Grace is Bigger Than We Think

“By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.” 
– St. Paul (1 Cor. 15:10, NIV)

“Stir the spark of grace now within you, and God will give you more grace.” 
–John Wesley

“Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort.” 
–Dallas Willard

Grace is Bigger Than We Think

    Many Christians rightly understand that grace is indispensable in our lives, as much as the right kind of fuel is essential to a working vehicle. Grace is indeed that essential, since the scriptures insist from beginning to end that every good gift from God is precisely that–a gift, which we could never possibly deserve. However, instead of cruising down the open highway and having enough gas in the tank to deal with whatever obstacles may come along, many of us have experienced the Christian life more as one with an occasional spurt while more often staring at a “Low Fuel” light, feeling like our motor could have nothing left at any moment. 

    Grace is the fuel we are made to run on as Christians, and learning to live the kind of life Jesus invites us to as his followers is about learning to cooperate with grace. Unfortunately, though, we often misunderstand (or, perhaps, under-understand) what grace is, and we therefore end up putting a diluted fuel in the tank. Then, we’re left unable to explain why our car quit on us before finishing the trip.

    In the minds of many of us, grace has been diluted to one thing: through Christ, God offers me forgiveness even though I really don’t deserve it. Even though that is true, immensely important, and an exceedingly gracious thing of God to do, forgiveness is not the totality of grace.

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Are We Too Familiar With God?

Perhaps “familiar” is not the right word – maybe “casual” or “nonchalant” might be better choices.  My husband and I recently celebrated his birthday in St. Louis, Missouri.  My parents cared for our five year old son and three year old daughter for the day, so we took advantage of getting to do things in the city that wouldn’t be as easy or enjoyable with preschoolers.  We toured Bush Stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, and then visited the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. The walls and ceiling of this massive stone cathedral are covered with mosaic scenes, which took 76 years to complete and total 83,000 square feet!  

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The Courage to Live

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. There are a number of reason for this. Part of it is stress about where I am in my education (done with course work, but have no clear dissertation topic). Part of if it is where I am in life (I’m turning 56 in September and still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up). Part of it is I tend toward melancholy (the Eeyore syndrome). Part of it… well, anyway… there are a lot of reasons. I’ll get through it. I always do. I’ll go for a nice 10 mile run. Classes start soon (Aquinas this semester). Maybe I’ll go to Disneyland (one of the perks of living in So Cal). 

One thing I’ve done that has helped is I started reading George Sheehan’s classic, Running and Being. It’s a 35 year old book, and I can’t believe I’ve never read it before. As I’ve read, I’ve seen some of myself in the pages—some of my reclusiveness, my inwardness, retreating into my mind, into the realm of ideas and thoughts (yes, I’m an introvert). Some people misinterpret these characteristics in me. They see it as being antisocial or as a tacit misanthropy. But it’s not. 

One of the things Sheehan notes right in the beginning is how he had spent his whole life trying to “fit in” and in the process lost himself. By working so hard trying to identify with a group, trying to fit the image of what he was supposed to be, he lost who he was. He struggled with unworthiness (he wasn’t one of the popular), inferiority (he wasn’t like others), and incompleteness (somehow he never measured up). Struggling to overcome these “flaws” he constantly fought to “reinvent” himself, to become something other than who he truly was. Striving to “fit in” he lost himself. 

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Millennials, Mainline, and Methodists: The Cure for What Ails Us

I’m tired. I’m tired of the posts and ads and quick fixes. I’m tired of the head-scratching and magic bullet appeals for how to “reach” millennials. I’m tired of marketing tricks and demographic reports that promise to hold the key to attracting customers. In conversations about the problems with the church, with mainline decline, with the “nones,” etc., in our culture today, I hear recommendations for everything from increasing parking to Instagram to inclusivism, and many sure-fire fixes in between. What I hear woefully little of is the need to make disciples…real disciples.

Churches and leaders feel the need to add descriptors to the word disciples: dynamic disciples, fully-committed disciples, faithful disciples, disciple-making disciples, and on and on. This need for qualifiers indicates to me that we have a weak and desperately underdeveloped understanding of what a disciple even is.  And, thus, we don’t see the value and necessity for disciple-making as the cure for what ails us.

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Running as a Discipline

I used to play basketball, and was actually fairly decent at it for a 6’4" white guy from Southern Idaho.  Playing basketball in college for three years was a great experience. I had fun playing and improving as a player, and met a lot of great people, like Daniel.  A few years ago while playing a church league basketball game, which is often not anything like church, I tried to make a back to the basket post move, like one that Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs makes look routine, and my body moved slower than I expected and the move did not play out like I had pictured it in my head.  At that moment I knew it was time to change my game, and now settle for the occasional straight on lay-up, spot up jump shots, lots of three pointers, and hardly ever playing basketball.

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It is for Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free

An important challenge for Christians is to be able to distinguish between the freedom celebrated on the 4th of July and that described in the scriptures. They aren’t identical (which I’ll explore below), and I think the efforts of many well-meaning pastors and churches in their worship services around the times of our national holidays actually serves to confuse many happy church goers about what freedom for a Christian really entails.

In Galatians 5 Paul says that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. This particular verse follows a section in chapter 4 where Paul uses the allegory of Hagar and Sarah to illustrate the difference between being born the child of a slave (the law) and being born the child of a free woman (grace). Through Christ, Paul says, we are “children, not of the slave, but of the free woman.” And it is for this reason we have a share in the inheritance. Not because we do this or that, not because we follow the law, not because we always do what is right, not because we are circumcised, but because in Christ we have become children of freedom. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. And so, the only thing that counts, according to Paul, “is faith working through love.” 

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Forgiveness Isn't the Marriage

I have a philosopher friend (who sells insurance for a living) who, if given a chance in conversation, has a tendency to say something simple but very meaningful. One day we were talking about how we both grew up within the same streams of Christianity (for which we are both very grateful), and one of the things we picked up along the way was the version of Christianity that goes something like this: you’re a really bad sinner, and Jesus died on the cross so that you could be forgiven. Therefore, you need to ask him to forgive your sins so that you’ll get into heaven when you die.

Then my philosopher/insurance salesman friend made the following observation:

Something that seems to make more sense is to think of it like a marriage. Forgiveness in a marriage is kind of like the foundation poured for a house––there’s no chance for the marriage to exist without forgiveness in place. A marriage has to has forgiveness to begin, and it has to have forgiveness to keep going, but forgiveness isn’t the marriage.

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