I heard a troubling thing not long ago about yet another alternative gospel being preached in the world. It got me thinking. I feel the weight of how important it is for us to stay grounded in truth and not be swayed by any other way to the Father than the one found in the word, the one preached in the Church for two millennia.
Some are advocating for the idea that, basically, once you give your life to Jesus, since you’re a new creation, there is no work left to be done. The entire witness of the Bible, the life experience of every Christian I’ve ever known, and 2,000 years of Church history beg to differ. This mindset and perspective cannot help but produce entitled believers, which is a contradiction in terms anyway.
Far be it from us, Church, to torture and maim the Word of God, accepting one part of it while refusing another, twisting it and cutting off certain parts of it so that it will say what we want it to say. This is not rightly dividing the word. There is nothing in the gospel of enablement for the flesh. No. It is to be crucified daily. Daily.
One and Done?
“Repeat after me,” the preacher says, “and Jesus will solve all your problems. Just say the words of this prayer, and all will be well.” Lies. Beware the hawker of cheap grace; he is of his father the devil. Make no mistake: stepping into relationship with Jesus will cost you your life. It is by design. Many say they follow Him, but in truth He has few disciples and His Church is small.
Grace is not cheap. Grace is the most valuable substance in the universe, having cost the priceless blood of Jesus Christ. The words of a magical incantation are not what brings grace to bear upon the human soul; the “sinner’s prayer” said once and then discarded is not how miraculous transformation is wrought.
We must get away from the salesman’s irreverent approach to preaching the gospel, Church. Shoving the words of a rote prayer into the face of a stranger represents zero relational investment on our part, and we need to stop it. This isn’t evangelism or discipleship, it’s salesmanship. It’s not salvation, it’s mysticism, and it’s nothing to do with the truth. I don’t care if you said the sinner’s prayer fifteen years ago; how’s your walk with Jesus going right now? How are you proving Him today?
The truth is, you don’t find Jesus, He finds you, and you don’t invite the God of the universe into your heart like it’s some kind of awesome privilege for Him to be near you. It is quite the opposite. It is total surrender or total destruction; there is no middle ground.
And while I don’t believe it’s possible to “lose your salvation” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I do believe scripture when it instructs me that we go from glory to glory, which means that we understand more about grace today than we did a year ago, five years ago, twenty years ago. We value it more today than we did then. This glory-to-glory awakening is often called sanctification, and it’s often presented as separate from and different to salvation.
But in the scope of eternity they’re one and the same. We need to work it out in fear and trembling. Are we doing that, Church? Would you consider yourself awed and reverent before the throne of grace, or when you pray, are you just ticking off self-obsessed requests on a list? God is not our candyman.
I don’t believe that grace is irresistible in the sense that if we’re called and chosen we have zero personal responsibility to engage it. But I do believe that grace is irresistible in the sense that not one sheep will be snatched from the Father’s hand, that when time is finally overthrown by the fire that is chasing it down, all that will remain is the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Where irresistible grace touches down and is realized in the individual life of the saint is something only God can judge.
I believe that grace is so valuable that it should never be taken for granted. Paradoxically, grace by its very nature almost has to be taken for granted in order to be effective. The subtle difference lies in invisible places only God can see. Any teacher willing to presume upon the priceless grace of God for his immortal soul, and to teach others not to press on for the upward call of God in Christ, does not value grace and does not know it. Any so-called disciple estranged from grace enough to abuse it and confuse it with privilege is estranged from God and does not know Him.
The Heart of Salvation
In John 14.15, Jesus couples the keeping of the Father’s commandments with abiding in His love. For Christ, love and obedience were one and the same. I take this to mean that Jesus meant—when He said that He came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it—that His motive is love. The contrast between this new way, in His own blood, and the old covenant, which was kept out of a fearful expectation of judgment, (Hebrews 10.27) could not be starker.
I have a radical proposition for you, and it’s this: I don’t believe it’s actually possible to fulfill the law out of a fearful expectation of judgment. What I mean is, even if Jesus kept the law to perfection but His motive was fear, I think it’s so out of step with the kingdom that the faulty motive would invalidate the whole exercise. I think it’s because of love, with love as the motive, that He was able to become our propitiation.
Now, if love is this important—and it is, because love is not a thing God does but who He is—then it should matter deeply how we approach the throne of grace. Do we approach as Pharisees, who come with all the right clothes on, having kept the law to the letter, having scourged ourselves in order to do, above all, what God does? If we do that, we are to be counted among those cursed by the Father because they do not know Him. In other words, they are estranged from love.
Faith Loves
It is impossible to please God without faith. Faith without works is dead. Jesus is the life, and He said that the greatest commandment is to love the LORD our God with everything we’ve got (Matthew 22.34-38). I think it’s therefore reasonable to assert that the primary work we are to manifest under the sun is love. If God is love, then to love Him is to love love. And let’s not forget that love perfected casts out all fear.
Religion, mysticism, and ritual are all about fear. This is what draws many into their influence. People are comforted by fear when it’s all they know. And here in America today, we are addicted to fear. In the end, all these systems of ruleskeeping can do is point back to man and glorify him, which is why they are, all of them, not only completely impotent to save but also outrageous to God, who, for all eternity, has provided for any who will simply believe all that we need to be able to please Him.
If faith is a gift given for love and Christ kept the law for love and not fear, faith that is active must find love at its core. Love should be faith’s beginning and end anyway because Christ is the beginning and the end, and Christ is God. But think about it: if you don’t love God, how can you hope to persevere to the end of your own days, never mind the end of today? There’s no way you’ll make the journey without love.
Persistent Repentance
I could write persistent love, persistent humility, persistent faith. They’re all moving in the same direction, motivated by the same heart. Or I could write faithful repentance. Maybe the words I need to be able to communicate this idea are best rendered in the language the angels speak.
God really does look after His kids when they obey Him. There are still challenges because the only way to know that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, and further that apart from Him we can do nothing, is by experience. Therefore sometimes we get to walk out what we say we believe. This is proving it. And it’s a huge part of the gospel because as I've said before, the gospel is preached with words but proved with lives.
I took a walk this week and realized I’m experiencing a massive shift in my own life right now, and not just because our oldest son is testing himself by briefly moving out at only 17 (he’ll be fine; he’s going to go work in remodeling with his uncle for a few weeks). I’m definitely grieving the all-too-soon end of his childhood. I’m wondering where all the time went. We can’t get any of that back, and I’m realizing for myself just how quickly a life seems to be able to be lived. And I feel poignantly how absurd it is to try to cram the full meaning of a human life into eighty-odd years. We were definitely made for eternity. When we come to these major waypoints, we feel the pain of the fall very deeply indeed.
Things have been changing quickly for us this past year. I lost my job on May 14, 2020. I haven’t found a replacement income since, yet impossibly, we’ve been more than okay. One major component of that is that we have continued in obedience to the word He has spoken over us. God has given us what we need when we’ve needed it. And I’ve been praying like a workman about a couple of things, really hammering what I thought were to be our top two priorities: I’ve been faithfully (relentlessly? Stubbornly?) praying for God to show us an income and a place of our own. I have felt these requests to be both reasonable and rational for the past six months, so I have kept on stirring them into my prayers. Since I have learned that there is both a purpose and a timing component to how God answers prayer, I have been at peace even though I haven’t seen the fruition of these requests. However. Pregnant ellipsis. I realized this week that I’ve been out of step with God in these priorities. The difference that I can now see feels extremely profound.
His command to us about all these things—incomes and places of our own and things like them—is to seek Him and His righteousness first, trusting Him to add these things to us in whatever way is best from His view. It’s almost like they’re an afterthought to God. I believe it, honestly, because when He opened the door for us to move into our new studio space, it was like He snapped His fingers or something. Zero effort on His part. He is so wise and so strong. We would have had to have labored for months and years to bring about something as good as this.
But what’s going on in my heart is far more momentous than an income and a place. Establishing WhiteNoise Studio goes well beyond what we can see or catalog, and God is all about doing stuff in the invisible places because that’s what matters most in the kingdom. I feel the effect deep in my soul.
And Never Looking Back
I don’t yet know precisely—and cannot therefore name with precision—what God is doing in my heart, but I do know that I’ve been brought once more to the edge of all I’ve ever known. It's subtly different this time, but I recognize the spiritual scent of it somehow. When I step off here, there will be no going back. Once you leave the Shire, you can’t ever really return to it. The Shire you would go back to no longer exists because your vision has been forever enlarged. It is impossible to unsee a thing. Especially when you’ve seen the unseen.
I never would have known this if I hadn’t been afforded the grace to walk it out. Part of grace and mercy is the gift of time. Day by day, we have more space to learn by failing, and this humbles us and drives us back to God. That is, if we love.
I don’t know really what further evidence I can bring before you here to convince and console you that repentance isn’t an event but a process, that it is a process because of grace and mercy, and that it is not a unilateral creature. That is, repentance is not a thing both offered by God and accepted by God. The acceptance of the offer is a thing only we can do. And we must reaffirm it every time God expands our revelation of His glory and our total depravity (that is, our flesh).
God does all the heavy lifting getting us to the place of revelation again and again, but our part is to respond by either running for or running from. If I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that every new day comes with a new race. And we must decide daily, again and again, if we’re willing to run it. Love, being humble, will never force that decision, but it will offer peace with heaven again and again until we learn. This is one reason why grace is priceless. It is renewed every day.
Disciples leave all to follow, and that isn’t a one-time event. It is a process because revelation is from glory to glory. You may think you left everything to follow Jesus yesterday, but this is today now. There is a cross for you, the grace to carry it, and in the fellowship of the suffering of Jesus Christ, He is present with those who press on.
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