Hope with Grace – Part Seven

We are considering our understanding of grace and how much bigger, more important and essential grace is than our ability to comprehend it, and our inability to grasp its enormity and hold on to its truth.

If we are thinking about “Hope with Grace”, and our concept of grace is weak, then our hope will not be strong, secure and certain.

Bonhoeffer was scathing in his view,

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance… Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate….”[1]

Some days it just seems so easy to simply want to enjoy the benefits of the grace that comes through Jesus Christ without actually wanting to know and love Him more in all of His glorious reality and respond to Him in full and loving obedience. We simply want to know enough grace to forgive us our sins and then to continue to live in our own self-determined comfort.

We even simplistically offer grace to others, telling them that their sin does not matter and thus we violently and wantonly cheapen grace in that process. When we diminish the reality of sin; we seek to destroy and devalue grace. We have no right to offer grace without the willingness to pay the price of grace; what point is a gift that has no cost. Grace is infinitely more costly than the price it needs to pay. We created humans just don’t have the resources to pay grace’s great cost. In reality, there is no human grace; there is only the grace which Christ bestows and how dare we cheapen it by believing that we can dispense it so freely and glibly…. We must point all people to Christ who alone can give grace because He, and He alone, has paid the full price of this priceless gift. He, and he alone, gives Himself to atone for sin.

Bonhoeffer again:

“Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again… grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: ‘ye were bought at a price’, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God….[2]”

So I am led to conclude again that my life is too comfortable. Why is this so; because of God’s grace? No, because of my lack of understanding of God’s grace. If I truly understood, I would live my life with more passion, confronting every impure thing in my life and in the lives of those that I love. But I often prefer complacency and I deceive myself into calling it grace. Grace is the most costly thing in the Universe, and I am often guilty of reducing it to a “get out of jail free” card.

Praying that the Father will give us wisdom by the Holy Spirit to understand His great grace expressed through His Son.

Blessings,
Brian

 

 

 

[1] Bonhoeffer D The Cost of Discipleship Collier Books : Macmillan, New York,(1963) p44-45

[2] Bonhoeffer page 45