Challenging Grace

God's grace has radically changed my life. Though I've always known Jesus loves me, I always had this sense I had to somehow earn his love. Then, in college, I started to experience that love as unconditional--a grace that accepts me before I can accept Jesus; that loves me regardless of what I do or don't do. It's such a liberating message that I want to make sure, to the best of my ability as a pastor, that I share that amazing grace as often and as clearly as possible.

But...

What troubles me as a pastor is how little that grace really seems to impact the lives of many of us who claim to follow Jesus. From the beginning, Jesus completely interrupted peoples' lives with his grace. Impacted by that grace they were willing to do anything for him, including die for him.

Today we say we'd die for Jesus, but how often do we skip worship because we're tired or just don't feel like it or because we don't really get anything out of it? We say that Jesus is the center of our lives but how often do we skip our prayer time because we have so many other things on our plate? We say Jesus means everything to us but how often do we hold back from the offering because we just need to buy that one more thing?

Those are tough questions. And they are not usually the kinds of questions that come with proclamations of grace. Because they sound so...well...graceless.

Yet it was the giver of grace who said, "If you would come after me, you must take up your cross, die daily, and follow me." Hmmm...where's the grace in that!?!

As believers in Jesus we believe grace is found in precisely that--the cross, where Jesus laid it all on the line for us. And it's in taking up the cross, losing our lives in Jesus, that we find our lives.

I want to make sure people really get grace--that they really understand the depths of God's love for them because so few of us really do. At the same time I fear I often rob people of that grace by not holding up the challenging, life-transforming, life-altering call of grace.

Grace challenges me to live my entire life by the power of the grace of Jesus. That means more than taking Jesus up on his grace when I feel like it or have the time for it. It means that grace controls my life--sets the agenda for my life. Again, it doesn't sound grace-full saying it that way. But that's where the grace is.

Challenging grace challenges me as a follower of Jesus and as a minister of the Gospel of grace. Again, I want people to experience the sheer joy of unbounded, unconditional grace. But sometimes I make grace too nice. I neuter it of it's power by using a wimpy form of it--a form that excuses and understands and says it's OK when people make excuses for not making Jesus or worship or prayer a priority rather than a form that invites them to a life completely and utterly reshaped by Jesus and his priorities.

The real problem--I, like most people, want others to like me. But when Jesus held up such all-encompassing, reckless grace, it got him killed.