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Grace according to pundits
Last week, a widely read American magazine asked some famous “personalities” to chime in on a single topic: grace. These are some of their ideas about grace:
- Grace is something you do after you’ve tripped: you’re catching yourself and taking something that could have been negative…and moving past it.
- It’s the joy of giving another person pleasure.
- You can’t legislate when beauty will happen or if it will happen. That is the meaning of grace.
- Grace is a kind of illumination: that feeling of being comfortable in your own skin.
- I think of grace as the courage to be hopeful in hard times.
Rereading those as I type here in my office, I find them as empty as the mug I just drained of tea. Yet, just as my cup has some tea dregs in the bottom, there are small aspects of truth in those statements. The problem is they are the dregs, divorced from the richness of the source.
John dealt with the issue head-on in the prologue to his gospel, declaring in John 1:17, “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Jesus alone delivers the unmerited favor of God. Charis – the Greek term we translate “grace” – is undeserved blessing that can only be found through God. If one connects to God’s unearned approval through Jesus, then one is in grace. Anything else is not grace, as Paul points out in Romans 11, declaring that life and salvation “is not by works; otherwise grace ceases to be grace.”
Such is the key problem with the pundits. They are each trapped in the perspective of humanity, either describing grace in works terms or are divorcing it from the source – Jesus.
Of course, it’s not merely famous “personalities” who do this. You and I are eminently capable of reducing truth to nasty dregs divorced from the source. By God’s unmerited favor through Jesus, I pray we instead enjoy the powerful richness of lives steeped in truth.
God bless,
Wayne