Grace
Posted by Jesse and Sarah Dempsen , Friday, December 3, 2010 2:09 PM
I've been thinking a lot this year about grace. It's incredible to consider just how free God is in His love. It's hard to even begin to try to convey it, because for the Christian, grace seems like a given. We tend to think of it as what we got when we signed up, but we don't think of it as being the thing that sustains us our whole lives and on into eternity. We hear the word and it loses its power and meaning. Not only that, but we also attempt, often unintentionally, to sabotage its meaning.
Here it is: grace is the unmerited favor of God. Unmerited: meaning we do nothing to deserve it. In fact, we learn from the Word that the opposite is true. We daily do things to earn God's displeasure and anger. But instead of getting His disapproval - which we rightly deserve - we get His favor. Unmerited. Undeserved.
Favor: in English, that's a word that doesn't hold a lot of weight. We most often use it in the context of asking for small things ("Hey, can you do me a favor?"), or when talking about something we prize over other things in a certain category ("What's your favorite color? Who's your favorite singer?"). Both uses connote triviality. We don't typically ask people for "favors" when the task is huge. So when we think about God's grace as unmerited favor, it takes on a meaning (at least to me) of God's mild acceptance or tolerance of us -His preference for us over something else almost as appealing. Which, let's face it, is better already than what we deserve.
But when it comes to grace, it's more than God's tolerance of us. It's a never-ending shower of His unfathomable love. He doesn't treat us like a misbehaving animal He lets in so it can keep warm by His fire; we are adopted by Him into His family. We're not only allowed in the house, but raised as His children, fed, sheltered, and doted upon. He celebrates our accomplishments with joy we can't begin to understand, and disciplines us with a loving patience we couldn't even hope to achieve with our own children. And all this while we continue to misbehave in ways that would drive even the most patient parents over the edge.
And He doesn't care what we do. If we are His children, we can stay out late drinking every night and never come home to a locked door. We can never clean our room and let unwashed dishes rot away in the corner, and He won't tell us we need to clean it up or get out. He'll lovingly allow us to suffer consequences, but He won't stop loving us any more or less than the kid whose bed is always made.
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A common reactions we receive when we tell people we're planning to be missionaries on an Indian reservation is "That's a hard job. Good luck." And I think there's varying thoughts or attitudes that accompany those words:
- It is a hard job. Native American culture is generally closed to the gospel, and working to make inroads into a culture so mistreated by Christianity is extremely difficult.
- Reservations are some of the roughest places in the US in terms of poverty and crime.
- It's easy to think there's something "wrong" with the people who live on reservations. Why would anyone choose to live there, when there are no jobs, no good schools, and no opportunities? Most people in white culture want to believe that the problems in Native America can be easily corrected with a few simple choices, or that the problems exist because the people don't choose wisely. And while there an element of truth to that, it's far too simple to dismiss the issues in that way.
And it's this last attitude that I'd like to talk about in light of grace. Here's a question: what's our natural condition as a person born into the human race - as sons of Adam? That's right: slavery to sin. Our weaknesses and flaws are so much a part of us that no amount of willpower or good intentions can overcome them. We're trapped. We can't get out, and we can't escape. We are in need of someone more powerful than ourselves to do that for us.
The problems of our culture are in some ways different than the problems that plague Native America, but they are at their root the same in origin and in cure. It takes a powerful grace to overcome our sins and weaknesses and set us on the path to freedom from them, and that same powerful grace is the answer to the sins and weaknesses that have enslaved the Native American culture. And while there are myriad and complex reasons for the particular sins that enslaved Native American culture, it doesn't change the fact that they require the same cure.
We are all of us in the same condition. The only answer and hope for any of us is through the grace of Jesus Christ setting us free from the sins that have beset us by birth - both the ones inherent in our natures and the ones taught to us by the culture we've grown up in.
So the answer isn't in better educational or economical choices, but in "being transformed by the renewing of your mind." The gospel must come in all its power and might, to set free the captives.
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