God against our sins has been demonstrated. We do not merely have forgiveness; we have justification. Our sins have been avenged. We do not have unconditional love; we have love on the condition of Christ's suffering on our behalf. If there were no vengeance for our sins, our conscience would never give our heart any peace. The writer of Hebrews says that the blood of Christ purifies our very conscience (Hebrews 9:14); the entire condition of our acceptance has been met once and for all. Our conscience insists there must be punishment for our sins, and its demands are met in Christ and Him crucified. It is finished; it is the end of coercion and threat. The threat has already been carried out to its worst conclusion. The threat and sting and fear of our transgression have already been completely fulfilled in great abundance because the law is satisfied in Christ. It has been completely declawed, and we are no longer under the coercion of the law. We have won the spiritual lottery! Because of this, because we are completely and totally and utterly forgiven; we escape the prison of ought, the universe of obligation. We can now do all that we do for an entirely different reason. The reason Christians are often unclear on this is that they have not ceased all of their prosthetic noise and coerced moralism to turn their gaze entirely to the cross. They have not understood the power and scope of the precious blood of Christ spilled for us.

Because of the power of the cross of Christ, we do all that we do because we want to, because our heart chooses it, because of love. There is no threat and no fear hanging over us; we do everything for entirely different reasons. All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. Our questions are now concerned not with right and wrong but with profit and desirability, which are more powerful motivators anyway. We now have the opportunity and the unction to choose the holy because we like it, not simply because it is what we ought to do. In fact, only after Christ removed the fear and force of the threat of the law did this possibility of heart-level obedience become possible.

Indeed, passages such as 1 Corinthians 6 support this point:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything (1 Corinthians 6:9–12 NASB).

Those who put on virtue as a veneer, but whose heart still lusts after the forbidden, are constantly under pressure to break forth into the freedom of their forbidden desires. They are not really walking in grace; they only say that we ought to walk in grace, and so the fire of desire for the forbidden still burns. Yet the true question is not “How strong is our will to squash our forbidden desires?” but rather “What is it that masters my desires?” The simple and complete forgiveness we have in Christ removes the fear and fire of the forbidden from our hearts so that we are no longer mastered by sin's allure. All things are lawful, but I am mastered only by the superior love of Christ. Those who doubt that our holiness is based on faith in the work of Christ, on Christ's holiness and not our own, only practice holiness from fear and not from love. It is not that they merely stumble on particular sins; rather, the problem is that they are idolatrous lovers of the forbidden and are held under control by fear. This cannot last. They have not come to see that all things are lawful, that the kingdom of God is driven by the profit and desire motive and not by moral constraint. Thus, whether they experience a temporary victory of the will or not, they are yet mastered by their inward desire for the unlawful. It is the breakthrough to real, scandalous grace that allows the mind to enter the kingdom of profit, where the conscience itself is washed and the heart is mastered by a truer and grander and more desirable love.

IN THIS IS LOVE

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10, NKJV).

I really want to hammer this point home: only under grace, beyond the coercion of the law, is any kind of virtue possible. The greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. And yet John tells us here that our love is not the point at all. What are we missing here? The entire description of loving with “all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength” should serve as an indicator that we've fallen short (who can actually love God that way?), pointing us to the beauty of God's love. That's where it's all at. As John indicates here, it is only as we see and truly know that love for ourselves that we can even respond. However we make the rest of 1 John work for us, it all has to jive with this verse, does it not?

Here is the message: love begins with God. It is not that I love God! The pressure is off! That's right; He doesn't expect me to learn grace by fulfilling this greatest of the commandments. I don't love well; in fact, I don't know how to love at all. My desire is all askew, and this is the central, all-encompassing problem. It is all way out on the table, right out in the open. I am a hater. It is He who loves first. Being a Christian is not about entering a universe full of rules and conditions. All other human society is about fulfilling expectations and rules. Even complete hedonists have their own society of rules and conditions to be a part of the party. But becoming a Christian really primarily means belief that God first loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Faith in Christ is a condition to salvation in the same way that it is “required” for you to be at a party to enjoy the party. Yes, you have to go. Yes, you have to believe; you have to receive the propitiation. However, couched in the frailties of human language and colored by the human condition, in which we have been accustomed to living under laws and expectations and rules since the time we were infants, it is difficult for us to see what this all means.

If you are letting yourself get hung up on how faith ties in to grace, let me remind you that faith itself is a gift (Ephesians 2:8) and that the machinations of all of that are ultimately bound up in the mystery of God (Romans 11:33–36). For now, let's stop getting hung up on it.

Now does this mean that we do not love? Does the apostle seriously mean it when he says, “not that we love God?” Is he saying we just sit around not loving but being loved by God, that it is all a one-way street?

Let's say, hypothetically, that it does. Let's say that we just sit around not loving, being completely horrible and self-centered, full of lust and murder and hatred and coveting, expecting and hoping that God somehow loves us anyway. Isn't that the way it is, in reality? What is so shocking about this? If God expected us to change first, to love first, we would have a distinct problem, wouldn't we? So often we make a resolve that we need to love God more. It doesn't really work, though, does it? We can pretend and pose and talk the talk, but at the back of it all is a real irritation with the interruption and work that it represents. Life becomes like a trip to the in-laws when we would rather be fishing on a beautiful day. I confess: I am a sham. No, I do not love God very well. I am quite terrible at it.

So, I would say, yes, it does indeed mean that we do not love. Just settle in and admit it. Start there. Until you have accepted that the first thing is that God loves you, even you, you are quite useless regardless of what you do—and worse than useless. The first thing you must do is to stop posing and start being honest. Go ahead and die. You don't love God, you don't know where He is, and you wish you didn't have to worry about it on top of everything else. You have other interests and problems; His laws and requirements are all an intrusion into your little party.

This is the thing to get straight; here is what this is saying. He loves you. Now. He loves you. He loves you. He loves you. You are the one He loves. Do you think He doesn't know what a sinner you really are? While you were yet a sinner, He died for you. Do you get it? Forget about repentance and performance and service and evangelism and the whole world of all of it. It will come later at the right place and time. He loves you. The kingdom of God is all about real, honest desire and passion, and it starts with Him. You are the pearl He seeks, the sheep He went to rescue, and the long-lost son. He actually loves you. This is the beginning. Once you stop all your fake posing and stop whitewashing your loveless dead tomb of a heart and let this simply soak in, you will see it. Only then will you see that this is actually all about love; it is not a demand or a moral requirement.

Then you will begin to see that an honest response of love will start to form in you. “He loves me,” you will say in your heart; “He knows everything about me, and still He loves.” That is when real affection, real joy, real simple-honest-delicious love begins to come to you. It is a response to His love—and that is what He longs for! The world opens up and joy enters, and simple things bring you pleasure as gifts from His hand. You are saved from your horrible condition!

THE GREATEST AND MOST IMPOSSIBLE COMMAND

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Matthew 22:36–38 ESV).

I want to take some time to focus on this fundamental commandment that, according to Jesus, is the first and greatest commandment. Aren't we supposed to heed this greatest command? It is not to obey but to love. I would submit that obedience is easy—it involves actions that we may or may not like doing. The trick of Jesus’ command is that we must love not only in deed but with the heart and soul and mind. Jesus asserts that this is the greatest command. All the others hang on this one. Notice that it is considered a single command, so it is not enough to love God with the soul while harboring doubts in the mind. You have to love Him with your heart and your mind. Notice also that it must not be a partial love or a half-hearted love. The command is to love God completely, with all the heart and all the soul and all the mind.

We must emphasize that the command is to love. It is not to obey. Love is greater than obedience, because grudging, embittered, slavish obedience falls short of the command, while love engenders true obedience. People try to water righteous living down to obedience—because obedience actually sounds doable. Perhaps you can go through the motions of obeying, and your heart might kick in and love it. That is not the command though—the command is to love. Only obedience from the heart is real obedience. The final zinger in the big 10 is coveting, which means you can't just avoid committing adultery; you can't even want to commit adultery. The heart and the mind and the soul must have 100 percent true devotion and affection for God. You have to love Him, and you have to like Him.

It is the greatest commandment, and it seems to be the one commandment about which everyone agrees. After all, who would argue that people don't need to make an effort to try to love God?

So when Paul says that we are no longer justified by the law because through the law comes the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20), he can't possibly be talking about this command, can he? How can there be any relationship with God if we don't have to love Him? Who could think such a thing?

I'll tell you who thinks such a thing: no less than John the apostle! Look at this again:

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10 NASB).

This first and greatest commandment is hugely difficult. We really can't do it; it serves only to show us the great power and depth of our sin. It involves control of the affections, of the theater of the mind. It involves minding and controlling what we love, and loving first and foremost the invisible God. We can't just debate whether He exists; we can't simply “believe” in Him—we must love Him.

The heart, the mind, the soul—all must carry perfect affection for Him. Our problem is that we can't even make ourselves like broccoli, much less say “no” to all the passing pleasures and screaming promises of the world and the flesh to love God passionately and exclusively. Brad Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston, and he couldn't bring himself to faithfully love her. I'm not looking, but that is one heck of a beautiful woman. Yet he still could not control his affections in order to remain true to an exquisite woman whom he could actually see. We are asked to love God whom we cannot see, with our whole being, perfectly. Perfectly? Yes, with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind. All means time—past, present, and future. All also means to the degree that our whole attention and hope and longing are wrapped up in God. If we do not love Him perfectly, then it is not our whole mind and heart that loves, and there is something else for which we harbor idolatry and affection.

Someone might object that I am ignoring the context of 1 John 4. It says that if we say we love God and yet don't love our brethren, we are all a sham (1 John 4:20). You have to love your neighbor; not doing so proves you don't love God! Here's what I'm saying—yes, that is all true! We love so poorly. We say we love God, we try to love others, and yet we love no one but ourselves. Is our solution to start pretending to love people better so that it looks like we love God? How is that working for all of us? Do we enjoy living all from pretense? Implementing this kind of solution marginalizes verses such as 1 John 4:10, 1 John 4:16, and 1 John 4:19 about God loving us—a love that is found not in us but in Him—by emphasizing our responsibility to love. Any fool can press the case for our responsibility to love our neighbor and then not do it! This is our fiery sermon, our powerful Christian life? Clearly if we do not grapple with 1 John 4:10, if our way of loving makes us want to ignore 1 John 4:16, we are not living under grace. It is His love for us that is the door to a universe in which love for others is possible. We cannot press old covenant (law and retribution) onto these passages and expect them to make any sense.

We cannot grasp the crucial truths of Romans 3:24–25 if we water down Romans 3:20 to the point of meaningless irrelevance. When Paul says that no one is justified by the law, he is referring to this great commandment to love God. Paul asserts that no flesh will be justified through the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. When believers hold out on this main command, making this one a requirement for salvation, they make a grave error. Paul is not saying that although specific, piddly laws cannot save us, the big important ones can. Rather, he is saying that this big one cannot save us, nor can all the others that it summarizes. We cannot love the Lord; we don't know how. The great command only shows us how deeply we sin. The greatest commandment is the Red Sea of the soul, and if there is not a miracle to lead us to safety to the other side, we are going to perish in slavery. Understanding this point is crucial to truly knowing grace. If we balk at it, we effectively make this difficult and undoable commandment (love) the touchstone of salvation, nullifying the public suffering and precious atoning work of Jesus.

It is this great commandment that lays the axe to the root of our self-justification. It is this great command that most thoroughly kills us. All of the other commandments hang on it, but this great one is the true killer. It does not merely say, “Don't steal.” It says, “You love the wrong things, and you can't stop.” If we want to steal something but stop ourselves, we demonstrate the fact that our hearts are set awry. We have made an idol of the things we wanted but forced ourselves not to steal.

We are colored by our desire for the thing we cannot have, as well as by our guilt and lack of gratification without it. What a mess! The commandment says, “You really cannot pull this off. You cannot control what you love with perfection of heart and mind. Your obedience is a complete sham. You hate it all.” The great commandment says, “You don't love God. You just “obey” because you are afraid that others might guess that you don't love God.” This type of “obedience” is a putrid stench, made more so because of the belief that it somehow approves the “obedient one” to God. The great commandment says, upfront and close, that God is not impressed with our heroic acts of will. It is love, not willpower, that fulfills this greatest commandment.

So, it is of grace that we come into a relationship with God. It must be. This greatest commandment is also the most immensely undoable commandment. It is the very apex of Paul's assertion that no flesh will be justified through the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. If we are to love God, it must be that He first loves us, because if our salvation depends on us, we are lost. However, the amazing hope that Scripture gives us is that God really does love us first; it tells us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Thus, the great commandment is the big flashlight that shows us our desperate need for grace, and it is His one-way love for us that rescues us from our lovelessness and moves us straight into the kingdom of grace and gift and affection.

If we are going to come to love Him, we are going to have to openly acknowledge our inability to obey the command to love God, coming on the basis of grace alone. We have nothing to present, especially not obedience to this great and central commandment. I cannot believe how people press this command on people as though it were obvious and easy, and then immediately turn around and talk in a way that belies their lack of pure love for God! What a sham! We hear that it is all about relationship, not religion, as if this replaces our need for redemption. The truth is that we can't do this; we can only acknowledge that the command is good and confess that we cannot obey it. We must fall on our knees and cry tears of shame for all of the worthless crap we have set our heart on, for this ridiculous pretense and fake righteousness. We are genuinely and thoroughly evil. Our hearts are an endless river of false love and idolatrous affections. Everything we do under this pretense is a lie. We have not loved Him! We stray constantly! Even our highest worship is full of distractedness and mental wandering and secret idolatries. Oh the rottenness and pretense and false piety we put forward! We must cry out to Him that He might release us from the pressure to live under all of this hell! It is not our love that is the bridge to God…we can't trust that! We must trust His love alone, He does actually love perfectly. And by grace, He will write love on our hearts when we come to see that it is not of our own efforts or our own flesh, that it is all a gift of which He is the source. Our love comes only as a response to the free gift of grace.

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord: “I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:10–12 ESV).

ANTINOMIANISM AND THE LAW UNDER GRACE

“Antinomianism” is a big theological word that means “against the law.” This has been a hot topic for 2000 years, from Paul down to John Calvin and many others, and on to today. Accusations of heresy fly on both sides of this word. Some believers feel strongly that in Christ we are still bound to the law, that the liberty we have in Christ does not release us from our obligations to it. I am not pretending to be aloof or immune to these issues, but I am going to look at it from a different angle.

Let's imagine we have a man with a paintbrush, a palette of colors, and a blank canvas. Suppose he says to himself, “I am determined to be a great painter, and this will be my first masterpiece!” How do you think his painting is going to progress? I think he will be staring at that canvas in fear for a very long time. Three weeks later, we will find no more than a smudge rubbed out and a very frustrated painter. Someone may ask him, “What do you do, sir?” And he may answer, “I am a great painter!” Yet if they look at his fruits, all they see is a blank canvas and no body of work. His own demand of himself to do great work is killing his ability to do great work. His determination to be a great painter has destroyed his ability to be a great painter.

On the other hand, suppose he says, “This is fun! What do I care what other people think? I simply enjoy painting! After all, the truth is, I'm a novice, and my paintings will reflect that.” How do you think his work will progress? I think he will have made wonderful progress on his painting within a day or two and will quickly develop a huge body of work. Someone may ask him, “What do you do, sir?” And he may answer, “I have a little fun with paints.” If they look at his fruits, they will find many paintings obviously painted with enjoyment and perhaps even some talent. Perhaps over time, there is improvement. They might say, “Here is a great painter, a man with great potential!” His lack of demand on himself to do great work opened the door to do great work.

I want to add that the paintings by Monet when his eyes were failing at the end of his life put this idea into high relief. Monet's style hinges on an artful dependence on imperfection, so that even his failing vision could not impede his creative flow.

In truth, it is not the demand for righteous fruits or the determination to produce righteous fruits but the actual presence of righteous fruits that serve as a signal of the presence of true faith. If we determine first to show true fruits, we put the cart before the horse. Consider these verses from 1 John, which have been put forward as a defeater of radical grace:

And by this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him (1 John 2:3–4 NASB).

By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother (1 John 3:10, NASB).

Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:1–3, NASB).

Notice that not one of the statements in that list actually says, “Keep his commandments! Do it or die!” These scriptures are saying that if someone says he is a painter, maybe there should be some paintings behind that claim. He says, “Are you wondering if your faith is real, if you really know Him? Or if this other person's faith is real, if he or she really knows Him?” Look at his or her faith! Look at that person's love and compassion for other believers! Look at his or her remorse over sin! Sure enough, we do seem to know Him! How else are we to harmonize those verses with verses such as these from the same letter:

…but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us (1 John 1:7–10, NASB).

My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world (1 John 2:1–2, NASB).

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10, NASB).

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us (1 John 4:18–19, NASB).

Are we to throw these verses out? Ultimately, they are all harmonized by this verse:

And this is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us (1 John 3:23, NASB).

In the flow of the actual text of 1 John, faith in Christ and love for others are all mixed together. Note that John 3:23 names belief in Christ and love for one another as a single commandment. When John talks about keeping His commandments in 1 John 2:3–4, that is what he means…yet when he says we are to love, this commandment cannot be interpreted in a way that conflicts with the idea that love comes from God first loving us. First, come to the belief that God loves you, that Jesus died for your sins. Really believe that, and move over to radical grace. Fruit follows that kind of faith.

Consider this passage from the Psalms:

I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go; I will counsel you with My eye upon you. Do not be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, Whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check, Otherwise they will not come near to you.

Many are the sorrows of the wicked, But he who trusts in the LORD, loving kindness shall surround him (Ps 32:8–10, NASB).

If we require force, threats, punishment, fruit-checking, and bit and bridle to believe in Christ and to love the brethren, we actually cut ourselves off from the ability to bear the fruit we so greatly seek. We're seeking the wrong thing. Fruit can be an idol anyway. My whole point is that if we focus on faith in Christ and the love that God has for us, we will see fruit appear. We can't demand it; we can only look back and see it. Look at Christ's love for you! As T. S. Eliot wrote:

I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.[2]

Total immersion in the eternal forgiveness, acceptance, and full justification we have in Christ is the only foundation for true virtue. We have no other way. This takes virtue out of the picture as the basis for our acceptance, blessing or favor. Radical grace is the narrow door that leads to true righteousness. So, far from being antinomian (against the law), grace alone empowers us and leads us to the holy and the righteous as chosen from the heart. Grace alone has the power to restore unity to our understanding of the good. No demand of the law, even in sanctification, can ever touch that kind of power. Do we want to change? Do we want to repent? We must go boldly to the throne of grace; it's the only place we'll get any help.

CHRISTIAN VIRTUE VS. WALMART

The questions must arise: Are there no imperatives at all? Is there no place under the new covenant to tell one another to do this or to avoid doing that? There are a lot of statements in Paul's letters where he tells us very clearly, “Do this” or “Don't do that.” They are imperative statements. Romans 12 is a great example:

Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and curse not. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation. Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,” says the Lord. “BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS HUNGRY, FEED HIM, AND IF HE IS THIRSTY, GIVE HIM A DRINK; FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL HEAP BURNING COALS UPON HIS HEAD.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:9–21, NASB).

What happens if we don't do these things? Does our justification come under question? Do we become substandard “carnal” Christians? Clearly, the apostle Paul is telling us directly what to do and what not to do! Aren't we just supposed to be done with condemnation, to set our mind on the things of the Spirit, and to then expect that, by some miracle or magic, we will naturally and inevitably do from our heart the things the law prescribes?

On the one hand, I think it is true that, in Christ, the law is inscribed on our heart, and there is no need for us to tell each other “Do this,” or “Do that,” or “Love the Lord.” This is a hallmark of the new covenant:

“FOR THIS IS THE COVENANT THAT I WILL MAKE WITH THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL AFTER THOSE DAYS,” SAYS THE LORD: “I WILL PUT MY LAWS INTO THEIR MINDS, AND I WILL WRITE THEM UPON THEIR HEARTS. AND I WILL BE THEIR GOD, AND THEY SHALL BE MY PEOPLE. AND THEY SHALL NOT TEACH EVERYONE HIS FELLOW CITIZEN, AND EVERYONE HIS BROTHER, SAYING, ‘KNOW THE LORD,’ FOR ALL SHALL KNOW ME, FROM THE LEAST TO THE GREATEST OF THEM.

FOR I WILL BE MERCIFUL TO THEIR INIQUITIES, AND I WILL REMEMBER THEIR SINS NO MORE.” When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear (Hebrews 8:6–13, NASB, emphasis mine).

Stay with me here. In the universe of grace, under Christ's propitiatory blood, we are no longer under the coercion of law. Remember, in Romans 12, as in all the rest of Paul's letters, we are to understand the imperatives from the perspective of being urged “by the mercies of God.” But we can't skip Romans 1–11 and just jump into that application. The foundation of justification by faith and our standing in grace is all-important. It is as if you have won the lottery. You can't lose, and you have such an overabundance of grace that you need never worry about being deficient in righteousness or acceptance ever again. If that isn't straightforward for you, go back to it. Don't look at the “practical” application until you have the foundation.

When people win the lottery and no longer have to work, do they cease to live at all, to do anything? No, they continue to live—and in fact, they need some guidance to know how rich people live. They just don't quite know how this works. Suppose someone from an impoverished life wins the lottery. The second this person gets his first check, he runs to Walmart to buy a whole carload of junk food and junk items. Then suppose our newly rich friend with so little taste or culture runs into a rich person who has been rich for most of her life, and the two become friends. The experienced rich person might give our friend the following counsel: “You're buying groceries yourself at Walmart? No, No, No! Hire a chef, and have your chef make contacts with local specialty organic farmers and dairy owners who cater to the rich! Hire a personal trainer and masseuse. You are rich now; start living that way!”

I think these gospel “imperatives” are just like that. As those who are newly rich in a great abundance of grace, we are still accustomed to living Walmart lives when we could be living like our grace-rich friends such as Paul. Paul had been living under grace for a while and knew how to look at the world in the right way with more ease than we do. Now, as a Christian, which of these commands in Romans 12 is so onerous? Abhor what is evil? Love what is good? Under grace, that sounds pretty good! Does that negate that redemption is a free gift, or that we are dead to the coercive power of the law? Of course not! He is showing us how to live grace-rich lives of joy and beauty and abundance; we have the means, and we are part of the “in” crowd. He is just giving us some guidance toward what our newly resurrected self is already inclined to do. Paul writes the following, making this line of thinking very clear:

All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify (1 Corinthians 10:23, NASB).

You see that this is not an equation involving a judgment as to whether we are just or not. All things are lawful! As I've said elsewhere, it is an aesthetic question—a question of profit, not of morals. Mind you, Paul said the same thing in 1 Corinthians 6 in the middle of a discussion of scandalous, sexually deviant sin. As believers and part of the grace-rich community, we are empowered to choose virtue as the profitable and desirable way. We don't need the cheap Walmart thrills of carnal sin; we have the love and favor of God!

Under this paradigm, we can dive into “imperative” passages without fear and without thinking that we are descending back under obligation and law. Look at it all as though we have a rich friend showing us how to stop buying our groceries at Walmart. That is pretty much what is going on.

IS GRACE EFFORTLESS?

Does this mean that under grace, there is no effort or work? (Again the Romans 6 question: shall we sin all the more?) Of course not! Look at this passage, which has been put forward in some discussions disputing that radical grace is a foundation for virtue:

Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love (2 Peter 1:5–7, NASB).

Under grace, under the belief that we are enormously loved and abundantly forgiven by God through Christ, we are able to produce moral excellence because we choose it from the heart. This does not mean we can't apply diligence; in fact, because we have freedom, we choose success all the more! The same dynamic applies to owners of a business versus employees. The employee tends to do only what is required and no more, whereas the owner stands to prosper and has pride of ownership, often choosing to work harder than anyone else to ensure his company's success. It is the freedom to choose—not the demand for diligence and virtue—that engenders excellence and diligence.

In fact, let's look again at 2 Peter, this time supplying the context for the verse so that we can see the reason for doing all of this:

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, in order that by them you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge; and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness; and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love (2 Peter 1:2–7, NASB).

It is because of multiplied grace—because we are the recipients of His precious and magnificent promises, because we are partakers of the divine nature, because mercy has created a unified understanding of the good—that we supply all of these virtues of diligence, moral excellence, self-control, and the rest of the list. It is because we have been gifted with an escape from lust to have a true desire for the holy that we have such diligence and spiritual fruit. That is what Peter is saying: It is grace that is the foundation for true and heart-level virtue, not the demand for virtue that is the foundation for grace.

Only under radical, scandalous, real grace, with the ready availability of forgiveness and acceptance when we need it, are we able to be truly virtuous because we love it. Only under grace can we truly regret our sin—a regret that occurs not through fear of punishment but through a realization of all that we have missed, such as the party and the joy that could have happened under the Spirit's guidance and leading. We come to truly regret sin and love righteousness when we actually like righteousness better.

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death (2 Corinthians 7:10).

If we regret our repentance, there is clearly still a desire for the forbidden. We can't just promise to stop doing the shameful things we crave! We can't stop the behavior while still lusting for the pleasure—what kind of lifestyle is that? Only heart-level change will do. We have to come into love, the love that God has for us. Only romance works, and only the God-initiated wooing of our hearts will draw us into this understanding. Augustine understood this when he had his conversion experience:

And, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I cried to thee: “And thou, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Wilt thou be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities.” For I felt that I was still enthralled by them. I sent up these sorrowful cries: “How long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not this very hour make an end to my uncleanness?”[3]

See how the real root of his repentance was not a useless promise of behavioral reform but a confession of enthrallment with sin? The heart of Augustine's confession was a wrenching acknowledgement of the division of his understanding of the good; he longed for the forbidden as aesthetically superior while he knew only the moral good was acceptable. So the straight-thinking heart sees that only undivided love will do and laments and confesses its own powerlessness to accomplish it. Only one-way love will help us:

What is grace? Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. It is being loved when you are the opposite of lovable.

Grace is a love that has nothing to do with you, the beloved. It has everything and only to do with the lover…

Grace is one-way love. The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place inhuman experience… One-way love lifts up. One-way love cures. One-way love transforms.[4]

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Is grace really strong enough medicine to produce virtue in us? Don't we need positive and negative reinforcement?

2. Is it true that the law assumes that we will not be obedient? What is law? Is it only Old Testament edicts, or is it any obligation that might be pressed on us against our will?

3. What is the relation between grace and desire, and why is the law incapable of bridging that gap?

4. Why is religion in general, and Christianity specifically, so obsessed with morality?

5. Calvinists believe there is a “third use” of the law, as spelled out in the Westminster Confession 19:6–7, in which Christians under grace are still bound to the law. Is this right, and if so, does the line of thinking in this book support or reject the third use of the law?

2 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 163.

3 E. B. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book VIII, trans. Marcus Dods Pusey (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1955), Paragraph 28.

4 Paul F. M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publications, 2007), 36.

CHAPTER 4

GRACE IS THE AIR LOVE BREATHES

Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining (1 John 2:7–8).

IN A SENSE, I BELIEVE THERE IS SOMETHING universally and profoundly spiritual, and even deeply biblical, about the way popular culture views love. Isn't it telling that we say we “fall in” love? There is a sense of surrender, of entering rest. There is a sense of acknowledging something wonderful and inevitable, something so good that it almost scares us. There is a sense of entering into some destined blessing, a sense that fate and mystery have converged to lead two people into joy. Two people's paths have crossed, not just by accident but by fate.

Notice also that entering into love involves a death—but a joyous death, not a sad death. There is the sense that one is lost in something so good it must be a dream, that regardless of what happened before, there is heaven now. It is the same air, the same trees, the same car, the same job, the same dishes…but now with this person, there is a tremendous sense of joy about things.

This is all about grace. As I've said at length elsewhere, love is a command, yet it is the one thing we cannot force ourselves to obey in our own strength. Romance because of coercion or obligation is not really love at all! What woman wants a man to marry her because he thinks he is obligated to do so? She wants a man who has truly fallen for her. When we try to say that love for God begins with us, that we can choose to love out of obedience without having truly known the One who is love, we strip love of its grace and mystery and power, leaving only the dry, lifeless husk of obligatory obedience. This isn't love; it is law.

In the end, this kind of love—the love filled with romance, desire, joy, and surrender to only Him—is the sort of love God is looking for in us. This is the kind of love we cannot just turn on and off at a command. Some people in the church may criticize pop culture for pressing these silly ideas about love, but to strip their relationships with their spouses and with Christ of beauty, mystery, and grandeur is to betray a graceless, lifeless, loveless legalism.

The commandment to love is a commandment to do something that cannot be accomplished in our own strength: it is a commandment to enter into the romance of grace.

AN OLD COMMANDMENT AND A NEW COMMANDMENT

There is a particular paradox in Jesus’ new commandment, which is an old commandment (1 John 2:7–8). He commands us to love one another as He has loved us. However, as with Buttercup being forced to marry Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride, the one thing at which we are least successful is the control of our own affections. We may as well be told to grasp the wind or embrace the oceans.

The apostle John tells us that this old command to love has been updated to a new commandment (John 13:34, 1 John 2:8), that there is something different to it now. It has been lifted out of old covenant dynamics and applied to new covenant dynamics (Hebrews 8:8–13). I seek this difference; I seek the simplicity and essence of the new commandment to love.

I have heard many teachings about love being a decision, a commitment. We are told that love is an action, not a feeling. It's a silly Hollywood myth that we “fall” into love. Love is doable! My wife may be an impossible, cold shrew who has completely let herself go and smells bad on top of that, but I can choose to love her. It is my responsibility. I can force myself to love unconditionally! Ephesians 5 commands us to love our wives as Christ loves the church. When malodorous, homeless drug addicts need food, we don't have to “like” them to love them in deed. We can feed them, take them to the homeless shelter, and have them out of our space, safe in the assurance that we did the deed Jesus would have wanted us to do. We don't have to “like” people to “love” them. Love is a command!

To be clear, I am challenging this position. If love is “doable,” even when I find someone to be unlikeable, hideous, or incompatible with me, this must mean I am commanded to tolerate them and do certain acts of service for them even though my heart is simply not in it. I don't like them but I can “love” them through some kind of gift or act of service. They are not treasures to me; rather, they are weedy, ugly fields that I'm supposed to buy for some hidden reason. I wonder how that would go over with them, if we let on that we can't stand them and are helping them only so God won't frown on us. In such a scenario, people become merely a property that we use as part of our self-justification project so that God won't condemn us for neglecting them. It would seem that such “love” is pure hypocrisy (Romans 12:9). Aren't we supposed to love without hypocrisy? Doesn't that involve some kind of real affection or compassion?

1 John 3:18 tells us that we are to love not with mere word, but in deed and in truth. Because we are accustomed to being mindful of the outward show rather than the inward heart, we are inclined to think that the “deed” part of love is more difficult and more important than the “truth” part of love. However, nothing less than a heart-level, genuine love will take us all the way to the cross for someone. It is the truth part of love that drives the deed part. It must be the heart, and not just the tongue, that loves; otherwise, we love with hypocrisy (Romans 12:9).

I want to do an experiment. Let's suppose that the “love is a decision” camp is wrong. Love is entirely undoable in our own strength. If you hold a gun to someone's head, for example, and say, “Love me or else,” the person will not be able to do it, even under threat of death. Love is effortlessly defiant toward force and coercion. It is, in fact, the one thing that we cannot command ourselves to do at will! We may be able to let our enemies have our shirts and slap us around, but can we really bring ourselves to love them? Our own hearts tend toward selfish and uncontrolled emotion at their core. And that is the problem: Although all of the other commandments depend on us having genuine love and real affection for someone, love is the main thing we seem to be incapable of really producing on demand. We know that justice stands against these other people, that they are not to be trusted at all, that they deserve to be punished and not loved. How can we love them?

Yet if we search our conscience, we realize that it does no good at all to “love” people without liking them. We are powerless to change our affections. We are commanded to love, but we cannot do it. The old command—however wonderful its requirement might be—cruelly demands what we cannot deliver.

THE NATURE OF TRUE LOVE

“Ah,” readers may think, “but you are confusing romantic love with other kinds of love—brotherly love or perhaps agape love. You can command agape love because Jesus commands it. Jesus would never command what we cannot do!”

I object to this line of thinking. If it is true that Jesus commanded only what we are able to do, we should all be walking around with missing hands and eyes, red cheeks on the right and the left from slaps, and bereft after giving everything away to robbers. Jesus does command what we cannot deliver; He demands absolute perfection (Matthew 5:48) and we cannot deliver it (1 John 1:8,10). He distinctly meant to command what we cannot deliver many times over. I would say that, whatever agape love means, love is love. Thus, deeds devoid of affection and help devoid of compassion are exactly what Paul calls a clanging cymbal in 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–3).

It is in fact quite possible to do dramatic acts of service without love. What else can 1 Corinthians 13:1–3 mean?

I would like to know how the concept of I have to love you, but I don't have to like you fits with 1 Corinthians 13-style love. Does it, really? As stated in this chapter, we may be able to fake love by loving in “deed,” but we are supposed to love in deed and truth—the main point Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 13. Of course we have to like people. That is the very thing that we have to admit is very difficult; in fact, it is impossible to do by our own willpower. For us to fulfill this command, we have to first truly come to see and know God's love ourselves. We have to recognize that each person is the pearl that God went wild over and sacrificed everything to obtain, which by any common parlance includes “liking” and “loving” them. When we divorce loving from liking, saying that we are obligated to love but not to like, we water down the law that tells us to love under the old commandment universe—perhaps to make the law more palatable. Yet in fact, we cheapen the law by trying to make it less convicting and more doable.

Real acts of love do not make this ridiculous distinction. When you go out to buy a gift for your child, you don't grit your teeth in the face of great mountains of dislike about doing what you must do. You are excited to buy the gift, because you can imagine how overjoyed your son or daughter will be, and you rejoice at the thought. You take pleasure in their pleasure. You delight in fulfilling their desires and wishes. You rejoice to see them grow and mature. Their joy gratifies you. You don't buy them a gift because you hope to thereby come to love them; you love them first and so buy them a gift.

LOVE CANNOT BE COERCED

Authentic love, which includes liking as well as loving, is difficult enough to maintain even with our own family—our spouse, our children, and our parents. However, I am not saying that we never have love in our humanity, in our pre-supernatural or unredeemed experience. We do love to some degree because we are all made in the image of God. Everyone inherently knows what love is, has tasted it, and now craves it! Even as unrepentant prodigals, we know and desire love no matter who we are. Thus, I am not making the point that love is impossible altogether; rather, I am making the point that love cannot be demanded or coerced. The law—and the threat and fear of it—are incapable of producing love; it comes by other means altogether.

Somewhere in each of us, we know what love is, and Christian or not, we know that it breathes only the air of grace. Love is born of response to affection and kindness. Love responds to love, to unconditional and radical kindness. The only way love can be commanded is by means of grace, by one-way affection. Love does not live, breathe, or thrive under fear and control; rather, it completely and effortlessly resists these things. So it is with law and grace; we are to love as we have been loved, because love is a response to grace:

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us.

If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also (1 John 4:16–21 NASB).

LOVE MEANS FIDELITY

In an article in Christianity Today, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson gives us the following little parable:

Picture this: a bride and a groom dashing out of the church, through showers of birdseed and into the limo, all aglow with the light of love from the vows they”ve just taken. In the backseat of the car, en route to the reception, they embrace and kiss. Then the groom announces that he has something to say.

“Now you realize, my dear,” he begins, “that, as far as I”m concerned, we can”t really say we”re married, because I don”t know yet what kind of wife you”ll turn out to be. I hope for the best, of course. And I”ll help you all I can. But only at the end of our lives will I be able to tell if you”ve lived up to my expectations. If you have—then, and only then, I”ll agree that we truly married today. But if you don”t, then as far as I”m concerned we were never married at all. After all, how can I call you my wife if you fail to be a wife to me?”[5]

No love song was ever written in which the lovers promise to dump each other if things become irritating or difficult! We all know inherently that love means the promise of fidelity. Love says, “This will be an everlasting love!” Love says, “I will stay with you forever!” Yet we are quick to believe that the love God has for us is fickle and easily broken.

The fancy theological term for this persistence of God's kindness toward us is “assurance.” If we are going to use the word “assurance,” we should use it in a meaningful way. It means we are sure of something, we are confident of it. Isn't it strange that we paint a picture of God as requiring fidelity of us while having no fidelity Himself toward us? If we keep thinking that our salvation is unsure because we sin, we must realize that we are no longer able to talk about having assurance. Consider this passage:

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives (1 John 1:8–10, NIV).

Obviously, John understands that you can be a Christian and have less than perfect fruit. If some level of sinfulness can break your assurance of the sufficiency of Christ's blood, where do you draw the line? Instead, Jesus teaches us this:

“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.” (John 10:27–29, NASB).

Real, scandalous, broad grace is such a game-changer. Assurance that we are the beloved of God, the favored and desired bride of Christ, the pearl worth everything, changes the way we live. There is a difference between people who walk around thinking they are Christ's favored, beloved bride to whom He is eternally committed, and people who think it is all about moral fortitude and that God is watching so He can reject them if they slip up. I have personally had many struggles with sinful and horrible addictive behaviors, and the one thing that has brought sustained transformation to my life is the understanding of God's amazing and undeserved love for me. All the accountability partners in the world did nothing for me but tempt me to lie.

Real assurance of the unbreakable acceptance and love from our Father is the kind of faith that produces moral excellence. I am not saying we should throw moral excellence out the window. Rather, I am saying that if we let our lack of moral perfection undermine our assurance, we can no longer go boldly to the throne of grace in our time of need. How shall we persist in our pursuit of moral excellence if we cannot approach His throne to receive mercy when we actually need it? Assurance proves itself when assurance is required.

It is God's love that is the engine of His justice, and His justice is the engine of His good wrath. Jesus has stepped in as the just justifier, and the more clearly we see His suffering on our behalf, the more we live in the light of the power of His blood. The more we agree with God's wrath as just love, the more we purify ourselves. The law, gospel imperatives, and the like serve to bring us to God's throne, but it is a throne of mercy. We are changed, not as slaves coerced, but with a transformation from the heart, uncoerced and desired. We persist in our faith because He is faithful to us.

GOD IS GREATER THAN OUR HEARTS

So, we have our hearts like the fishermen have the stormy sea. We cannot control our affections because they are larger than we are; and this command to love is the most damning and terrible command. If we can fulfill every other commandment, we will break on the rocks of this impossible command. Slap me, rob me, but do not ask me to love you. That is far too much for me.

In the universe of grace, His command is not to tell our rational, self-controlling, fleshly self to command our own heart; rather, His command is directed to our heart. His command creates the result that He desires, bypassing our own control over our heart because this very control is the main thing damaged in the fall. God is performing a delicate procedure because our heart is the very engine of our autonomy, and love is all about autonomous choice. Thus, He must restore our broken and misfiring heart without destroying the thing that makes us an individual. And He does so through the cross of Christ. He does it by the persistence of grace. The old commandment presses upon us the obligation to love, but the new commandment releases us into the power of love. He commands the wind and the waves, and they are calm. He commands us to love by first loving us, and so creates the love He desires. It is of grace, because love responds only to affection and not to coercion or force. Love, by grace, must make itself desirable to our hearts by sheer miracle or our hearts will not autonomously engage with affection. Is this crazy? Maybe not:

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything (1 John 3:19–20 ESV).

What is the point? God has power over our hearts and is able to produce change. He does this without brute physical miracles or threat of punishment. Such miracles and threats are the way of love under the old covenant, the old commandment to love. He commands us to love by the new commandment, under the new covenant, in which He writes the commandments on our hearts (Hebrews 8:10). He loves first, and so commands us to love by making Himself our flaming and true desire. Grace is love coming at us when we don't deserve it, when we don't love in return. Thus, he draws us into the kingdom of grace and births love within us.

There is a great deal of discussion regarding law and grace. These talks often zero in on the exact mechanism by which we are made into a new creature and how that mechanism causes us to become virtuous. What is this miracle that makes us suddenly virtuous? Is it real? This is the objection I often hear: “We still have to try to be good; don't tell me something different! My uncle's cousin's sister claims to be a Christian, but she still takes drugs and parties and neglects her children. You cannot just believe He loves you and be done with it!” I can guarantee you that your uncle's cousin's sister has never learned the romance of grace—because she still thinks the party is in the camp of the forbidden. She still thinks the real party is down in the dungeon.

Here is the miracle: God persistently loves us whether we love Him back or not. He does not tell me to force myself to love as a moral act. That is the old commandment that appeals to the flesh, to the will. He tells my heart directly to love by loving me directly. When we respond poorly, He continues to love us because His love is a free gift—the miracle that finally forms a new man, a new heart in us. The miracle of the new birth is not a miracle of old school acceptable moral behavior; it is a miracle of love and freedom and joy! Romans 6, 7, and 8 do not spell out a picture of sudden moral perfection in Christ; they spell out a picture of new birth and continued struggle. Our new life in Christ is not simply a better version of the old life. His wrath against our sin, which His love requires, was avenged in great abundance on the cross. Thus, despite our continued struggle, He loves us in a most direct way, and it is His love for us that transforms us.

When I discover a new song that I really like, I don't want to hide in a closet alone and listen to it; I want to share it. When the love that God has for me is manifested—when I perceive how persistent it is, when I come to understand it and believe it—I'm not inspired to be more selfish. I'm inspired to share it, to love those around me, and to walk with the fire of joy, because I have been so greatly loved myself. Just like a man in love, I walk with a special glow. I see colors more brilliantly and taste the simple pleasures of life more fully. Grace inspires and enables love in a way that the raw demand and coercion of the requirement to love never could.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34–35).

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

We love, because He first loved us (1 John 4:19).

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Is Hollywood right in saying that we fall helplessly into love and that we have no real control over our affections? Is this biblical at all?

2. What about Stockholm syndrome? Kidnapped people often come to have real affection for their captors while they are held. How does this correlate with the concept that love cannot be coerced?

3. How does the cross of Christ relate to the one-way love of God for us? How does it accomplish behavioral change in us?

5 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, “What's His Is Ours,” Christianity Today (September 2012): 32.

CHAPTER 5

LIVING UNDER GRACE

IN THE CLASSIC COMEDY MOVIE OFFICE SPACE, Peter Gibbons is stuck in a cubicle in a dead-end job. Seeing that he is so depressed and bored, his girlfriend urges him to go to an occupational hypnotherapy session. While Peter is still under hypnosis, the hypnotist has a heart attack and dies, leaving Peter in a state of euphoric peace where his worries, ambitions, and fears are all gone. He suddenly has no moral constraints and begins to do exactly what he has been wishing he could do. He sleeps instead of going to work. When he does go to work, he ignores his boss. He guts fish right on his desk. He unscrews the cubicle wall and pushes it over so he can have a better view. He basically comes unhinged—and ironically, begins to succeed at his job when he loses his fear and starts to behave in a manner consistent with his true heart. The rest of the movie unfolds from there.

This is an incredibly common theme in movies: The main characters are slaves to obligations and stuck in the prison of ought, but they find a way to break away to live from the heart. The characters are held by the fear that their lives will crash and burn if they live from the heart instead of living to fulfill their onerous obligations. However, the movies always show that the breakthrough to success involves jumping off this cliff of obligation into the waters of freedom. Many religious people despise such a message because they believe that godliness primarily involves forcing yourself to reject your heart to do what you ought to do. Yet these movies resonate with us because they touch on a real truth: Living merely as we ought to live instead of living from love kills us. It is a prison from which we must escape.

As we have seen, we have a problem in the human experience because moral good and desirable good are split—we often want what we know is wrong and despise what we know is right. It is almost laughable for any of us to say, “I love the moral way of living.” In fact, a lot of movies show a kind of “coming-out” moment in which the protagonist casts off the fear of traditional ideas of the good and embraces his or her true desire, or true self. This is not a recent thing, not a political thing, not an American thing. It is not a part of some kind of culture war. It is not the trouble with the evangelical church. It is universal and true for all of humanity, from Eve and the serpent onward. Ironically, this kind of transformation is exactly what the gospel is designed to give us, but under a unified desire that longs for the holy.

God is working to bring us back to a place where what we honestly want coincides with what is right. We misinterpret this to mean that God wants to impose right behavior on us against our desire, or that in God's world, morals trump desire. Actually, desire always trumps morals, and grace aims to restore desire to acceptable ends. Thus Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but I will not be mastered by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12). Profit is more important than lawfulness because desire won is true mastery over a person. Soldiering on while secretly harboring opposing desires is not exactly the victorious life Christianity promises! Mastery means the heart has been won over, love has been engaged. There is excitement, vision, energy, and fullness of heart. There has been a baptism; we have jumped in and found the water to be fantastic!

THE CROSS AND JOY

I want to expand on something I only hinted at in a previous chapter. If this is all true, if the gracious work of God rescues our desire from the forbidden, if its aim is to restore this division between the moral good and the aesthetic good—then why am I still struggling? Surely I'm missing something; I've gone too far with this idea. It can't be right! What about verses such as the following?

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me (Matthew 16:24, NASB).

For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please (Galatians 5:17, NASB).

This disproves my point fairly well, doesn't it? Righteousness, holiness, godliness—none of that is about getting what we want; it is about denying ourselves what we want! Perhaps. Or maybe we should look at these passages a little more closely.

Jesus says, “If anyone wishes to come after me…” We have a wish, a desire, to come after Jesus. In context, there has just been another debacle with the Pharisees, but Jesus has taken the disciples off by themselves and has asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” Then He asks, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter says, “The Christ.” It is at this time, this first time, that He begins to explain that He will die and be resurrected. Peter is alarmed and takes Jesus aside to rebuke Him. This is the context—Peter, the one who first proclaimed Him to be the Christ, the Son of God, rebukes Jesus for all of this talk about suffering many things and dying.

What does He reply? He says, in paraphrase, “You want me to stop talking about suffering and dying? I am going to sacrifice everything to gain my pearl of surpassing value, which is you. If you want to model my behavior, throw away all caution and all of your attachment to lesser things, and pursue Me as your greatest treasure. If you grasp the greatness of this love, you will sell all else to get this great treasure.” Even though this sacrifice becomes so stringent that it leads to a cross and to death itself, the reason for endurance is the joy set before us.

The writer of Hebrews put this exchange between Peter and Jesus in perspective:

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Hebrews 12:2, NIV, emphasis mine).

He did it for the joy set before Him, a joy that was not taken away. Not only is this true, but it is set forward as our ultimate example. The point here isn't the suffering. It isn't even the cross itself; it is the passage to joy. In the end, the suffering will be seen as momentary light affliction that produces an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Corinthians 4:17). The underlying theme is the same as with the parable of the hidden treasure—sacrifice is made “from joy over it.” The desire is engaged, is unified, and leads us to sacrifice to obtain the greater treasure. There is joy over it, but there is also the selling of all, the sacrifice of once-cherished things. The sacrifice cannot be minimized; however, if there is not treasure, if there is not joy—if the focus is on the sacrifice rather than on the joy—then there is only the death of true desire. Sacrifice becomes punishment and ugliness rather than a liberating passage into fulfillment. It is paramount that we keep our eyes on the prize; it is all-important.

This mind-set plays itself out in everything we do. For instance, when we seek to help “the poor,” if we do it from a place of mere obedience, we do it only from sacrifice. If we are driven out of the prayer closet to practice our righteousness publicly, we are only using people as props for our own self-justification project. This is dishonoring to the very people we help because we see them not as the pearl God desires but as objects of burden who exist to serve our selfish interests. Because we essentially see them as “the poor” instead of as real people, as objects of ministry instead of as real treasure, we operate from a place of martyrdom and have little joy in the process. This is unsustainable and has little benefit to the kingdom. Just as Jesus saw through the disciples’ current state in life and envisioned each of them as someone far greater, even so all of our ministry and efforts must stem from the same dynamic—a vision of hope and joy for people. In all our ministry and relationships, we must search the appearance of the empty field of the person and see the treasure there. Then the sacrifice we make for them will be out of joy. This is the kind of cross that Jesus bore and that Jesus asks us to bear, a cross that is a passage to some great desire. Most certainly we are to take up our cross, but we are to follow His pattern—we do it because we have found treasure, and we would gladly give up every smaller concern for this great desire.

THE TWO SELVES

Paul maintains an odd and clear tension throughout much of his writing. On the one hand, he tells us that we are new creatures, that our old self has died and that we are new creations. On the other hand, he maintains that we continue to struggle with our attraction to sin. Apparently our continued struggle with sin does not invalidate the fact that we are new creatures. Let's first examine Paul's ideas about the new creature we are in Christ:

Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. (2 Corinthians 5:17, NASB).

I hope that as you read this, you can really see it with fresh eyes. This is a crazy and revolutionary idea, and quite a twist on the idea of being “born again.” Despite our continued imperfections, when we become Christians, we are a new creature. There is some part of us that wasn't there before, something that is different, something actually new. We have a new self, a self that loves good, a self in which the desire for good is united with virtue. We have a new self that gives freely without needing payment or recognition, and that receives with gratitude and without regret. Our new self is born of grace, loves what is holy, and breathes the air of gratitude. Instead of just cleaning up what is there, God bulldozes it and rebuilds. This new self is based on and somehow integrated with our identity, our central personhood—yet this truly new and different self is undivided between desire and virtue.

In Romans 6, he speaks of our old self, the “fleshly” self, as having been killed off, crucified with Christ:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? (Romans 6:1–3, NASB).

Notice that he is not saying that we should try to die to sin or that we are obligated to die to sin. He doesn't say that we have a responsibility to die to sin. He says it is a done deal; we have died to sin. In the same way, he is not saying that we should try to raise ourselves to newness of life. He is saying that because we have come into Christ, this is already true of us.

Despite all of this, we all know that we continue to struggle with errant desire. There is no use beating around the bush; we may be new creatures, but we still love sin. No clever reasoning, poetically beautiful writing, or theological speculation can disguise this. Paul is quite clear about the fact. He deals with it consistently and extensively throughout his writings: when we come into Christ, we each become a new creature with a new identity, yet we still struggle against our old self.

For we know that the Law is spiritual; but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not wish to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that it is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which indwells me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the wishing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish. But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wishes to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? (Romans 7:14–24, NASB).

We may be crucified with Christ, baptized into His death, but the old self, the fleshly self that has been ultimately dethroned, continues to lurk around and exert its influence. How does this work?

We are like a five-year-old who has inherited millions of dollars. The five-year-old may have papers tucked away somewhere legally guaranteeing him the right to all of his money, but he really has no idea what it is about. He sees wealth in terms of toys and candy; he thinks more wealth is about more childish indulgence. He doesn't understand the power or the freedom such wealth affords him. Nevertheless, whether he understands it or not, the wealth really does belong to him. In Christ, as new creatures, we are blessed with freedom and power beyond our comprehension. It is all ours from the very beginning, but it takes time for us to come to understand what we have.

Another way to look at it is that we are like a person who has been in prison for decades and was recently released. Long-term prisoners become very accustomed to prison life, and for such a person, freedom can prove a strange and difficult experience. Even so, there is no doubt that freedom is much preferred to imprisonment. We may not initially embrace the life of freedom, but whether we do or not, we have been truly liberated and will have to learn to live as free men and women.

We are used to being fleshly. We are used to loving sin. We are used to having morals imposed on us, to having our wild and immoral desires squelched. We have spent our lives learning to pretend that we like living in the prison of ought. We are used to being frightened of our own disreputable inner desires. And we are accustomed to the turmoil that all of this entails. We are babies—or even aliens, almost—to the idea that there is a real part of ourselves that freely wants to do right. In Christ, it is there and it is real, but we are out of touch with it. We have trouble believing it could have any power.

Paul is saying, “Stop seeing your freedom in terms of candy and toys. Stop living like a prisoner. It is not who you really are anymore.” Let's be clear; the dynamic of life under the old self is very familiar. It isn't just that the flesh wants to sin. It is that the same flesh that wants to sin is used to living under a moral constraint that thwarts the desire. The mind set on the flesh brings both of these things into play: desire for the forbidden and trust in the warm blanket of moral constraints that tell it “No!” When we start to think about releasing our true, new desire and trusting our new self to behave virtuously under that freedom, we feel very unsafe. It is a new self, an untried self, a self with which we have not learned to live. We are used to the noisy clamor of sinful desire and to witnessing morals and principles stamp those desires out. We think that is what life is. We're afraid to trust the work of God, afraid that we might really have a new self who loves virtue and can operate from undivided desire. This is why we find true grace so scandalous and why we are constantly trying to undermine our freedom with just a little bit of law.

As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on The Sin of the Elder Brother.[6]

In Christ, there really is a new self. As we grow in Christ, our mind, our patterns of thought, and our habits of living come more and more into harmony with the way the new self operates. We begin to learn to trust our new self's desire for virtue. We begin to warm up to the idea of freedom, the feeling of desire that is unleashed and does good. We begin to trust that—yes!—God has actually done a real work. I actually am a new creature. We start to believe that we can love what is right. At first, we don't understand it; we don't quite believe it. Let's face it, this is very rarely taught, and many of the modern church's teachings appeal to the old fleshly self and the need to put a leash on the old dog. We are led to think that the Christian life is all about being better at being an old creature. The truth is, however, through simple belief in Christ, we do become new creatures and do have the choice to say no to the tyranny of the old self. We must begin to trust the new self to guide our mind. The struggle is to set our minds on the things of the Spirit and not on the flesh. This is a very different struggle than the struggle to impose law on the fleshly desire for the forbidden.

I am going to be a bit frank about this now. Very few Christians, especially Christian leaders, seem to have read or considered the essential doctrines spelled out by Paul in Romans 3–8 and all the rest of Paul's writings. In fact, these same people are very clear, in subtle or bold ways, that they do not believe the new self is real or is capable of winning at virtue. It is seldom taught that, as a Christian, the desire of the new self can lead a person to righteous acts. All of the misguided teaching really strengthens the old self and empowers the old dynamic. It says, “Go back and ring the old bell, arouse those old desires, and then impose moral standards on them to squelch them. Don't commit adultery, adultery, adultery! Remember and avoid the glories of sin! Sin is awesome and powerful—don't do it!”

Repeatedly, week after week, the message is, “Be a living zombie, a whitewashed tomb; this is the Christian way, this is bearing your cross.” After hearing such a message, it sounds so strange to hear Christians say that the “Gospel” is supposed to be good news. It isn't good news because it isn't the Gospel. You can feel the awkward tension when an invitation to “receive Christ” is tacked on to the end of a sermon that is little more than a steaming pile of impossible advice and condemnation, and very few (if any) attendees respond. It is not good news; it is bad news. Anyone with a shred of intelligence will run screaming out of the building before they will submit to such insanity. The whole message is often completely devoid of grace or of the virtue of the new self we have in Christ, and the whole sermon has merely enthroned the old self so it can be squelched by some “Christian principle.” This is all, ultimately, just warmed-over death.

Well, what should we be preaching? What should we believe? What should we be saying? If you are a preacher, consider how fearful it makes you to rethink your message along these lines! You can't just preach free love, after all!

I say, preach truth, preach crushing and convicting law, preach strong grace. Jesus preached repentance in a way that caused crowds of sinners to flock to Him. Prostitutes followed Him like puppy dogs, and they wept and wiped His feet with their grateful tears. Obviously, they felt welcomed and loved by Him, not condemned. To Him, sin is a disease that needs treatment by a doctor, and virtue is not an obligation to be forcefully imposed on the unwilling. Preaching to the flesh, preaching in order to squelch the desire of the flesh, preaching the comforting message of principles that address surface behaviors—none of that produces real results, does it?

Paul preached a message of incredibly scandalous grace, as have many others since then; when it is preached, it changes history. We are not smarter than Paul, nor are we more fruitful. Pastors, I encourage you to go back to these scriptures and preach grace. Tell people that God tremendously loves them. Tell them clearly that Christ's blood is enough to abundantly justify them. Tell them this over and over, seventy times seven. Lead them to a unified desire for virtue. Encourage them to learn to trust the desire of their new self. Figure out and teach what it means to have a mind set on the Spirit. Don't sit there and pretend you are doing this if you aren't.

If we should repent of anything, it should be repentance for misguided teaching. Consider that we have tortured people with our previous preaching. Ring a new bell, a bell of love, grace, freedom, and newness. The weeping sinners will flock to you; I just know it.

THE LIFE OF JACOB: A CAUTIONARY TALE

In Genesis 25–33 we find the story of the life of Jacob. He is a very strange figure indeed, and I think his life has much to teach us about the life of grace.

Here is a guy who is chosen beforehand—more clearly than just about anyone else in history—by God for blessing. He is the example Paul uses to talk about predestination and the foreknowledge of God in Romans 9:9–18.

Yet this guy seems to have grown up completely unaware of the word pronounced over him (Gen. 25:23). Through manipulation and subterfuge, he plays on Esau's weakness, swindling him out of his inheritance (Gen. 25:29–34). He also colludes with his mother to deceive his father to steal Esau's blessing, resulting in Esau reacting with such murderous anger that Jacob must flee (Gen. 27).

So, Jacob has a history. He is a sinner. He has fled from his brother's wrath, which was richly deserved. Jacob is a usurping, conniving, swindling snake. On top of that, he is a somewhat effeminate mama's boy. He arrives at Bethel, where God appears to him in a dream with an amazing vision, which we now know is a tremendous theophany of Christ and the grace that comes through Him. As you read Genesis 28:10–22, you can notice these things:

1. God does not mention his sordid history or his guilt.

2. God does not chastise him for his reprehensible behavior.

3. God does not mention anything about his current predicament.

4. God makes a set of completely unconditional one-sided promises to him.

Does any of this sound familiar? There are worlds of revelation in this first instance in which Abraham is listed as his father, rather than Isaac. Abraham is the one who believed in the one-way promise, and this is the kind of life God is seeking for Jacob. However, what we see is that the value and reality of this revelation seem to escape Jacob; in fact, his immediate reaction indicates that he idolizes the place.

Having fled all the way to Paddan-Aram to live with Laban (Gen. 29:1–30), Jacob has conditioned himself to interpret life according to his guilt. He does not interpret his life according to the promise he received. He must connive and work for his blessings. He does not contest with Laban to marry Rachel as he and Rachel desire; rather, he works for her for seven years. He likewise does not contest with Laban when he is tricked into marrying Leah instead of Rachel, perhaps because he himself is a trickster and believes in his battered and horrid conscience that fate has decreed this turn of events. He has sowed deceit and trickery, and so he reaps it. Jacob lives as though he believes in karma. His conscience will not let him say, “I do not want to work seven years for Rachel; we both desire to be married now.” And seven years later, after having worked for the time agreed on, he does not say, “I agreed to work seven years for Rachel, so now you must give her to me because I will not bow to your deceit.” Because he is accustomed to the world working by deceit and to its lack of justice, he submits to its decrees.

Now, quite apart from any expectation of grace or provision from God, Jacob and Laban conspire against each other for livestock (Gen. 30:25–43). After twenty years of being roped in by his own slavery—likely at least in part because of his bad conscience—to what are obviously ridiculous decrees and agreements, Jacob finally conspires to leave Laban to go back to Canaan. On the way, we encounter a very telling story (Gen. 32:22–32). Jacob does not seem to remember the one-way promise; he is bound and determined to grapple with fate. When God comes, he must wrestle, and even when He is ready to leave, Jacob will not rest but persists to wrestle. He is determined to fight for his blessing, and although this work of wrestling with God disables him, it does not negate the one-way promise God made twenty years earlier. It is interesting to note that God renames him Israel (“he who wrestles with God”), and that Jacob passes this mind-set along to an entire nation!

Now we see the root shame that Jacob fears, the one that has governed him, finally come to confront him. How he fears the wrath of Esau his brother! (Gen. 32:1–21). Yet when the confrontation finally comes about, it turns out to be nothing! In the end, all of Jacob's conniving is rendered powerless, and unexpected forgiveness toward him reigns despite his own behaviors.

How often do we persist in interpreting the events in our lives by our sordid history instead of by God's gracious, one-way promise? How often do we let needless ideas and pronouncements enslave us for years instead of believing the promise that God truly holds over us? Yet, despite all of this, God's one-way promise remains true for us whether we remember and live in light of it or not. How many needless entanglements and worthless vows enslave us for years while we could simply choose to rest in the simplicity of believing and trusting God's promise toward us?

We can choose to live in the light of grace, of God's one-way love for us, or we can choose to live in light of our history of failure and shame. Let us determine to pay much closer attention to the word we have heard (Hebrews 2:1) and live in the light of God's promise of kindness and mercy, refusing every entangling vow that might restrain us. Let us be determined not to neglect so great a salvation and to enter that rest! God will attend to our needs and will overcome our faults to bring His promise to fruition in the end. The work of God really does boil down to belief:

They said therefore to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent (John 6:28–29, NASB).

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. In what way does our struggle change when we die to the law and enter the universe of grace?

2. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please (Galatians 5:17, NASB). How does this fit with what I am saying in this book?

3. What is the difference between the flesh and the spirit? What is the flesh?

4. With regard to sinful actions, the apostle Paul says, “No longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me” (Romans 7:17, NASB). How is this different from Flip Wilson saying, “The devil made me do it”?

5. In what ways might your past sins and failures be preventing you from living as though you are the glorious recipient of God's promises?

6 Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publications, 1997), 7.

CHAPTER 6

THE GRACE WE DON'T WANT

The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD (Jonah 1:1–3, NIV).

THERE ARE A LOT OF BOOKS AND WORKSHOPS out there about finding God's will for your life, hearing God's voice, discerning God's direction, and so forth. His will and direction are pictured as being mystic, ethereal, and very easy to miss, with us tottering on the very edge of either finding or missing the tiny and well-hidden path to God's virtually invisible way. Well, here in the person of Jonah, we have a guy who heard the voice of God and knew the will of God very clearly. His problem was not a matter of revelation!

So, far from seeking God's will, far from following God's direction, he ran! He knew one thing for certain—he did not want to do this thing that God wanted him to do. In fact, he went to great lengths and trouble and expense to avoid doing what God had directed. He journeyed down to the seaboard, searched out a ship, paid the passage, and actually launched out to sea toward a place far away from his native land to escape the manifestation of the grace of God! What could possibly have motivated him to do these things?

It helps to consider the historical context in which Jonah lived. The Ninevites were the Nazi Germany of their day, the extreme mortal enemies of Israel and Judah. They were brutal, godless, and thirsty for power, blood, and conquest. It would be as though God asked you to go preach to the Taliban, with the Taliban actually organized, powerful and far more evil. Tales of carnage and horror surrounded the Ninevites. Jonah knew all about their violent and sadistic wickedness, and he did not want to give them the opportunity to repent! These were people Jonah hated with good reason. This directive of God was an extreme and unusual thing, and it is understandable that Jonah did not want to do it. He was OK with preaching to his own people, but he would actually go so far as to forsake his own beloved people and land to avoid doing this. His mind-set actually makes sense. Anyone would feel the same in Jonah's shoes.

On reflection, many of God's commands are offensive. We are asked to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, turn the other cheek. We are asked to give to those who rob us! It sounds nice until you consider that we are talking about our enemies. They are evil, aren't they? Who is going to really do all of this—seriously? The truth is, we can't stand grace and mercy; it seems to be an absolute scandal. We lust for justice, for retribution, for revenge. If someone strikes us, robs us, or hurts someone we love, we want them to pay for it! If my son is getting beat up at school by a bully, I admit that I am gratified when he stands up for himself and fights back. I don't really want him to love his attackers or turn the other cheek. I want him to stand up to them. Even when I myself sin, I want to suffer for it and may do something myself to manipulate the consequences of my guilt. How could God be merciful to all of those people? How can God be merciful to me?

Am I not Jonah? Do I not run?

In many instances, just as with God's directive here, I view my own preferences as superior, and I view God as being loony and just plain wrong. We are fools if we think we would do better than Jonah in this situation. We know God's will and we run. We hate grace.

GRACE FOR THE UNGRACIOUS

Now here is the good part. After Jonah hears the word of grace and runs, after the tempest at sea, after he is thrown overboard, after he spends three days and nights in the belly of the fish, after he is spit back up on the land—God speaks to him again. Jonah has run, he has been given up for dead, he has been spectacularly and miraculously saved. During all of this, God acts, but He does not speak. Now He speaks:

Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh (Jonah 3:1–3, NIV).

Does this sound familiar? There is no rebuke! God did not say, “I told you so, Jonah. Did you really think you could escape God? How dumb are you?” No sanctimonious lesson is thrown in his face, however much we may think he deserved it. In fact, there is no mention or interpretation of these incredible events at all! God returns Jonah to square one and tells him the same exact thing as before, without a shred of condemnation or judgment.

I would imagine that if Jonah were to lead a seminar on finding God's will, it would be very different from the message we are used to hearing! I think he would say, “I really wanted to miss God's will. I paid money to miss God's will. I forsook my homeland, my friends, and my family to miss God's will. I got on a boat and set sail for a far-off foreign land to miss God's will. I hated and loathed God's will in my heart. I truly believed that God was wrong, unjust, and evil. Yet, He made sure I did not miss it. He redirected me with force and persevered to make me an instrument of His grace. I hated His mercy, I despised His patience, I detested His concern for these evildoers. Yet He forgave my lust for revenge. His grace sent a tempest to thwart my determined journey away from Him so that I would proclaim His mercy to these people I despised.”

Far more than giving us some fine line defining His mystic and ethereal will, He exercises strong grace to pursue us and bring us back to the service of His good cause when we all but flee from it. He is merciful, gracious, and kind to us so that we might bear the message of grace to others. When we are ungracious, He persists in grace. Our enemies may speak against us, ridicule us, rob us, and hit us, but we are no better. We would wish the exact same thing for them if not for this incredibly strong mercy given to us. Yet our heavenly Father persists; He is committed to making sure we do not miss His will so that we may be vessels of grace to the graceless. We may foolishly run, but through one means or another, He will bring us back to the proclamation of grace.

JESUS AND THE GRUMBLERS

Jesus’ life is full of the grace people didn't want. In His confrontations with the Pharisees, unwanted grace was the defining dynamic of His ministry. For example, we have the story of Jesus teaching in a house where a huge crowd gathered. Some guys had a friend who was paralyzed, and they wanted to bring him to Jesus to see if He might heal him. They couldn't get in because of the crowd, so they climbed up on the roof and dug a hole through it and lowered the paralyzed guy down right in front of Jesus. The story goes on in Luke 5:17–26:

Seeing their faith, He said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?” “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,”—He said to the paralytic—“I say to you, get up, and pick up your stretcher and go home” (Luke 5:20–21 NASB).

People still resist grace in the stream of that same dynamic. We would like to think that we are the helpers, that we are the friends. We see ourselves as the good guys. But many times, we are the skeptical reasoners, the grace haters. We question whether He should forgive. We wonder if this coworker or family member is actually going to be allowed to get away with it. We are shocked when He blesses instead of punishing, when He heals, when He is kind. We want Him to heal those who deserve it. We deserve it more—why would He bless these other undeserving people? Why does this other person get to teach when I have to do children's ministry? Why is this other person leading the project when I am more qualified?

As the father in my household, I am faced with the issue of grace over and over again. Someone does some shocking offense, and there is an expectation that I am going to execute some kind of justice, that I am going to ensure that they learn that they are never to do this again. It is not enough for me to say, “Please consider everyone else's interests next time, and do better. I forgive you.” There is a general shock—“That's it? You forgive him? After that? Are you really going to let him get away with it?” To be clear, this is not to say that grace precludes us from disciplining our children. Sometimes, we must dispense grace that our children don't want. Under grace, we discipline them as seems best for their good, but not to balance out justice. Justice is balanced out only in Christ.

The point is not that we ought to forgive better. The point is that the grace of God transcends our own gracelessness. We live first not as one who forgives, but as one who is forgiven. This is the only kind of faith capable of extending grace to others. If we are not willing to receive it for our own transgressions, we won't have it to extend to others. When we are not the good guy, He overcomes. He heals anyway. He proves He can forgive. He reasons with us. He persists in saying that grace is better. He gives undeserved blessing when we don't want Him to do that. He is not held back or tamed by our small and selfish desires. He comes to us as our healer. We are the judge, the sinner, and the paralytic, yet He overcomes them all. The one group we might imagine we resemble in Jesus’ parable above is the friends who carried the paralytic to Jesus, but in reality, we rarely fill that role.

Because He is gracious, I can say, “I am only a sinner. I am paralyzed. These friends may be of service, but I can do nothing but sin.” And so, only because He wishes to do so—and not because of any merit in me—He touches me, blesses me. And that blessing is only a shadow and a sign of the greater blessing of forgiveness and undeserved love.

A KINGDOM OF BLESSED LOSERS

As a fellow grace-hater, you have probably noticed that sometimes other people get blessed instead of you. Nothing is more irritating! Sometimes people much less deserving than we are prosper and are honored. Sometimes, God likes to forgive and bless those to whom we would rather see “justice” meted out. Sometimes God simply refuses to do the right things on the right schedule! Jesus has given us a delicious parable to specifically show how life operates in a world that operates by grace:

For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and to them he said, “You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.” So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, “Why do you stand here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You go into the vineyard too.” And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, “Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.” And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” So the last will be first, and the first last (Matthew 20:1–16, ESV).

What are the workers complaining about? The master isn't fair! We require justice! You can't bless these other guys—we worked hard for the money! It isn't right that these lazy loiterers get paid the same amount we get! If they get paid so well for so little work, it must mean that we are getting slighted. We want to be paid in proportion!

The fact is, the master was doing what he wanted to do instead of doing what was fair, because he wanted to be gracious with what was his. Grace offends our sense of fairness; fairness has been nailed, squirming and horrid, to the cross. God does what He wants because of the greatness of His love; if we must say so, the good is good because He likes it. However, it isn't that His version of the good transgresses the law. Rather, His version of the good fulfills it and goes right past it. He gives aesthetic good beyond the point of what is morally deserved. His actions are both moral and desired, and these actions offend the moralist because God acts only from love and seeks to break that which harms and imprisons.

If we do not give up our notions of fairness, if we insist on believing that blessing has to be deserved, we are going to be very uncomfortable living in God's universe of grace. He delights in giving people far more than they deserve, and if we are going to go on being offended by this, if we refuse to stop hating grace, we are going to have a difficult time in heaven! The community of the redeemed is a community of those who are given a huge abundance of undeserved gifts. Perhaps some who bristle at this would be a lot more comfortable in hell, where everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Heaven is the place for those who receive scandalously unmerited riches in lavish abundance. The citizens of heaven will become accustomed to receiving lavish gifts and riches that they never earned and that seem to have appeared at the fanciful whim of One who simply likes to arrive on the scene with presents and surprises.

The elder brother in the Prodigal Son story has the same “fairness” syndrome that we tend to have today (Luke 15:11–32). He has an exact sense of justice concerning who should be accepted, who should be blessed, and who shouldn't. Doesn't he have a point? If you think about it, the dynamics of this scene are absurd! No one could be more irresponsible than his brother; he took his entire inheritance and burned through it in perhaps a few months. Then he returns in shame and rags, and his father doesn't even scold him at all! In fact, he celebrates his return! The elder son, solid and faithful, was never celebrated, but now this fool is dressed up in the best robes, and the tent is full of music and dancing! They're dancing! Yet here he is…he never left, he never did anything wrong, and yet he was never celebrated, never the center of attention. No one danced, no music was played to celebrate his stolid and consistent righteousness.

Should he sin all the more that grace might increase? Shouldn't he do some dramatic wrong so he can also get a party? Look at the father's answer here—“You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” That's it?

It doesn't seem that anything changes for the elder son after that speech; nothing feels like it is really his, and he is still stuck here with nothing except the responsibility. He gets no stinking party, not even a goat, while his brother gets fattened calves and music and dancing for his foolishness. The world is turned around; his father is a fool!

In Numbers, we have the strange story of Balak, who tried to hire Balaam to curse Israel:

Now God met Balaam, and he said to Him, “I have set up the seven altars, and I have offered up a bull and a ram on each altar.” Then the LORD put a word in Balaam's mouth and said, “Return to Balak, and you shall speak thus.” So he returned to him, and behold, he was standing beside his burnt offering, he and all the leaders of Moab. And he took up his discourse and said,

“From Aram Balak has brought me,

Moab's king from the mountains of the East,

‘Come curse Jacob for me,

And come, denounce Israel!’

“How shall I curse, whom God has not cursed?

And how can I denounce, whom the LORD has not denounced?

“As I see him from the top of the rocks,

And I look at him from the hills;

Behold, a people who dwells apart,

And shall not be reckoned among the nations.

“Who can count the dust of Jacob,

Or number the fourth part of Israel?

Let me die the death of the upright,

And let my end be like his!”

Then Balak said to Balaam, “What have you done to me? I took you to curse my enemies, but behold, you have actually blessed them!” And he answered and said, “Must I not be careful to speak what the LORD puts in my mouth?”(Numbers 23:4–12, NASB).

If you read the context, this is a group of people who have been forced to wander in the wilderness for many years, people whom the ground swallows up, who have been disciplined and punished, and who complain bitterly about all of it. Yet, even unknown to them, God defends them against enemies and calls them blessed! I wonder if the Israelites would agree! Even though they are blessed, they do not perceive themselves as blessed. This is the same spirit the elder brother had; they do not perceive their position or give thanks.

Thus, when someone else is blessed, the brother becomes angry because what he sees is that this person is blessed while he is not. It is a double-edged sword. The fact is, they are both blessed, and the one who is shown mercy knows it.

What we really see between these two brothers is this: they both seem to resent their father. They deal with that resentment differently—the younger acts out and parties and squanders, and actually leaves. He is brash and foolish. The other smolders and resents his father's love for his younger brother. Neither likes the way the father handles things; the older brother has maintained a veneer of respectability while the other wears his discontent on his sleeve, but both ultimately act out their discontent and ingratitude.

Here is the thing to learn from this story: can we rejoice as we look on our Father's blessing, mercy, and grace given to someone else when we ourselves do not feel celebrated or recognized for the moment? Do we like to see others celebrated? Are we envious when others are noticed, received, forgiven, paraded, and honored? Can we walk in the quiet knowledge that we are loved and cherished by our Father when that love is manifested in a common and undramatic, daily sort of way? We will be very uncomfortable in heaven if we can't dance and enter the celebration with all the angels when the Father bestows blessing, honor, and grace on another sinner. Heaven is all about grace, and that means there is going to be a lot of blessing flowing to people who do not deserve it. Do we rejoice when grace is given to others?

Grace is scandalous, its blessings always unmerited. We can choose to focus on either the scandal of it or the joy of it. More importantly, are we a help or a hindrance to the Father's desire to express grace to others? Do we concern ourselves only with the grace that comes to us personally? Or can we find a way to rejoice when that grace comes to others? Jesus died in order that grace might come to everyone except Him. That is the cross we are called to bear—to live to see others lavished with God's grace, even when we do not see ourselves blessed in the moment.

Through the story of the prodigal son, we see that the elder brother was the darkest opposite of Jesus’ praxis: he resented grace, and he could only think of the blessing he wasn't getting. When others are blessed and honored even though they don't deserve anything except punishment, we can choose to either rejoice and celebrate or resent and sulk. The Father's will is for all of us to rejoice and dance. Isn't He wonderful?

SELF-LOATHING AND SUFFICIENT GRACE

It is difficult enough to forgive others, but often we have a much easier time forgiving and loving others than we do forgiving and loving ourselves. One of the most shocking insights is that the man under law does not want mercy extended even to himself. He wants the chance to prove his worth and so gladly self-condemns to that end. Our flesh is amazingly consistent in demanding justice for all. We often reserve the worst condemnation and punishment for our own souls. We wear our self-condemnation and self-loathing like a warm blanket; our shame and our guilt are like familiar close friends. How Paul's confession in Romans 7 resonates with all of us!

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:21–24 ESV).

The impetus of the Gospel is this: God has directed us; we know His will for our lives very clearly. It is called the law. Our conscience constantly bears witness to it. We aim to miss His will, we ignore His will, we hate His will. We run from His will daily, over and over again. His will is kindness, and His kindness is an outrage against justice. Once we are believers and are new creatures, we still repeatedly run from His will. Regardless of the wondrous transformation that happened to us when we became Christians, we still miss His will and direction; we do so often and sometimes completely. But, as He did with Jonah, God still pursues us; God still uses us. Even when we loathe ourselves, He persists in expressing grace toward us. As with Jonah, His grace is far stronger than our self-loathing. Thus, we return to the truth that, even when our own heart condemns us, He is greater than our heart and has a stronger love:

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything (1 John 3:19–20 ESV).

Our greatest danger is actually that our self-loathing and self-condemnation will win over our lives. But the Gospel promise is that, in Christ, there is no condemnation (Romans 8:1) and that we can expect God to extend favor to us so that we can walk by the Spirit—by God's favor, not by personal resolve born of anger at ourselves for our own shortcomings.

If our own sin, failure, and hatred of God's clear will and kindness are not barriers to the favor and blessing of God, then what can possibly harm us? Even if we have a “thorn in the flesh,” some kind of hardship or physical ailment, it doesn't trump grace:

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Corinthians 12:7–9).

In other words, even a clear absence of earthly blessing and a clear presence of earthly hardship can be part of God's grace to us—and through us, to others. God can cause even our troubles to work for good. That is the nature of His grace. If He can overrule our sin, our very hatred of His will and His ways, can He not overrule everything else?

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:31–39 ESV).

I have heard people argue that this list does not include our own sin, so it is possible for us to take ourselves out of this picture. Nothing could be further from the truth! It is God who justifies! No one is better or stronger; none can condemn those He has declared just. From Romans 3 to Romans 8, He has been proving this very point. Romans 8:31–39 is all icing on the cake because our justification is our most pressing problem.

So grace doesn't mean we that now have nothing to conquer. When we have hardships, we persist in interpreting the world through the eyes of grace. We keep reading the love of God into our lives; we do not escape. We conquer and are more than conquerors through the one-way love of Christ! Like Paul, we can boast all the more in our own weaknesses. I may be overweight, uneducated, poor, unsuccessful, and even sinful, but God overcomes and uses these things as touch points for me so that I might minister comfort and hope to others. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not even our own mistakes. How can we possibly lose?

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Because of God's omniscience, foreknowledge, and power, is it impossible to miss His will? If it is impossible, does that mean we have no autonomy? Or rather, because we have autonomy, is it in fact quite possible to miss His will, with Jonah's story simply anomalous?

2. Aren't there people who are so evil that grace shouldn't cover them? It's very easy to say no, but I've been to Auschwitz. Some people, according to Scripture, go to hell. How can God so love “the world” and yet rightly judge that some people go to hell?

3. Paul's desire was not gratified when his request for healing was denied and he was instead told that God's grace was sufficient for him. Is this a back door for all prayer to go unanswered? In the name of sufficient grace, should we expect God to be unresponsive and cruel? Is grace made meaningless when we apply the term “sufficient” to every difficult circumstance?

CHAPTER 7

TEMPTATION, DESIRE, AND PREDESTINATION—OH MY!

No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, that you may be able to endure it (1 Corinthians 10:13, NASB).

WE MAY THINK THAT THE PRIMARY QUESTIONS God poses to us are, “Are you good? Are you sanctified? Are you holy?” But when we look at what our enemy the devil thinks is important and what threatens him, we can see the real picture. As we see in such verses as Genesis 3:1–6 and 1 Corinthians 10:3, the primary question, the real treasure we hold, is not our virtue but our desire. The battleground is not our behavior but our heart. The main question for God is not “How can I make them be good?” but rather “How can I get them to respond to my love?” God knows this and Satan knows this. Our true inner heart, the thing we truly exalt and love, is the real treasure we hold. God is interested in our heart, as is Satan. Satan would much rather turn our hearts away from God than kill us. God would rather give us freedom and woo us than force us to behave well. He would prefer to risk us misusing our freedom than to take our freedom away and eliminate our chance to love Him from the heart.

As we have seen, only the freedom of radical grace—that one-way love conditioned only by Christ's blood—is the door to real heart-level virtue. God has done the shocking and dangerous thing that the cautious among us warn against: He gave us absolute acceptance and favor first, and lets us work out how we live with that afterward. He is looking for a perfection of love, for virtue chosen freely from desire, and not a veneer of coerced behavior.

IS GRACE EQUAL TO PREDESTINATION?

I want to look at radical grace from a slightly different angle. Looking back through material on the history of theology, I've seen that some major themes have emerged over time. A lot of conversation over the centuries has centered around the doctrines of the trinity, the incarnation, grace vs. works, and predestination vs. free will.

I have always been mystified by the church's attraction to the issue of predestination and free will; theologians seem to have obsessed about it for all 2000 years of Christianity. Until very recently, I could not have been more disinterested. After all, whether God predestines things is His business; what is that to me? I can control only what I can do, so even if it ends up being predestined all along, how could I have known that? My thought was always “Let's stop talking about this because we can't possibly know how it works anyway.” I haven't substantially shifted from this position, but I do have some new thoughts about it all in relation to grace.

We usually think of predestination in terms of time, believing that God sees ahead and orchestrates events and then in a way controls what we will do, plans ahead how we will act. Somehow our acts in the future are predetermined.

Upon reflection, I don't really think time is the primary factor in the question. The real questions are these: Does God control us like puppets, or do we have some form of individual choice? Are we really autonomous creatures at all? Has God cut the puppet strings? Are we real boys and girls? At the heart of this issue are other questions: If we are free creatures, how does God interact with us? Can He influence us without transgressing our personal freedom? Can we be autonomous creatures and still have grace in our lives?

In fact, throughout history, two extremes of “grace” seem to have emerged, and both hover around these wild notions about predestination and free will. One view of grace is that God chooses, despite behavior or even belief, to ultimately save some people and damn others. Some hyper-Calvinists teach that God creates some people to be damned to hell forever no matter what they do. It's like negative grace. If you think about it, if you believe so strongly in grace in this sense, then the belief that there is no human autonomy is inevitable. This view of grace has merit in one sense because the Gospel is all about God-initiated love; however, it tramples the important and delicate issue of our autonomy. I think that our ability to choose is a sacred part of our being made in the image of God.

The other view of grace is that it changes us to the extent that we have a distinct power to sin no more. Grace is the power to be legalistically successful. We are still under obligation to be virtuous, but grace empowers us to fulfill this. In fact, this view says, because we are predestined, we have “irresistible sanctification”—we can't help but do right. So we have grace (through Christ's blood) to do works, but it is these works that, in the end, save us. If we continue in our sanctification, then we must have been predestined to do that; if not, we were predestined to damnation. Don't screw up past that mystical “nonsanctified” point or you will prove to have been predestined to damnation! So much for grace, right?

GRACE IS SIMPLER AND MORE PROFOUND THAN PREDESTINATION

When I am being intimate with my wife, I don't think, “Is it I who make love to her or is it she who makes love to me?” We make love together. I woo her, and she responds with desire because she loves me and knows that I love her. If she is not in the mood, it waits until another night. When we are intimate, we seek to give each other pleasure as much as it is in our power to do so. Our most private and pleasurable desires happen to be the place where we join physically in love. We don't parcel out who loves whom in that time; because we love each other, it is a moment of passion beyond analysis. We are focused intensely only on each other. We share deeply private, intense desires together.

This is how grace works. Is it “predestination”? Is it God who initiates and chooses? Of course! Do we choose from desire to respond? Of course! How can both things be true? I don't know. I'm not God, and these are things are taught in the scriptures as being a mystery:

So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use?(Romans 9:18–21, NASB).

I'm good with that. This book is not a treatise on predestination, so I am purposely avoiding that rabbit trail for now. The point is that in marriage, we love each other. We join in mutual desire and attraction. Human sexuality and romance are a picture, a shadow, of this. Where our desire is seated most deeply and intimately is where this mystery plays out.

There are three things which are too wonderful for me,

Four which I do not understand:

The way of an eagle in the sky,

The way of a serpent on a rock,

The way of a ship in the middle of the sea,

And the way of a man with a maid (Proverbs 30:18–19, NASB).

Please do not take this as a dig at my Calvinist brothers and sisters. Somewhere in my secret soul, I will have to end up admitting someday that I am Calvinist, but not yet. I have received more instruction from the Calvinist side of the world than from anywhere else. No one seems to be as obsessed with grace as the Calvinists! In fact, I agree with them that the gospel, our salvation, and even our faith are all initiated by God. I am merely saying that there is an aspect in which the way He does it preserves our free choice, and that is something of a mystery. What I am also saying is that these are not points about which to be merely doctrinally correct. They are beautiful, living truths that we are intended to experience, seek out, and live by with joy. I am forever an advocate for the intellectual side of the faith; Christianity is not a faith for the lazy of thought. However, the truth of these matters is far deeper than the intellect—it is simpler yet more profound.

We are the bride of Christ; these issues are questions primarily of the heart, not of doctrinal correctness. These are questions whispered in the middle of pillow talk, not publicly debated when we attempt to correct and defeat all detractors. They are the unfolding of great, delicate, and frighteningly powerful desires. They are the unveiling of a complete nakedness of soul to One whom we love and to whom we surrender out of a crazy and sacred romance. I am the one who is loved by Christ, and I am the bride who responds with unabashed passion to the One who has earned my great trust. This is the way the answers to these questions play out.

FOR THIS CAUSE A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER, AND SHALL CLEAVE TO HIS WIFE; AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31–32, NASB).

GRACE AS ASSURANCE

So I don't really think either of these common positions—grace as predestination or grace as irresistible sanctification—is quite correct. I believe we have been introduced by an initiating faith into what Paul calls “this grace in which we stand”:

Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God (Romans 5:1–2, NASB).

What this means is that, having believed—by whatever initiative and mystery—we have solid assurance of our salvation. We can still be tempted, even errant. We stand in grace and not in a grace that ends if we don't continue in “irresistible sanctification.” That kind of grace would leave us without assurance regarding whether we truly belong to God, because our eternal choosing would come into question whenever we didn't exhibit the proper evidence of sanctification. If sanctification were irresistible, we wouldn't really have the ability to make a free choice based on an honest desire to be virtuous. Conversely, under grace we have departed from the universe of earning wages, even by irresistible work, and have entered a universe of gifts.

Now, in the universe of gifts, there are still choices. We are still asked to strengthen, to cleanse, and to build our desire. “Everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 John 3:3). Notice, however, that 1 John 3:3 is not a command but a promise, a statement of fact. Once our hope becomes fixed on His love for us, purification becomes our ongoing passion. Our fallenness was all about desire for the forbidden—which is why temptation is always about an appeal to the desire—while our redemption is all about desire for the bidden. Ultimately, worship is desire set right, and idolatry is desire set wrong. Satan understands all of this and appeals to the desire directly. God also appeals to our desire by offering us grace and giving us an environment in which we have the opportunity to choose what is right because it is what we want. Temptation and the escape from temptation both function at this level. Consider this verse:

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren (James 1:13–16, NASB).

See, the temptation is an appeal to the desire, a lure for us to once again desire the forbidden. Our acting on the temptation is just the outworking of the real sin, the real flaw, which is desiring it in the first place. In other words, when lust is conceived, when errant desire is born, it is inevitable that sin happens—it already has (James 1:13–15). As in all the rest of the scriptures, we see here that the heart is central.

PERFECTION OF DESIRE AS THE HARSHEST LAW

None of this means that a perfection of desire becomes the new law to which we must now submit, a kind of glorified version of the tenth commandment “Thou shalt not covet.” Nothing could be more harsh. When by faith we come to stand in grace, we are completely absolved of the guilt of every iniquity, every sin, and every errant desire. Grace does not accomplish the unification of the moral and aesthetic good in us by simply demanding it. There is no division of the good. We are forgiven of all. We are born into and introduced to a desire for something far, far greater than the little sins for which we once longed. We are led to a perfection of desire because of grace, and we are allowed situations that test us only to a certain point. We are ever loved, ever accepted, ever led to greater gifts and pleasures.

I believe that God allows temptation as a tool to strengthen and perfect our desire under grace. It is as though God is playing a game of chess with our hearts. In this chess match, He may make certain sacrifices, but in the end, He intends to win. What do I mean here? We pray for a certain job; He knows that we will hate it in the end but that, in our present state of desperation, we will interpret His denial of the job as Him being cruel and indifferent to our prayer. He also knows that confidence in prayer is more important at this juncture in our spiritual development than us being denied our flawed request. We think obtaining the job was the important thing, but perhaps God thinks our confidence that He hears and answers our prayers, even when they are misguided, is more important. Later, He may answer other prayers differently, but every temptation and every circumstance is orchestrated and used to further our assurance of His love for us.

The heart that is being perfected by His genius and love is not tested, denied things, and allowed to suffer out of cruelty on His part; rather, these difficulties occur to perfect the heart and allow us to enjoy the greatest and most immediate pleasures. We are ever loved. In our finiteness, we are led on to the joy of a greater and more resilient perfection—one that is desired but not demanded. We are wooed, courted, and drawn into a great and everlasting love.

Let's go back to our primary verse, 1 Corinthians 10:13. Grace dictates that God allow the stage to be set—just as in Eden and just as with Job—for us to be tempted only to the point at which our personal autonomy is honestly capable of saying yes or no to the desire. This is also possibly a contributing factor to the idea that the Holy Spirit led Jesus and leads others to the wilderness. There must be the opportunity for an autonomous choice to be made for the good. True evil doesn't just want to kill us; it wants us to lust, to desire the forbidden. True evil knows that the greatest harm that comes to us is not the evil done to us but the evil we choose. Thus, just as with Jesus, we are led to the wilderness to be tempted, to refine our desire, to freely choose the good. The wilderness is a picture of the carefully orchestrated, manifest absence of God. And it is the grace of God that orchestrates these absences. He wants the stage to be set for us to choose right, to desire holiness, without His blessing or control.

If we think back to times when we have been tempted, isn't this true? We are suddenly and oddly alone, and the chance to act on a hidden or shameful desire is strangely present. Furthermore, isn't it true that there is always a way to get out of it? This is simultaneously the predestined providence of God supernaturally manifested and the absence of His manifest presence directly requiring that we exercise our free will and choose the good. The work of God and the character of a person are both in high gear when such a scenario arises.

I don't think this is an issue of holding a Calvinist or an Arminian position. Rather, it is that, although predestination is certainly a mystery, we can be sure that it would never remove our autonomous freedom to choose the good. Furthermore, if we completely removed the possibility of temptation (which by definition involves our power of choice), we would all have to excise 1 Corinthians 10:13 from our Bibles. It is equally true that, in these instances when the opportunity is created for us to be tempted within limits, we are given the chance to exercise our free choice. Because we are under grace, the most important issue is not that we choose the good perfectly but rather that we exercise our heart and choose the good out of true desire. Temptation is a little like lifting weights with our heart. God seeks to lead us to the place where we honestly combine the aesthetic good and the moral good in our heart, and this could not happen unless we had the true freedom to act. If we start to postulate that it is God causing us to choose and directing our free will, removing the possibility of real temptation, then we are playing God and claiming an understanding of mysteries that are really not in our domain. As Solomon says,

He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NASB).

We are crafted in a way that allows us to apprehend the infinite while being finite. We grasp and long to know the intricacies of God's motives and acts while knowing only what we see and do. We know there must be predestination without ever knowing how to plumb its depths. We know that every explanation, every theology, is incomplete no matter how clever. That is the essence of being human.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. If God is love and there is no evil in Him, why does Jesus instruct us to pray that we will not be led into temptation? Does this invalidate the concepts presented in this chapter about the nature of temptation?

2. If it is true that, in instances of temptation, God carefully orchestrates the extent of its allure and maintains an escape route, why would Jesus instruct us to pray against the work of God? When God allows temptation, does that make Him a participant in evil?

3. What does the nature of temptation say about true desire and counterfeit desire?

CHAPTER 8

GIFT CULTURE—LIVING FOR THE DESIRES OF OTHERS

IN HIS EXCELLENT BOOK THE GIFT, Lewis Hyde explains the genesis of the term “Indian giver”:

When the Puritans first landed in Massachusetts, they discovered a thing so curious about the Indians’ feelings for property that they felt called upon to give it a name. In 1764, when Thomas Hutchinson wrote his history of the colony, the term was already an old saying: ‘An Indian gift,’ he told his readers, ‘is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.’ We still use this, of course, and in an even broader sense, calling that friend an Indian giver who is so uncivilized as to ask us to return a gift he has given. Imagine a scene. An Englishman comes into an Indian lodge, and his hosts, wishing to make their guest feel welcome, ask him to share a pipe of tobacco. Carved from a soft red stone, the pipe itself is a peace offering that has traditionally circulated among the local tribes, staying in each lodge for a time but always given away again sooner or later. And so the Indians, as is only polite among their people, give the pipe to their guest when he leaves. The Englishman is tickled pink. What a nice thing to send back to the British Museum! He takes it home and sets it on the mantelpiece. A time passes and the leaders of a neighboring tribe come to visit the colonist's home. To his surprise he finds his guests have some expectation in regard to his pipe, and his translator finally explains to him that if he wishes to show his goodwill he should offer them a smoke and give them the pipe. In consternation, the Englishman invents a phrase to describe these people with such a limited sense of private property. The opposite of ‘Indian giver’ would be something like ‘white man keeper’ (or maybe ‘capitalist’), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for production).[7]

The Native Americans had a distinctly different notion of property and ownership than the Europeans had. Native Americans had a gift culture in which the value of possessions related to the fact that they could be given as gifts. They received admiration and gathered honor not by holding on to possessions but rather by giving them. They were excited to acquire things mainly because these items represented the means to give gifts; people in their culture were impressed not by what they possessed but rather by what they gave. In fact, it was considered immoral to keep such gifts to develop and invest them; such a person could be perceived as getting rich at everyone else's expense. The European sense of ownership was considered immoral hoarding.

The kingdom of God is such a gift culture. Jesus is the greatest in the kingdom; He gave up the incredible treasure of being equal with God to become humbled to the point of death, all as a gift for the sake of the church:

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:4–11 ESV).

It is expected that the recipients of such a gift should pass it along. We have been greatly forgiven, so we should forgive. We have been greatly loved, so we should love one another. We have been greatly blessed and gifted, so we live for the edification of the whole body of believers. We are given the gift of redemption and complete release from guilt, shame, and judgment so that we can enter a kingdom of gifts, where we receive freely and so freely give.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another (John 13:34).

GIFTED TO GIVE GIFTS

If it is true that Jesus’ death on the cross for us has completely satisfied justice for all of our sins, then our reason for living is no longer to satisfy the demands of conscience or obligation. Through the cross, we have escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust (2 Peter 1:4). This does not mean that we have entered sinless perfection but rather demonstrates that we have come to agree with the need for the cross—that our sin is to be judged and that we despise it when we fail. Does this mean that we can sin all the more that grace might increase? What does life under grace really look like?

Living free of coercion does not lead us to live only to gratify our own desire. Paul speaks of not looking out merely for our own personal interests (Philippians 2:4), because such wonderful freedom and blessing leads us to want to share our gift with others. Our own selfish interests are simply too small for the gifted heart.

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, (Philippians 2:3–5, NASB).

You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me. In everything I showed you that by working hard in this manner you must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:34–35, NASB).

In Christ, we enter the society of the gifted. We enter a body of people dripping with supernatural powers that are far beyond what they deserve. If we are free of the slavery of coercion, then we no longer receive anything because we earned it. If all is gift, we receive everything on the basis of blessing and love, not merit and worthiness. In fact, our gifting in Christ is so distinct that Paul warns us not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think (Romans 12:3), not only because we suddenly have power to stop transgressing the law's standards of behavioral righteousness but because we are gifted beyond measure with distinct gifts. We are the vessels of supernatural wisdom, power, and insight so overwhelming that we are tempted to think we are almost gods. What Paul is saying is that we are to live for and mesh harmoniously with each other in the practice of being gifted to bless each other. We are given gifts in order to give them, and giving is far more blessed and satisfying than hoarding and possessing.

Suppose you have a friend who is a fantastically gifted musician. She incessantly practices her art, not because she is compelled by her teacher to do so but because she loves honing her skills. Do you suppose she is going to be happy holing up in a practice room playing by herself for the rest of her life? Of course not; she hones her skills in order to share the beauty of her art. Our gifts find their ultimate expression when they are shared with others.

Thus, although we can worship God alone in the forest, we have to be in fellowship if we really want to enter into a life of radical love, favor, and power. We are meant to be infused with massive and embarrassing giftedness far beyond what we deserve, but our gifting will only make sense if we give it to others as an act of love. We don't want to be a gifted musician to go into a closet and play for ourselves; we want to be discovered, to broadcast this awesomeness to the whole world. Our gift is to be given to others regardless of whether the receivers are worthy of the gift, because they are no more worthy to receive it than we were worthy of being empowered to give it.

The nature of a gift is central to Christian living. If there is any such thing as progressive sanctification, it is certainly about leaving behind the universe of law and consequence, judgment and obligation, to enter more deeply into the universe of gifting and unfair liberality. It is to become more and more stable in believing that, no matter what, we are greatly and enduringly loved, and that the believers around us are similarly loved. It is about receiving all that we are becoming as an undeserved gift in order to pour out gifts for the pleasure and benefit of others. It is to live under the new commandment:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34–35).

Notice the power of this. Society under the new covenant means that the law to love has been written on our hearts. It is inscribed on my heart, and it is inscribed on your heart. I can expect gifts from you that transcend fairness. I don't need to keep account of how much I have received from you, nor do I need to worry that you have served me so much that I cannot receive more from you. In the kingdom of God, I can expect that you are seeking no recognition or reward; rather, you are joyously giving the gift that you have been empowered to give to me. When it comes around, I can exercise my empowerment in order to bless you. We have tossed overboard the useless idea of fairness and equality of giving based on accounting and deserving. We can give and give and give without fear, knowing that our brothers and sisters also are empowered to give. We live in a strong and mutual dynamic trust that what is given will more than meet our needs. If I am the only one who watches out for my own interests, then there is only one person who watches out for my interests: me. On the other hand, if I am in a community with many others who watch out for each others’ interests, then the number of people who are watching out for my interests multiplies. None of this makes sense if we remain isolated to worship God alone.

The greatest gift we are given is each other. As C. S. Lewis pointed out,

Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I'm putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall out-live her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects. And in there, and beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life.[8]

We are walking and talking and working and playing with eternal beings who have been redeemed at great cost by God Himself, One who has done shocking things to achieve an eternal relationship with each of us. How can we help but be drawn to each other and love each other, actually seeking the gift of amazing empowerment to serve and liberate one another? This is how Jesus has loved us; this is how we are asked to view one another and live for one another. Not only am I the pearl that the merchant had such joy over that he sold everything to get it, but all of my brothers and sisters in Christ are also that pearl. If I can't see that as true, I reduce people to objects to be used for acts of self-justification instead of recipients of very great and very important gifts.

UNWORTHY SERVANTS

This translates into very unusual relational dynamics. When faced with a moral question, as in whether we should or should not eat meat sacrificed to animals, we are to weigh the answer according to the blessing and perspective of the other person instead of according to our own opinion. We are to think, “What can I say and do that will bless this other amazing member of Christ's body?” Is it their conscience to abstain, for example, from alcohol? Then we are to uphold their perspective and abstain from it in their company for their sake, because we are the recipients of a great grace that blesses despite any weakness of another. We have such a different and strong identity in Christ, as one who operates from being an incredibly gifted object of love, that we do not need to insist on our own moral opinions or supposed freedoms. Rather, we act in a way that supports those for whom Christ died.

We see hints of gift culture all through the teachings of Jesus, such as in the parable of the unworthy servant:

“Which of you, having a slave plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come immediately and sit down to eat’? “But will he not say to him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat, and properly clothe yourself and serve me until I have eaten and drunk; and afterward you may eat and drink’? “He does not thank the slave because he did the things which were commanded, does he? “So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done’” (Luke 17:7–10, NASB).

At first glance, this parable seems so terrible! We are to just serve and serve, and then serve some more, with no hope of reward at all? Serving is boring. What happened to all the talk of love, favor, and blessing? Aren't we the bride of Christ? Serving without reward is not even biblical, we might say. What about Hebrews 11:6, which says that God rewards those who diligently seek Him? Why would Jesus have taught this? I confess that I have always hated this parable; it just doesn't seem like a blessing.

It all takes on a different flavor when we look at it from the perspective of grace, from the perspective of the gift culture. We are not servants who serve in order to receive a compliment or public recognition—because all that we have is a gift, and we live for the joy of giving gifts. There is no record kept because we are no longer under the law (Romans 6:14). We are truly all unworthy servants, and indeed we receive gifts that transcend and even ignore what we might have earned. The truth is that fairness has meaning only under the judgment of a standard, and such standards were blasted away by the power of the resurrection. In our service and life as believers, fairness simply is not the dynamic at all; fairness—petty and squirming and horrid—has been nailed to the tree and killed publicly. Our lust for fairness is squarely of the flesh.

When we kill off this lust for fairness, the door is opened to tremendous blessing. I recall a family meeting in which one of my sons was bemoaning the fact that one of my other sons was being singled out unfairly for a certain blessing, and he was calling for me to be more even and fair. I told him that I squarely rejected it, that my intention was not to seek fairness. Rather, under grace, my intention was to bless as it seemed best for the moment. I had, in the prior months, spent far more money than I had ever spent on the other boys buying “Mr. Fairness” guitars and music equipment, and this had transcended all ideas of equal spending at the time. I pointed out that everyone had been thrilled to see him receive these things because he is a gifted musician and he needed a nice guitar to empower his talents. Now, however, I was empowering the gifts and talents of his brother, and I was thinking not about what was fair but rather about what was needful for his blessing.

If we can't learn to be unworthy servants, to bless and bless and bless without thought of fairness or reward, we are going to have trouble living in the gift culture that is the kingdom of God. God is the vineyard owner who pays the guys who worked five minutes the same as the guys who worked all day (Matthew 20:1–16). His blessings transcend our tiny and selfish notions of justice.

GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT

In some circles, the purpose of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit is painted as being purely about living more in accordance with the standards of the law. The idea is that flesh desires sin, and the Spirit desires clean living. This is not really quite right. It is the flesh that seeks fairness, that lusts for revenge, recompense, and recognition. The flesh prays at the microphone but not in the closet. The idea that the purpose of the Gospel is to become simply more moral paints the life under grace as being all about me and my behavioral worthiness as an individual to live under God's blessing. My successful morality gives me nothing but pride and empowers me with nothing to give to the unworthy, believing sinners around me except judgment against them on account of my alleged success. The truth is we are never worthy to live under God's blessing, and the very idea that we can behave in a way that is deserving of God's blessing has been judged. We receive blessing based on Christ's blood plus nothing; it is all born of gift. Our virtue is itself a gift.

So the empowerment of the Holy Spirit is more than the enablement of personal virtue. We are powerfully and individually gifted to serve and build up one another. Various and specific gifts of the Spirit are given to each believer:

For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. And since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let each exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness (Romans 12:3–8, NASB).

It is amazing how well this passage pushes the idea that in Christ, we have entered a gift culture. Let's put it in context. Paul had never been to Rome, but there was a growing body of believers there. He was eager to go to Rome to visit them and to make sure that they really understood the Gospel. This letter was his attempt to explain the Gospel from beginning to end. More than any other book, Romans is the “go-to” book to understand the essential doctrines of Christianity. Romans 1–8 are all about explaining the Gospel and our identity in Christ. You will find nary a command or imperative in the first eight chapters; these are mostly explanation. Romans 9–11 explain the Jew/Gentile mystery, and Romans 12–15 explain the practical outworking of living as a Christian.

In Romans 12, after some prologue about being a living sacrifice (baptized into Christ's death) and being transformed by the renewing of the mind (living as one standing in grace), he launches into a discussion of powerful giftedness. He begins with an unworthy servant kind of talk—not to think more highly of himself (Romans 12:3 NASB)— and moves into talking about differing gifts and their use in service to one another. I would posit that the Christian life is far more about learning to live together in powerful interconnected giftedness than it is about behaving morally. As Paul says in Galatians,

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law (Galatians 5:16–18, NASB).

So, all this talk about the Holy Spirit and walking in giftedness “charismatic,” “gifts of the spirit” kinds of doctrine. Maybe that is somewhat true. However, what I really want us to do is to come back to this with a beginner's mind and look at these scriptures with a fresh eye in light of the true “full gospel,” which is the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified. Many times in charismatic circles, there is great emphasis on the Holy Spirit and the gifts even beyond the emphasis given to Christ and Him crucified. The manifesting of the distinctly cultural, charismatic-style gifts becomes a law, and the message of the law and the Gospel is downplayed or even ignored outright.

The truth is that only through Christ's suffering and death do we enter the kingdom of gift. If receiving and manifesting certain forms of giftedness becomes mandatory or exalted, then the blood of Christ is nullified. We do not see this turned around or put out of order in the writings of Paul. Jesus Himself teaches us that His death and resurrection are necessary precursors to the coming of the Holy Spirit:

On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would would seem to indicate that I am advocating “full gospel,” receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7:37–39 NKJV, emphasis mine).

“And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:16–18, NASB).

Paul also emphasizes this in Romans 5:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.

Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Romans 5:1–5 NKJV emphasis mine).

So we see that the Holy Spirit comes based on the glorification (meaning the death and resurrection) of Jesus. The Holy Spirit comes because the propitiation has been achieved and authenticated by the resurrection. If we do not come through the door of propitiation—if we do not come knowing that our sin has been publicly declared evil and avenged, if our own merit has not been nullified—then the Holy Spirit of God must abide in the requirement of justice and avoid any manifestation beyond conviction of sin. When we enter through the door of Christ into the kingdom of God, we enter into a world in which blessing and favor are given as a gift instead of by merit, and the huge gift that is given is the Holy Spirit.

Paul shows us that the Holy Spirit manifests His gifts as fruit, as gifts, and as office. The truth or authenticity of the presence and gifting of the Holy Spirit should not be measured by how strange and otherworldly they appear to be. Crazy otherworldliness is not the point of such gifts, just as the appearance of normalcy isn't the measure of such gifts. Let's take a look at the gifts as they are listed in the scriptures:

Galatians 5:22–23 is not listing gifts but fruits, which are general effects the presence of the Holy Spirit has on everyone. The fruits are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Romans 12:6–8 lists gifts: prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, and mercy. These are listed as gifts, but not specifically as gifts of the Spirit; this is inferred from Romans 8.

1 Corinthians 12:4–14 and 28–31 lists more gifts, and these are different from the gifts in the Romans 12 list: word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues. These are specifically listed as gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 4:11–13 seems to me to be listing the types of offices God establishes in the church, not specific gifts. Perhaps these are giftings that people practice over an extended time. Such people are listed as apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.

So, the Romans list is pretty tame. Teaching? Exhortation? Giving? Mercy? We're all pretty cozy with these gifts. They're not flashy, uncomfortable gifts, but they are nevertheless true gifts of the Holy Spirit that, if exercised well, are powerful enough to require the exhortation to not think too highly of oneself. The 1 Corinthians list is a bit more dramatic. Note that there is no mention anywhere of people being slain in the spirit, or of gold dust or barking like dogs and laughing uncontrollably. Many of the gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12 are still verbal gifts, and not explicitly or empirically supernatural. They are all supernatural, but the demonstration of strange, dramatic, supernatural events is not the point. The gift is given to empower a love that is not mere sentiment or talk (1 Corinthians 13).

My purpose in mentioning all of this is simply to provide a context for gifts within the romance of Christ and the church, and to move beyond the coercion of law into the grounding of our relationships in grace and love. The point of the gifts isn't to be dramatically and strangely supernatural. Some of them are strange and dramatic, and many of them are not. The point is that the Christian life is to be guided by giftedness, completely run by the grace-centered manifestation of the Holy Spirit for the love and edification of the church (Ephesians 4:12).

The nature of a gift is that it is ultimately determined by the giver, not the receiver. If God in His wisdom gives some gifts that feel uncomfortable to our flesh, are we to refuse? Why have we come to focus so strongly on the gifts themselves, rather than on the giver, that we choose to separate ourselves from our brothers in Christ? This focus and resulting separation is ungodly. As Paul says, there is a more excellent way (1 Corinthians 12:31).

The world will not know us by our dramatic, quasi-miraculous weirdness or by our dazzlingly perfect doctrinal insight and precise understanding of the finer points of the propitiation. It will know us by our love. Excellent doctrine and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit's power are important antecedents and powerful tools in showing each other love, but love is the true central point. Love is the miracle that the Holy Spirit births through the cross of Christ, and grace is the air that love breathes. Healing isn't a device to show that we are amazingly anointed weird Christian ministry people; healing is power exerted on behalf of sick or hurt people as an expression of God's love for them and of our love for them. The love is the real miracle; it is the thing nonbelievers ultimately see as evidence of the Lord (John 13:35).

Is that charismatic? So be it. I think it is the biblical position. We don't refuse the gifts because they seem weird, but we also don't validate the gifts as authentic on the basis of their weirdness. Let's put this most plainly: the blood of Jesus provides a door for us to the universe of grace, where everything works as a gift. The gifts are given so that we may, with great power, love one another. The aim of grace is romance between Christ and His bride, the church. The gifts, power, and virtue given through grace are meant to foster love; they are not meant to operate in isolation or to exalt any individual as though there were any merit in the expression of giftedness. No gift can supersede the message of Christ and Him crucified.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. If we view all of our possessions as opportunities to give, how will we ever retain enough of our own possessions to be able to live and give anything to anyone? Does a gift culture really make sense?

2. After teaching the parable of the unworthy servant, Jesus heals ten lepers in the next scene. Only one of them, a Samaritan, turns back to thank Him, at which Jesus praises the man and rebukes the others. However, hadn't He just said that we should be unworthy servants and should not seek thanks? Why does He rebuke the ones who did not give thanks? Is Jesus seeking thanks here, and transgressing the teaching He just gave concerning the unworthy servants? Explain.

3. Is it really true that being gifted empowers us all the better to give? It seems like a lot of rich people are gifted with money in order to sequester themselves from people with problems. They seem pretty happy. Is it really more blessed to give than to receive? Why?

4. Do we have to be baptized a second time into a more charismatic experience to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit? What about claims of gifts such as being “slain in the Spirit” or being overcome with uncontrollable laughter?

5. If we live in a gift culture, can we really trust that others’ gifts will mesh together to fully meet our needs? Who will really watch out for my interests if I don't watch out for myself? My church doesn't seem to function the way this chapter describes the Body of Christ; what am I supposed to do about it?

7 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2007), 3–4.

8 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 43–44.

CHAPTER 9

A SENSE OF WONDER: THE CENTRALITY OF GRATITUDE

THE SIMPLICITY OF WONDER

I ONCE LIVED IN A HOUSE nestled in the foothills of Mt. Baker in the Northern Cascade mountains near Canada. You entered the property through a gate into a line of trees that opened out onto an expansive green pasture. The gravel road wound around and up to a knoll where the house was perched. The pasture was surrounded by a forest of Douglas fir trees, western red cedars, alder, and paper birch; behind the house a mountain rose. It was dramatic and exquisitely beautiful, and I don't know that I will ever live in a place so inspiring again. The mountain had many trails, and one summer I hiked up past the views of the snowcapped Canadian Cascades in British Columbia, along a path that had become overgrown with alder saplings, to a small clearing. There in the clearing was a single exquisite flower, a red columbine, with a yellow star-shaped center. I sat in the quiet of the forest with that flower for most of an hour that day:

desire came

uninvited

unreasonable

untouchable

by my own derision

or the world's inevitable scorn

a mountain that stands unmoved

against time

all my doings

are the fuzz of green trees

around its base

I am powerless to

move it

change it

touch it

where is its root?

in a hidden cleft of rock

there is a wild columbine

impossible and exquisite

orange with brown spots

and long yellow pistils

the next time I am there

it is gone

for it

the mountain

has moved

Our encounter with something that invokes in us a sense of wonder is an encounter with some kind of splendor or beauty that is quite beyond us. We can marvel, but we cannot grasp. The sense of wonder releases us to enjoy, to worship, to experience awe, without having to understand or control. We do not need to name or dissect or control the encounter. We need only to stand in quiet enjoyment and revel in the simplicity of the moment. One of the unexpected benefits of the life under grace, the life that does not need to prove its own merit but is assured of its eternal acceptance, is that control and manipulation are released from us. We are free to release this grasping to understand, to utilize, to own. We can let the glory and beauty of things stand alone. We can enter a true sense of wonder.

Science is a wonderful tool that can lead us deeper into experiences of wonder. However, much of science is deeply under law; wonder is in general not allowed. The rule is dispassionate observation; there is the constant pressure to dissect, to name, to rationalize. One of the ironies of this is that, according to the laws of quantum physics, the very act of observation alters the dynamics, so there is really no way to engage in a disconnected and truly dispassionate observation. Grace allows us to enter into a sense of wonder at the world, to acknowledge that there are many things beyond us—things we did not make and do not need to control—that are quite wonderful. In wonder, we enter into the gift culture; we are presented with wonderful things we did not make or earn and for which there is no payment, and we need only do the thing that wonder invites anyway—give thanks. The sad dynamic of naturalism is not simply disbelief in God but a closed door to this profound understanding of gratitude. Naturalism denies not only the ability to acknowledge the existence of things in the universe beyond our grasp but also our greatest longing—to enter into wonder and express gratitude to Someone who gave the gift.

The beings around the throne who constantly say, “Holy, holy, holy” are under Jesus’ edict to never use meaningless repetition in their prayers. Did you ever think about that? This means that every time they say it, they are saying it in a fresh way, with a fresh sense of wonder at God, over and over and over. He is forever new, forever surprising, forever a fountain of beauty and wonder. He is forever a source of new beauty, insight, and truth that they had not yet discovered or perceived. This is all of grace; in fact, it is the real purpose of grace. Worship is this sense of wonder at God, under grace, and the simple utterance of genuine heartfelt gratitude. We do not need to control, analyze, and explain; doing so can quickly become a harsh, lifeless law. Rather, we have the freedom to stop and enjoy, expressing thanks.

After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.” Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold, a throne was standing in heaven, and One sitting on the throne. And He who was sitting was like a jasper stone and a sardius in appearance; and there was a rainbow around the throne, like an emerald in appearance. And around the throne were twenty-four thrones; and upon the thrones I saw twenty-four elders sitting, clothed in white garments, and golden crowns on their heads. And from the throne proceed flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunder. And there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God; and before the throne there was, as it were, a sea of glass like crystal; and in the center and around the throne, four living creatures full of eyes in front and behind. And the first creature was like a lion, and the second creature like a calf, and the third creature had a face like that of a man, and the fourth creature was like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within; and day and night they do not cease to say, “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, is THE LORD GOD, THE ALMIGHTY, WHO WAS AND WHO IS AND WHO IS TO COME.” And when the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, to Him who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders will fall down before Him who sits on the throne, and will worship Him who lives forever and ever, and will cast their crowns before the throne, saying, “Worthy art Thou, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy will they existed, and were created” (Revelation 4:1–11, NASB).

FREEDOM TO LIKE THINGS

Paul Zahl, in his wonderful podcast session titled “Lounge Crooner Classics,” says that his most popular and well-received podcasts of all were on giant crab monster movies and the rock band Journey. He then recounts a series of incredibly schmaltzy old songs from obscure movies of the 50s and 60s, which he happens to really like. I love that guy, really! I have a good number of songs that I keep on my “guilty pleasure songs” list, such as “On the Wings of Love.” I love the way that guy sings, I love the image of flying high with my lover on wings of love. I have always loved that song about Brandy, who loved some sailor who only loved the sea. It is pure syrupy schlock, but there is something about that song I've always liked! I admit it!

There is a fear in us that we like the wrong things, that we need to like things that are approved by those we admire. We are used to being told what to like. We are used to pretending that our desire is drawn to things that we are supposed to like because our friends or society or subculture approves. We are accustomed to pretending that we are not drawn to objects of art and culture that actually do fascinate us. The church has been telling us—in different ways and forever—what we should and shouldn't like, and there is very little safe space to admit that we don't all seem to function the exact same way. It is ingrained in us to distrust our own personal facility to like things. In fact, it can be difficult to know what things we do genuinely like versus the things we pretend to like because we so fear the disapproval of others.

In Christ, we are enormously and eternally approved; we have hit the approval jackpot. God Himself likes us so much that He was willing to die in order to obtain us! If we are so greatly approved, we are freed from worrying about the approval of others, and this has mammoth impact on the way we live and think and view the world. As long as we are under the fear of others’ opinions, worrying about our standing and worthiness among them, we are slaves to the obligation to like the things that others consider acceptable, even in mundane issues and childlike joys. Conversely, when we are already convinced that we are thoroughly approved, we have the freedom to like what we really like, not just the things we are supposed to like. Our sense of aesthetics is set free in Christ. We can worship from freedom; we can give thanks to God for the sense of Him that we actually possess, not the things that are supposed to impress us. We are permitted to come as children.

The artist and the creative community are greatly impacted by this; the spiritual grounding from which the creative urge springs is the soil from which the work finds its genesis and grows. If we live primarily for the approval of others, we will create work that conforms to their idea of innovation and greatness. Conversely, if we are already approved and do not live for the approval of others, we are free to create what we like instead of what we think our critics will approve.

This does not mean that in striving to exercise our God-given creativity, we see no value in the work of others. The greatest musician who ever lived, J. S. Bach, spent hours and hours throughout his life copying and studying the manuscripts of other composers and writing in their style. No one accuses Bach of being imitative or unoriginal. Grace affords the freedom to appreciate the brilliance of others while individually exercising our own God-given, creative gifts. We do not need to prove that we are original or unique. In fact, the need to prove originality can become an enslaving law, a grasp at being lovely instead of an assurance of being loved.

Grace grants us the freedom to choose the humble things at hand instead of paralyzing us with a grand self-image that causes us to emotionally or effectively reject the ideas, talents, and people at hand. The creative act is paralyzed by self-judgment but is released under the freedom of acceptance and grand approval. God Himself operates under this rubric, as this meditative poem illustrates:

You're gonna

jump into that wild blue

kiss that crazy girl

move there

stay here

After all

This number

not that one

made this cosmic wild

This note

not that one

made the song right

This word

This job

This color

This tree

This breeze

This name

Here

Now

Me

and

You

God said

Let there be

There was the universe

unsung and unseen

as yet not made

waiting and desperate to burst forth

And God waited

until a certain time

this time not that

God said LET

Let the world burst forth

Let the desire and the glory

burst forth into being

The fear over this and not that

Exploded into being

The possibly better universe

Split open to reveal the real one

And light spilled out

to all the seers and visionaries

all the mothers

who loved this guy not that one

And brought forth

this child and not that

And so Bach's cello suite

And African peanut soup

And the miles of raspberry fields near my house

Came to be

This is the day

The Lord has made.

GRATITUDE IS A PROFOUND AND SOPHISTICATED ACT

Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18, NASB).

We may want to keep worship within the bounds of profound experiences and cosmic insights, but God became flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus to show us that grace and truth operate on a very human level. It is important that grace work within our earthly relationships.

Life in the universe of grace is closely intertwined with gratitude. It is a gift culture, not a labor culture. If you live in a labor culture, there is really not much place for gratitude because the way to significance is to work hard, to work smart, and to thereby prosper. Gifts are largely unwelcome because they interfere with the ongoing aim to prove one's worth.

We see an awkwardness with gifts in the silly things that people say in gift-giving situations. People say, “Oh, you shouldn't have!” or “How can I ever repay you?” or “I don't deserve this!” Or others might say (and I've heard this), “You really deserve this!” What we're really saying in these circumstances is that we are not used to grace and feel awkward receiving a blessing that we didn't earn.

Gratitude is a profound and sophisticated act. It acknowledges the sacrifices others make on our behalf and the love that others act upon toward us. Gratitude acknowledges that the sacrifices of others satisfy our desire and fulfill the simple purposes of love. Gratitude is also God's will for us in Christ Jesus, who is on the lookout to bless us at every turn whether we deserve it or not. To cultivate gratitude is to grease the gears of grace by removing the burden of seizing favor and manipulating circumstances by our own labor and cleverness. Instead, we allow for circumstances and powers quite beyond ourselves to operate to our benefit. If I must deserve everything I get, then everything I get must depend on what I do—and I am limited in my knowledge, resources, and power. When I cultivate a habit of gratitude, I allow that good things can be given to me, that I can be blessed by the love, sacrifice, and concern of those who give to me beyond my own power or even my merit.

In our family, we have on occasion gone back to Philippians 2:4: “Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.” If I look out for only my own personal interests, I have only one person looking out for me—me. If we all look out for each others’ interests, we have six people looking out for our interests. The way to foster this kind of environment is to live in a culture of grace, which includes gratitude as a response to blessing not earned.

In expressing grace to one another, it is important that we not expect or demand gratitude. It is not a law, and God does not withhold favor because we do not perfectly express thanks. For us to demand gratitude from others is to establish a subtle backdoor to gracelessness. Gratitude is a gift, not a requirement; it is a sweet, joyous, natural way to respond to a kindness. It does not spoil the oil by promising repayment; such promises are nothing more than an attempt to drag the beautiful gift of God or of a human back to the world of law. Gratitude simply receives and says, “You love me; isn't that wonderful!” It allows us the freedom to serve one another wherever the need arises, recognizing the beautiful paradigm we now live under. It strips life of interpersonal politics and owing people favors and being enslaved because we accepted a kindness. Gratitude and grace fit together like a hand and a glove. They make life easier in that the only expectation is to give from love, and the only response ever expected is thanks.

In some ways, the church is used to living in a gift culture. We do not charge to come to church, we give to the ministry of the church, and we give away worship music for little or nothing. In fact, we feel the incongruity when a church goes astray with these things. This is because grace, gratitude, and the whole gift culture are the warp and woof of the Christian life, even for graceless churches that refuse to understand this.

Grace says, “I love you!” Gratitude says, “Thank You, Lord! I love you too!” It is as simple as that.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Do wonder and worship short-circuit the engine that drives scientific curiosity? Do we make God only a God of the gaps, as some atheists claim? In the name of faith and grace, of wonder and worship, do we become happy in our ignorance?

2. In this world, we do not live in a gift culture; in this sense, we are in the world but not of it. How can we, in practical ways, foster a gift culture using only the currency of gratitude?

3. What sacrifices do people in your life make for you? How can you meaningfully express gratitude to them?

CHAPTER 10

GRACE AND DESIRE IN THE GODHEAD

THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA

No, this isn't my next intrigue novel!

The title of this section is a reference to one of Plato's dialogues in which Socrates asks Euthyphro, “Is the pious (τὸὅσιoν) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”

As Christians, we might phrase the question as follows: “Is what is morally good commanded by God because it is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God?” This may be unclear, so let's use a diagram:

Not only do I think that grace speaks powerfully to this question, but I think the question itself betrays a mind-set that rejects grace and interprets the Word and work of God from inside the prison of legalism. This has profound and practical consequences for how we perceive, worship, and serve God as well as for why the freedom of radical grace and the centrality of desire are all- important. Let's unpack this a bit together.

If the moral good is commanded by God because it is morally good, then there is a higher authority than God to which God bows the knee. In effect, this hypothesis would mean that the moral good is greater than God, because God lies under its authority and submits to its demands. To borrow St. Anselm's idea, nothing greater than God can be conceived; if the law is greater than God, then God is no longer God.

On the other hand, saying that the moral good becomes “good” merely because it is commanded by God is to depict God as a cosmic despot who rules according to capricious whims, doing whatever He likes. Principle and justice fly out the window; the moral good is defined only by what God wants. If God would like for someone to be murdered or raped, then suddenly murder and rape become morally good, simply because God wants it to be so.

Clearly, I reject both of these options. Fortunately, grace offers us a different perspective.

Importantly, this whole dilemma hinges on the separation of moral good from aesthetic good. We imagine that, for God, the moral good and aesthetic good are separate, just as they are for us. God must want either one or the other, we think. Yet the fact is that this is not the case for God because, for Him, what is right and what is beautiful flow equally from love.

Legalists love the division of the good into two halves because if God bows the knee to the moral good, they are free to serve the idol of the moral instead of serving the actual living God. After all, God also bows the knee in the same way, thinks the legalist, so he can dispense with God and serve the true authority—the moral good. This is why legalism is idolatry—it sets the law above God and divides moral good from aesthetic good. This perspective is a comfort to the legalist because, from his cold isolation, he must adhere only to a dead principle and can dispense with all the mysterious vagaries of a relationship with a living being. The law is a simple and predictable idol, similar to a wooden block carved as an idol. We are free to be our own god, bowing the knee to principle—just as we imagine God Himself does—when we make ourselves legalists.

The question of Euthyphro's Dilemma arises only because we view the world from inside the prison of law. We interpret God's actions from the place of the knowledge of good and evil. A thing is either good or evil, and God's actions must be judged that way. It is as if we wear sunglasses that turn everything blue, and we cannot conceive of a world that is not blue. Grace disturbs us because it is a sudden intrusion of life and color into our previously gray, lifeless, predictable world.

In the universe of grace, there is no division between moral good and aesthetic good. God acts from love, and love rejoices with the truth. We may try to ask whether the demonstration of His love and grace constitutes an act that He desires more than moral righteousness, but He does not conform to such a grid; such a question is similar to asking if God can make a sandwich so big that He cannot eat it. He acts only from love, and love is both the moral good and the thing that He wants. The separation of love from what is right is simply nonexistent with God. Thus, if we live and think from the perspective of grace, there is no such dilemma at all.

THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SUFFERING OF GOD

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it (Matt. 13:45–46 NASB).

Once the merchant had sold everything to buy the pearl he desired, he was in poverty. The pearl was of great monetary value only if he sold it to a willing buyer, yet if he sold it, he would no longer have the object of his desire.

Thus, in acquiring the pearl, the merchant impoverishes himself to become rich. He becomes a homeless man in tattered rags on the street secretly holding his million-dollar pearl. Maybe he will build his life back up, maybe he will be resurrected—but not without the pearl! If he were to sell the pearl to acquire money, he would no longer have his treasure. It is not that the pearl has value in bringing wealth and luxury to the merchant; quite the opposite. The pearl has direct appeal and beauty in itself that is worth the loss of all other comforts.

Pressing this to the message of grace, we have something even more profound! We have already seen that it is not that the kingdom of heaven is like the pearl; reading this carefully, we see that the kingdom is like the merchant; we are the pearl. This means God is enamored of us; He has such overwhelming desire that He impoverishes Himself in order to gain us. Look at this:

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:5–8, NASB).

God has impoverished himself to gain us, not to use us to gain some further good beyond us. He did not acquire us in order to sell us for something else. There is not “something else” for Him, or some further aim; we are the direct object of His desire. He loves us directly, He sees worth in us as ourselves, and our redemption was costly to Him. We are desirable, alone and unadorned by what He can get us to do or how He can get us to change or what hoops He can get us to jump through.

God's desire to show love toward us in a way that was costly presented Him with a distinct problem. Let's do a thought experiment: suppose for a moment that you are God. You can snap your fingers and create an entire universe. Speak the word, and a new world springs forth; at your whim, whole species and ecosystems of living things spring forth. You are the creator. Nothing costs you anything! You must actually invent a way for something to cost you. In a way, it would seem to the human mind that everything You might give is actually kind of worthless because it is all so easy for you.

Thus God—who creates universes with an utterance, who owns everything, and if that isn't enough, He can create more—had a dilemma. How could He show that we were truly worth something to Him; how could He make His love cost something in a way that we would understand?

God has in fact created a way to give value to His love—He made up the idea of cost. He made up suffering, not so that we would suffer, but so that He could suffer, so He could bear the scars. We suffer now, for a moment, so that we can understand the worth of the scars that He bears; but we ultimately do not bear the suffering that He bore. We have momentary light affliction now; He bears the scars unto eternity. Because He has been resurrected, our scars are wounds that have healed. Had we no momentary light affliction, we would have no experiential connection to the great worth of the immense cost He paid to gain us.

And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth. And He came, and He took it out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne. And when He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, having each one a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy art Thou to take the book, and to break its seals; for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase for God with Thy blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.

“And Thou hast made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.”

And I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,

“Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”

And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying,

“To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.”

And the four living creatures kept saying, “Amen.” And the elders fell down and worshiped (Revelation 5:6–14, NASB).

This is perhaps the most incredible miracle of all—that the same God who has the power to speak universes into existence has gone to great lengths to forge a way to make this purchase costly to Himself. He made it be costly. He set the stage to make it cost everything to redeem us, and He did it on purpose. He wanted to make it clear that we were important enough to empty Himself, to sell all, to forsake all other comforts. He has shown dramatically that we are of very great worth to Him. Now He is forever sitting on the throne as the Lamb who was slain, forever bearing the marks of such a great cost. He is forever the One who impoverished Himself to gain the great object of His desire—the church, His bride. When He was resurrected, He could have been healed of His wounds. Instead, He carefully retains them into the very throne room of heaven. He stands marked with scars, saying in His very body, “I have gone to great lengths and great costs to say that I forsake all comforts for the love of you.”

Notice this: the pearl did not have to transform itself to become desirable. The pearl was beautiful as it stood. God loves us most directly, quite apart from any transformation that could take place. The most important thing in us that God sees as beautiful is already there. He seeks transformation as we might wash and iron a favored garment (Eph. 5:27) from an existing and profound love for us that has already impoverished Him to the point of death.

What wondrous love is this! I am honestly undone at the thought of being so greatly desired by Him! Who am I? I am the one who is loved by Christ, and that is far more than enough.

GRACE AND DESIRE IN THE GODHEAD

The doctrine of the Trinity, as I understand it, goes like this:

- The Father is God

- The Son is God

- The Holy Spirit is God

- The Son is not the Father

- The Son is not the Holy Spirit

- The Holy Spirit is not the Father

- The Holy Spirit is not the Son

There have been all kinds of debate and speculation through the centuries about how God could be one, with the same essence, yet have three separate individualities. I am not going to attempt to explain all of this—I am merely affirming this nature of the Trinity. However, I would like to present some speculations based on the truth of this nature of the Trinity.

The separateness of the Persons of the Godhead is not to be diminished or glossed over; this separateness of identity is extremely important. For example, we have this:

Jesus therefore answered them, and said, “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself. He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who is seeking the glory of the One who sent Him, He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him” (John 7:16–18, NASB).

Jesus therefore said, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me. And He who sent Me is with Me; He has not left Me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to Him” (John 8:28–29, NASB).

“Father, if Thou art willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Thine be done” (Luke 22:42, NASB).

If Jesus had no autonomy and could not of His own volition choose to do the will of His Father, how could He have the ability to seek His Father's glory? If He were one with the Father in terms of having no individual identity, how could He surrender His own will and choose the contrasting will of His Father? Clearly, they had differing wills here, and the unity they shared was one not of identity but of purpose. This separateness is true despite their unity in their essence as being God. It is an essential aspect of the Godhead that Jesus was able to choose not His will but His Father's will. It was not that the Father controlled Jesus like a puppet in forcing Him to lay down His life:

“For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father” (John 10:17–18, NASB).

No one took His life away from Him. Included in the group “no one” is every being everywhere, which includes the Father and the Holy Spirit. No one forced Him to lay down His life; He autonomously chose to lay it down. We see a similar thing with the Holy Spirit:

God also bearing witness with them, both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will (Hebrews 2:4, NASB).

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you (John 14:26, NASB).

We see that signs and wonders and various miracles and gifts are given by the Holy Spirit, according to the Holy Spirit's own will. The Holy Spirit is also an autonomous individual member of the Trinity who freely chooses to do as He desires. His desires are in accordance with those of the other members, and He serves their desires, but He does so according to His own will.

The point is this: The members of the Godhead live under the freedom of grace. They do everything from love, from an obedience of the heart, not from the coercion and fear of the law. They forsake lesser treasures at great personal cost to obtain a greater joy. They are unified because the moral good and the aesthetic good are undivided within them. They exercise no control over one another because they trust the perfection of each other's heart. They choose to serve One another, and this does not mean that there are never differences. They submit to One another from the freedom of love and respect—the same atmosphere God asks us to enter.

So, what are the consequences for us? Within the very Godhead, it is autonomous choice based on love and desire that maintains the unity among the Godhead's persons. There is love because there is freedom, and there is freedom because there is genuine liberty of choice. Jesus chose to lay down His life; He was not forced. So it is with us. We are invited to live a life of freedom in which we choose to do God's will—not from the dead coercion of the law or from threat, but from our hearts and from love. We are invited to live and to joyously choose to serve God's purposes from love and mutual trust, just as the members of the Trinity do. We sinning fools are invited to breathe the same air and walk in the same kind of unity that the members of the Godhead themselves occupy. We are not to seek death in the sense that we become God's robots or puppets. Our obedience, our virtue, and our righteous acts are always from choice and always from the joy set before us. God does not seek a dead facsimile of ourselves to ignorantly obey Him; He seeks a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). As occurs within the individuals of the Trinity, a mindful and heartfelt sacrifice freely chosen from love is what the Father seeks with us.

Why do I think that the nature of the relationships among the persons of the Godhead can serve as a suitable model for our own lives? Let's look at this passage:

For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? (Hebrews 2:1–3, NASB).

In context, the author of Hebrews has just gone on at length proving that Jesus is better than the angels. Here we see the stinger, the reason this point is so important. When he writes about the word spoken through angels, what does he mean? The answer is right in the passage. The word spoken through angels is a word in which every transgression is outlined, the line of disobedience is defined, and recompense and punishment are spelled out. In other words, according to Scripture, the word spoken through the angels is the law. The word spoken through Christ is different—it is salvation. The word of Christ is greater than the word spoken through the angels because Christ is greater than the angels.

So we are invited into a kingdom that is above the kingdom of the angels. We are called into an environment that does not operate by spelling out the definitions of transgressions and punishments. This is such a shocking development. It is no wonder that people balk at grace. We say, “Of course the members of the Godhead operate this way; after all, they are God. We are just humans and clearly not to be so trusted.”

But apparently, God sees it differently. When Jesus died for our sins, it was to open a doorway to this heaven, a world of freedom, autonomous unity, and obedience that grows from the depths of the heart of love. We are not God, but we are His bride, called above the angels to a relationship and a unity that requires no coercion or fear.

Do you not know that we shall judge angels? How much more, matters of this life?(1 Corinthians 6:3, NASB)

We are invited into a world in which the motivation is always love, never punishment. Our lives are not measured by conformity to standards of practice. In fact, our lives are not measured—we have entered a gift culture in which the only currency is gratitude. We are invited into a world where it is no longer we who live but Christ—and yet we retain our individual autonomy and choice to act. We are forgiven so that the barriers to the entrance into this world are removed, so that we may come boldly to this throne of grace. This throne of grace is where the persons of the Trinity choose freely and autonomously to love, where their essence is one while their personhoods are distinct. This is the world to which we are invited, because we are greatly loved. In all of the universe, no other but the church is named as His bride. The angels and the very universe itself longs to see the revelation of Christ's exquisite and beautiful bride, and this is what we are:

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body (Romans 8:19–23, NASB).

The Godhead is held together by nothing except love; there is otherwise complete freedom to choose. This is true from eternity to eternity. We as believers are invited into the same place. Grace invites us into an intimacy with God—one that was previously shared only among the members of the Godhead. We as the church, as Christ's bride, have been honored and raised up beyond any human expectation. This is ultimately the goal and end of grace: to operate purely on the basis of love. Truly, grace is amazing; no wonder the angels long to look into these things (1 Peter 1:12).

SURE, GRACE IS AWESOME—NOW TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

I want to wrap things up by introducing a modern-day fairy tale:

Once upon a time there was a wealthy young man who was looking for love. Because of his wealth, he could never trust that any woman he dated truly loved him. So he moved into a small, run-down apartment and took a part-time job as a waiter, pretending to be poor and normal. He dated a number of women, and finally he hit it off with a beautiful, witty, and hopelessly optimistic girl. She stole his heart completely! He began to call her all the time, and they would talk for hours. Soon enough they declared their love for each other. He secretly planned everything—he bought a mansion for her, which they would one day share; chose a beautiful ring that he thought she would like; and planned a honeymoon in Europe. He reserved a table at a fancy restaurant and made sure his people were ready to whisk them off in his limo. At the right point, he nervously got on his knees, opened the box with the ring, and asked, “Will you marry me?” A hush fell over the place as she put her hand to her mouth in excitement, and with tears in her eyes, she said, “Yes! Yes, I will marry you!” Applause erupted in the restaurant, and as soon as she had said yes, an army of hired hands behind the scenes went into motion while they ate, moving all of her clothes and personal items into her new mansion and setting appointments for choosing wedding cakes and dresses and such. That night she slept in her new home, and soon they had a huge fairy-tale wedding and lived together—mostly happily—ever after.

When I speak on radical grace and the true, good-news gospel, I am often asked, “What is the take-away? What is the application? What exactly are you asking us to do? We need to be told how to apply this in a practical way in our day-to-day life.”

How do you think the young woman's life was impacted after the events in this story? Do you suppose she had a good chance of remaining faithful to her husband? Or do you think she would go on to a life of robbery and drug-abuse and wild orgies? It wouldn't be a proper fairy-tale if things turned out that way, and it just isn't the way this story goes. We are the young woman from this little story. Jesus came to earth and masqueraded as a humble and somewhat obscure healer, while in fact he was God incarnate. As soon as we say yes to Him, things are set into motion on our behalf that we can't even imagine, and we suddenly become wealthy and important beyond our wildest dreams. Our main prerogative is to actually believe it and live like it. Before Christ, it didn't matter what we did; God seemed always against us. In Christ, no matter what we do, God is for us. In Christ, all of our works and virtue are no longer obligations but gifts. We are suddenly invited into a place above the angels in a privileged place of fellowship with God that no other creature possesses. This transition to life under grace is the all-important touchstone of lasting transformation.

On airplanes before takeoff, the flight attendant intones the usage of the safety devices on the plane, and he or she always says that in case of disaster, put the oxygen mask on yourself first so that you will be conscious to help your child. If you pass out, you're no help to anyone. Many times in talking about mercy and grace, it is pressed upon us as something we ought to extend toward others. There is nothing wrong with this; of course we need to show grace and mercy to others! However, if I am to be equipped to do this, I must first believe that grace is for me.

When we read the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11), the conclusion we are tempted to reach is that we ought not to judge; we ought not to throw stones. Of course we ought not to throw stones—everyone knows this in the abstract, and yet we all love to throw stones and gossip (Prov. 18:8) when it comes down to it. However, there is something far more profound here.

We are not asked primarily to identify with the stone throwers. We are the woman who was caught. Jesus defended her even though she was wrong. Jesus defended her in the face of true guilt. When Jesus drew a line in the sand, He stood on her side, not theirs. If we imagine ourselves as the stone throwers, we imagine ourselves as righteous with Jesus standing against us. If we imagine ourselves as the woman, we imagine ourselves as guilty with Jesus standing in our defense when we are at our worst. When we are accused, even when we are actually guilty, Jesus still stands on our side. He still defends us. His love for us persists even when we have blown it and don't deserve it at all. Our job is to believe that and live as if we believed it:

They said therefore to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:28–29, NASB).

Grace is from God for me, not from me to everyone else around me. I'm not supposed to be the source of grace; I'm supposed to be the recipient of it. In this way, it is not something I do but rather something I believe and receive. If I can't appropriate the love and mercy of God for myself in a deeply personal and individual way, what use am I to anyone else? We can't minister from a place of guilt, from a feeling that if the world knew our secrets, they would stone us. We have to know that even though the whole world rightly wants to judge us, and we truly have no defense, Jesus still stands on our side and defends us. His defense is effectual. Only He loves us. Only He knows how to truly defend us. Only He has the power to wash our conscience clean. He is rich in mercy and lavishes us with grace.

Stop worrying about whether or not you are exhibiting grace or rightly serving others. I can tell you right now, you are terrible at it. Your grace and your mercy are weak and misinformed and inadequate. Your version of mercy is that you were holding a stone but have been shamed into dropping it. Your life as a Christian will roll along much easier if you will let Jesus stand with you, if you will realize that He loves you, that He defends you, that He knows you are in the wrong and He still persists with your defense. Then you will know the release of having the defender and lover of your soul give you the life-giving freedom to go your way and sin no more. When you have tasted the incredible rush of having the One who is just and the justifier of your soul stand with you in your defense, when you realize that He will persist in loving you forever, you will rush, in your excitement and freedom, to bring others to drink the rich nectar of His perfect love. This is the true Christian life, full of freedom, assurance, and love.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Review the question at the beginning of this section: Is the pious (τὸὅσιoν) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? Think about this in terms of God and morality. Did we answer this question, or did we just talk around it?

2. Does it seem to you a thing of comfort or a thing of fear that, although the Persons of the Godhead have a choice in being unified, they choose to serve and obey each other from love without threat or coercion? Do you wish there were something more tangible holding the Persons of the Godhead in unity? Is such a bond good enough for your marriage?

3. In Galatians 2:20, Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (NASB). Does this negate the concept that God seeks an obedience freely chosen from love? Does God seek a living sacrifice or a person who no longer lives? How does this work?

4. Do you feel that it has “clicked” for you that you are the beloved bride of Christ who is invited into an intimacy above the place of the angels, into the kind of relationship heretofore known only by the persons of the Godhead? Do you even think this is true?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine, E. B. “Confessions.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Translated by Marcus Dods Pusey. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1955.

Capon, Robert Farrar. Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publications, 1997.

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems, 1909–1935. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage, 2007.

Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

The Princess Bride. Directed by Rob Reiner. 1987. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

Wilson, Sarah Hinlicky. “What's His Is Ours.” Christianity Today (September 2012): 32.

Zahl, Paul F. M. Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publications, 2007.

Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR THE ROMANCE OF GRACE

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: THE KINGDOM RULED BY DESIRE

THE HUMAN PERSPECTIVE: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AS TREASURE

THE DIVINE PERSPECTIVE: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AS PEARL MERCHANT

THE COSMIC ROMANCE

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 2: THE TWO KINDS OF GOOD

THE GENESIS OF THE CONSCIENCE

THE NATURE OF THE LAW

THE SHAPE OF THE HEALED DESIRE

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 3: BEYOND THE COERCION OF THE LAW

GO YOUR WAY AND SIN NO MORE

LAW PRODUCES REBELLION? REALLY?

GRACE—THE ONLY HOPE FOR TRUE VIRTUE

IN THIS IS LOVE

THE GREATEST AND MOST IMPOSSIBLE COMMAND

ANTINOMIANISM AND THE LAW UNDER GRACE

CHRISTIAN VIRTUE VS. WALMART

IS GRACE EFFORTLESS?

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 4: GRACE IS THE AIR LOVE BREATHES

AN OLD COMMANDMENT AND A NEW COMMANDMENT

THE NATURE OF TRUE LOVE

LOVE CANNOT BE COERCED

LOVE MEANS FIDELITY

GOD IS GREATER THAN OUR HEARTS

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 5: LIVING UNDER GRACE

THE CROSS AND JOY

THE TWO SELVES

THE LIFE OF JACOB: A CAUTIONARY TALE

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 6: THE GRACE WE DON'T WANT

GRACE FOR THE UNGRACIOUS

JESUS AND THE GRUMBLERS

A KINGDOM OF BLESSED LOSERS

SELF-LOATHING AND SUFFICIENT GRACE

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 7: TEMPTATION, DESIRE, AND PREDESTINATION—OH MY!

IS GRACE EQUAL TO PREDESTINATION?

GRACE IS SIMPLER AND MORE PROFOUND THAN PREDESTINATION

GRACE AS ASSURANCE

PERFECTION OF DESIRE AS THE HARSHEST LAW

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 8: GIFT CULTURE—LIVING FOR THE DESIRES OF OTHERS

GIFTED TO GIVE GIFTS

UNWORTHY SERVANTS

GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 9: A SENSE OF WONDER: THE CENTRALITY OF GRATITUDE

THE SIMPLICITY OF WONDER

FREEDOM TO LIKE THINGS

GRATITUDE IS A PROFOUND AND SOPHISTICATED ACT

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

CHAPTER 10: GRACE AND DESIRE IN THE GODHEAD

THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA

THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SUFFERING OF GOD

GRACE AND DESIRE IN THE GODHEAD

SURE, GRACE IS AWESOME—NOW TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY