The Beauty of Grace

I've mentioned before that I'm team teaching a class based on the book The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey. We've had a break over Christmas, but we start back up again this Wednesday. As part of the preparation for teaching, I re-read the chapter that we will be discussing; I did that today for chapter 8, which is called Mission: A Revolution of Grace.

As I read the chapter, I was struck by how much it sounds like the Beatitudes chapter that I talked about in the post linked here. One of the premises of that post, which discussed chapter 6 in the book, was that the Beatitudes are a reversal of what we would expect from life in general -- that life in Christ is backwards. I came to the conclusion, as I looked at the Beatitudes, that they are ultimately about grace.

It is interesting to me that this chapter about grace reminds me of the Beatitudes. According to Yancey, "grace introduces a world of new logic. Because God loves the poor, the suffering, the persecuted, so should we. Because God sees no undesirables, neither should we. By his own example, Jesus challenged us to look at the world through what Irenaeus would call "grace-healed eyes."

I am reminded of the song by Relient K -- Be My Escape, which has the line, "the beauty of grace is that it makes life unfair." Who do we consider to be "untouchable?" Who do we think are the "undesirables?"

We have a church service on Thursday nights called Common Grounds. It is attended by the poor, the addicted, the lost, and the hungry. I think there are many who would consider this congregation to be composed of the "undesirables" of our city.

I was struck by a sentence in this chapter -- we are "brought back to common ground, as sinners equally desperate in our need of God." What is our common ground -- it is that we are all sinners, and that none of us is considered untouchable, undesirable, or unlovable by God. Grace makes life unfair, and we should thank God for it.

So what do we do to allow God to work through us to bring grace to those around us? I think it is important that we realize that we all matter to God. Sometimes we have trouble believing it of ourselves. Sometimes I think we have trouble believing it of other people, like those who attend Common Grounds.

We need to offer our best. We need to give of all of our gifts to the Body of Christ -- surrendering them all to God's use. We need to remember that we are blessed by God, and because of that, we are able to be a blessing. That's grace. That's the reversal. It is in loving that we becoming lovable. It is in forgiving that we find forgiveness. It is in the act of following God that we find Him.

Image: Tree at VA, converted to grayscale