The real meaning of grace
Sometimes we get an idea stuck in our heads, and that idea makes it difficult or impossible to understand what God is really saying or what God is really doing.
A good example would be the book of Job. The human players in that drama labored under the misconception that God was punishing Job for some moral failure. As a result, nearly everything they said to try to explain what was going on missed the mark because God was NOT punishing Job; instead He was trusting Job—trusting Job to silence the accuser Satan. And by the end of the book, Job did exactly that; he silenced the voice of the accuser.
I think the same thing might be said about our understanding of grace. Or my understanding of grace, if you prefer.
For many years, I understood grace as getting what we don’t deserve from God. G R A C E — God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. Being forgiven of my sins. Getting a free ride to heaven. Being justified—just as if I had never sinned. Being found not guilty at God’s courthouse. Having my sentence suspended. And so on.
And when I heard that we weren’t under the law but under grace, I understood that to mean that we were no longer required to keep a bunch of rules because Jesus died to pay for our sins, and our sins are being forgiven by God.
But now I wonder if I was doing the same thing Job’s friends were doing: looking at God’s work through a faulty lens.
Consider the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus makes it clear that the law is not to be abolished but to be fulfilled.* (*And before you jump to the conclusion that I’m preaching works salvation, read to the end.) Jesus said, “Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:19 NIV
Then He goes on to point out that the teachers of the law in His day didn’t understand the moral implications of the law. In the mind of God, character assassination is made out of the same moral mud as murder, lust as adultery, and so on.
In other words, Jesus raised the bar. And He didn’t exempt any of us from His clarified requirements.
We move on from Jesus to Paul.
The thing that’s easy to miss about Paul is this: Before his conversion, Paul was a zealous, law loving Pharisee. He was under the law. He praised the law.
His misguided zeal for the law drove him to throw Christians into jail and to try to stamp out Christianity—making him the “worst of sinners.” As Jesus said about others of Paul’s ilk, he strained out the gnat and swallowed the camel.
Before Christ entered his life, Paul observed the law outwardly, but inwardly he struggled because the law put a spotlight on his own human inadequacy. (The real meaning of the Romans 7 passage in context.)
Paul was given the job of being the apostle to the Gentiles—the non-Jews. So he had to figure out what to do with this Jewish law he had devoted his entire life to studying. What relevance did the Jewish law have to a non-Jew?
When you put the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul together, a beautiful truth emerges: Jesus Himself is the fulfillment of the law.
Yes, Jesus is the final sacrifice for sin, and yes, in that way He fulfilled the law.
But it goes beyond that. Jesus embodies everything that was in the heart and mind of God when He delivered the law on Mount Sinai. Jesus was and is God in the flesh. When Jesus speaks, God speaks. The law is good, and all that is good in the law is from God, and is embodied in Jesus.
What does that mean for us?
When we invite Jesus into our lives and allow Him to be who He wants to be and do what He wants to do, we are inviting in the fulfillment of the law.
The fulfillment of the law is inside us, transforming us, granting us the heart and the mind of God.
The outcome—over time—is this: We want what God wants. We love what God loves. We hate what God hates. We no longer need a set of rules to tell us how to behave because we’ve internalized the heart and mind of God.
When I was a child, I needed someone to set a bedtime for me because I didn’t have the maturity to set one for myself. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t need someone to set a bedtime for me; I have enough sense to go to bed at a decent time every night.
In the same way, the presence of Jesus grants us maturity and clarity. We do the things God wants because God’s very heart and mind are inside us.
That is the real meaning of grace.
Are our sins forgiven? Of course.
Are we granted the gift of eternal life? Yes.
Will we still mess up? For sure. That’s a given. But it doesn’t disable us because the work of God in us is so much stronger than the work of sin. …If we say yes to Jesus.
So while grace forgives our sins, it does not exempt us from holy living and holy living is not accomplished through try hard human effort apart from God (which is sometimes preached from the pulpit), but rather through the transformation that comes to us because the Fulfillment of the Law lives inside us. (Jude 1:4, Romans 6:1-2, Titus 2:11-14, Philippians 1:6, etc.)
Grace works. The presence of Jesus transforms. We are becoming better people because God lives inside us.
Footnote: I don’t really have the space to get into it here, but sometime you might want to review all the passages in the Bible about the final judgment and ask yourself: Does this really sound like a criminal court proceeding? Or does it sound like something else? And if it sounds like something else, (how) does that alter our understanding of grace?
Be encouraged,
Dwight
