This last Sunday was Pentecost. On Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the Christian church. It is the day the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples in Jerusalem, the gospel was preached by Peter, and thousands were saved (Acts 2:1-41). It is also the day on which new believers began meeting together, hearing the teachings of the apostles, praying, having communion together, and experiencing the new life of the Kingdom of God (Acts 2:42-47). In the early church, Pentecost was more important than Christmas and nearly as important as Easter. Today is also a reminder that we can participate in the life of God. We do not have to stay as we are; we can be new people by the power of the Holy Spirit. We, like the early Christians, can be filled with the Spirit and changed by our faith.

Not so long ago, I met a person I knew forty-five or so years ago. When we were in High School, this person was skinny, not a good student, and not athletic. He was a party animal. He did not go straight to college, but worked for a while after graduation. I lost track of him. Not long ago, a handsome, confident, obviously kind person came up to greet me. “I hear you are a pastor,” he said. He then sat down and began to tell me about his Christian walk and introduced me to his wife. What a changed person he was! Actually, even today, if I did not know he was the person I knew in high school, I would not believe it was him!

By the same token, I have had the experience of seeing someone I knew in High School who left school, got hooked on alcohol or drugs, drifted into other behaviors, and looked twice their age. What we experience in our lives makes a difference. People change for the better or for worse in life. In this blog, we are talking about God’s power to change our lives for the better.

Come as You Are—But Don’t Stay that Way

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is one of the most important letters in the New Testament. Scholars often reflect on its importance to Christian life and Christian thought. [1] In this letter, we see Christ’s sacrifice and our salvation as a part of God’s eternal plan (Ephesians 1:4-14). Because of the resurrection, Paul believes that Christians can be enlightened and empowered by the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Pentecost—to know God and to live in the power of God’s Spirit (1:15-23). Then, in Chapter 2, Paul sets out his doctrine of Grace—the Power of God’s Spirit acting in love. Here is how he puts it:

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:4-10).

The Nature of Grace

There is no idea of the Christian faith more important than the idea of Grace. There is certainly no idea more important to Protestants, since the idea that we are Saved by Grace through Faith in Christ Alone is central to the Reformation and to all Protestant theology and life. [2] Grace, however, is much more than an idea in theology books. It is a reality that must be experienced and lived. Our busy, work-oriented, frantic, lonely, and isolated culture needs to understand and, much more importantly, experience God’s grace. The therapy of God by the Spirit is of importance to our happiness as well as our salvation! [3]

So, what is God’s Grace? Grace is God’s self-giving love towards us offered freely and without cost. The Greek word, “Charis” is the same word from which we get the word “Gift” as in Spiritual Gifts. The definition of Grace has important implications for Christians:

• We can’t earn Grace: It is a gift not something we earn.
• We can’t deserve Grace: It is a gift not something we deserve.
• We can only receive Grace as a gift. As Paul reminds us in today’s text Grace is a gift we receive by faith, so we have nothing to boast about.

Grace is the most important thing in the world. Grace is not only essential to our salvation; it is essential to a health human life. One reason our culture is characterized by fear about the future and excessive striving to secure our future is that we have forgotten how to rest in God and allow God to work in areas we cannot control and should not control. Thomas Oden puts it this way:

The Christian life comes to us on God’s initiative, not our own. We can choose by God’s grace to put ourselves in those times and places where God promises to be present. We can avail ourselves of the means of grace, but not so as to control them. They remain precisely grace—sheer gift. The teaching of grace stands as a penetrating challenge to all pretensions of self-sufficiency. [4]

We can never make any progress in the Christian life until we get straight on the fundamental principle: We cannot save ourselves. Only God can do that. What we can do is have faith in the love of God and in what Christ accomplished and revealed on the Cross. When I teach about Faith and Grace I put tell the following story. When our children were young, each Christmas Eve we would sit by the tree opening presents. Kathy would pick up a present, read a name, and hand the present to me. Then, one of our children would come up and get the gift. They had not earned the gift. They could not pay for the gift. But they did have to come up and get the gift. Faith is the means by which we receive the gift God has for us.

Grace Accepts Us Just as We Are.

I suppose every child has played in the mud, and every mother has cleaned up a filthy child (usually a little boy) who has found a pool of mud. When I was little, I was always getting filthy playing in dirt, mud, haystacks, piles of leaves, and other places from which Mom probably wished I would stay away. When our son was young, we learned that he had inherited this same quality! Did my mother reject me because I played in the mud? Did Kathy cease to love our son just because he got filthy? No!

The idea of purity is important to Jewish thought. To the Jew, the goal of human life was to become “righteous” by following the law and avoiding all forms of impurity. This explains a lot of the laws the ancient Jews were to obey. It is just contrary to this way of thinking to believe that God can accept us just as we are. God wants us to become pure and cannot accept us as we are.

Jesus changed all this. The Parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke is the best possible example. In the parable, a younger son dishonors his father and family by asking for his inheritance early. Unexpectedly, the father agrees. [5] Then, while the son defiles himself in immorality, the father patiently and lovingly waits for the child to come home. When the son does come home, the father welcomes him with open arms, gives him fresh clothing, throws a party, and celebrates. The older brother cannot understand how a father could possibly act like this, expressing the Jewish discomfort with grace. But the father affirms that the wayward son is welcome because “Once he was lost, but now he is found. Once he was dead, but now he is alive” (Luke 15:11-32).

In this parable, Jesus reveals a God who does not reject people for failing, for doing foolish things, for behaving immorally, etc. Instead God is portrayed in the Parable of the Prodigal Son as a forgiving, loving, restoring God. This is what God showed us in Christ: God loves each one of us unconditionally, like the greatest father any of us might have or dream of having.

This has implications for Advent as a church as well as for Christians. Just as God does not reject people because of their sinfulness, brokenness, and pain, so also God’s church is called to be a place of Grace. We are called to be a place where sinners find a home where the Good News is preached and lived.

Grace Does Not Leave Us As We Are

Grace accepts us as we are, but grace does not leave us as we are. Tomorrow is Memorial Day. I will go out in the yard to do some once a summer work. In the course of a few hours, I will begin to look a lot like a dirty child. Moreover, I will begin to smell like what women sometimes call, “A Stinky Boy.” Kathy will not reject me or banish me from the house because of this. She will not stop loving me. She will, however, demand that I take a shower before dinner. When Tim and I used to get muddy playing outside, Mom did not disown us or stop loving us, but she did make us take off our clothes and bathe. Any mother of a small child who managed to get covered with cleans up her child. God, like any good mother, does not leave us as he finds us! God loves us enough to continue by grace to help us change.

John Burke, Pastor of Gateway Church in San Antonio, has writing a book called, No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come as You are Culture in the Church. In the book, he describes what would happen if one of us found a Rembrandt covered in mud:

“If you saw a Rembrandt covered in mud, you wouldn’t focus on the mud or treat it like mud. Your primary concern would not be the mud at all — though it would need to be removed. You’d be ecstatic to have something so valuable in your care. But if you tried to clean it yourself, you might damage it. So you would carefully bring this work of art to a master who could guide you and help you to restore it to the condition originally intended. When people begin treating one another as God’s masterpiece waiting to be revealed, God’s grace grows in their lives and cleanses them.” [6]

Each of us is like a masterpiece painted by God. Along the journey of life, we may have managed to get covered in mud, but that does stop God from loving us. God reaches out to us just as we are. However, it is not God’s plan to leave us as we are. God’s grace continues to operate in our lives after we accept Christ. This grace, sometimes called, “Sanctifying Grace” helps us become the people God desires us to be.

There is a kind of evangelical Christianity that is not just about grace, it is about what the German martyr, theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called “Cheap Grace.” Cheap Grace is not really grace at all. It is counterfeit grace—a kind of religious co-dependence. In his book, the Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer decries the Church’s tendency to market Cheap Grace to people. Cheap Grace is grace without a commitment to change, grace without true repentance, grace without awareness and confession of sin, grace without the necessity of discipleship. [7] Cheap Grace is really not grace at all.

Grace Creates What We Shall Be

Bonhoeffer goes on to describe real, Costly Grace. Costly Grace is like the Pearl of Great Price Jesus describes in his parable of the same name. Jesus says that the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Discipleship is like a precious jewel hidden in a field. A reasonable person knowing of such a jewel would go, sell everything, borrow as much as possible, and purchase that pearl (Matthew 13:45-46). Real Grace is Costly Grace. It costs us everything because it is the priceless gift of God. If we have been truly saved then whatever good works we do are not just works of our human strength, but also works of God.

In the early church, there were people who accused Paul of a kind of Cheap Grace. Paul’s doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith and not works was and is subject to misunderstanding. Some people accused Paul of “antinomianism,” or being against the Torah, the law of God. In Romans, Paul specifically defends himself against this charge, saying:

What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life (Romans 6:1-4).

Christianity does not eliminate the law or the desire of God that we live in holiness. Our problem is, as Paul knows, we cannot obey the law without a new kind of live, a divine life given to us by God (Romans 7:21-25). Our new birth in Christ is like our natural birth. No one of us had anything to do with our physical birth. We received life as a gift from our parents. Similarly, we cannot be “born again” by our own works or by any action we take. Only God can give us a new life. Nevertheless, after we are born again we can and must cooperate with God in discipleship as by grace God transforms us into the people he desires us to be. This is what is sometimes called “Cooperating Grace.” In discipleship we cooperate with God in becoming the people God calls us to be. Grace you see does not end with our salvation. It continues after our salvation as God completes the work he began in our salvation (Philippians 1:6).

Conclusion

There are a lot of folks these days trying to figure our how to live forever. What if there was a way to live forever? What if there was a way not just to live forever, but also to live forever in a state of blessedness human beings never enjoy however much money they have? What if there were a way to live not just as we now live, but as we dream of living, filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, hope and the like? There is. God’s Sanctifying Grace is also God’s Perfecting Grace. We will not fully experience it in this world, but we will experience it. God is in the business of making all things perfect, including us. There will be a New Heaven and a New Earth, and there will be a new you and a new me (Revelation 21:1).

Ephesians says we are saved by grace not by works, yet God has prepared works for us to do. This sounds hard until we realize that the works God has for us to do are simply the works of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, hope, and the like we will do once we are captured by his love and renewed by his grace. The works of which Paul speaks are not something unpleasant or otherworldly. Instead, the works of Grace consist in living our ordinary lives in an extraordinary, loving, grace-filled way. This is the life of discipleship.

Copyright 2015, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] See Francis W. Beare, “Epistle to the Ephesians” in The Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1953). I do not agree with Beare regarding authorship but it is a fine commentary.

[2] The Reformation outlined the so-called “Sola’s.” “Sola” means “Alone.” For Luther and the reformers, there were five ”Sola’s”: Sola Christus (Christ Alone), Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone), Sola Fide (Faith Alone), and Sola Gracia (Grace Alone) and Sola Gloria (Glory of God Alone). Today, the focus is on grace.

[3] See, Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993. I have relied on this book to guide the theology of grace set out, and especially in crafting the definition of grace set out below.

[4] Id, at 37.

[5] See, Ken Bailey, Poet and Peasant through Peasant Eyes Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976). Bailey points out that no first century middle eastern father would have agreed to such a request, and Jesus’ hearers would have understood something we miss—the Father’s love us extravagant, unusual, and unbelievable.

[6] John Burke, No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come as You are Culture in the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 97.

[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York, NY: Macmillan Paperbacks, 1959, 1961 reprint), 45-47.