What is Grace? (1 John 4:7-21)

07/24/11 What is Grace (1 John 4:7-21) Spencer GUMC

It was back in January of this year that I got a call from the District Superintendent here in the Northwest District, telling me that I was appointed to Grace United Methodist Church in Spencer, pending a positive meeting with the SPRC. I will tell you something, there is nothing quite like getting appointed to a church whose name is Grace to make you start to ponder, as deeply as possible, the nature of grace as we receive it from God and we are taught about in the Bible.

So what is grace? More and more, I am convinced that the way that most people talk about grace is that it is, simply, "Getting what you do not deserve." This is good, so far as it goes. After all, when we get redemption in return for our sins, or when we get life in exchange for our death, and when we receive blessing from God when all we have given him were curses, are we not receiving what we did not and do not deserve, and is this not grace? Clearly we cannot speak of grace unless we include the fact that, when we receive grace, we do indeed receive something that did not belong to us before that time and that we could never have acquired for ourselves. However, can grace really be boiled down to getting what we do not deserve?

I think that grace is a far deeper, far richer, concept than just this, as important as it is. This is why I love this text from the first letter of John. He says, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." Now I want to point out what you may or may not have noticed when this passage was read for the first time a few minutes ago. The word, "grace," is not mentioned anywhere in this passage. Instead, we see the word "love" an awful lot. In fact, if you look carefully, you will find that the word grace is not anywhere in the first letter of John. That isn't a problem for this sermon on grace because the reality of grace is on every page.

Listen to how John speaks of the love of God. "By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent his only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." The word that John uses here is love, but the point he is making is grace from beginning to end. When John talks about love in its most absolute sense, when he wants to make it as clear as possible what it means that God loves us, he speaks of Jesus coming among us, God entering into our world of space and time and meeting us where we are. What love is, in its fullest sense, is not to be defined by our love of God or our love of other human beings, even our love for our parents, spouses, or children. Love is not defined by our love, but by God's love of us.

This love of God is not an abstract concept. It is not something that we could come up with if we just sat in a room in an ivory tower and thought a lot about love in detachment from what God has actually done for us in Christ. For others, love might be a abstract concept that can be applied, willy nilly, to anything that makes us feel good, but for Christians, love is not a what, it is a who. The fullest and final expression of love is the person of Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not, as Christians, develop a concept of love independently of God's self-revelation in Christ and then try to see how Jesus does or does not fit into that concept. We cannot do this, for love is not, as John says, determined by our love, but by God's love. God's love is made known to us in the fact that God has not chosen to remain on his own, but has chosen to take our created existence upon himself, to live in our broken world, and to bring healing from outside of the universe that does not seem capable of cultivating healing from within it on its own.

This is what love is. If someone were to ask us, "What is love?" the answer we would have to give is, "Jesus Christ." If there is anything else we can call love, we do so in a secondary way. Every other love takes its place behind Christ the Lord, the one who loves us with a love that will not let us go, with a love that is greater than the love we have for ourselves or could ever have for another. Our love for God and our love for others is real love to the degree that it reflects and manifests in our own creaturely way, however indirectly and brokenly, the love of Christ toward us.

This understanding of love brings about a radical change in the way we consider it. We could say that, when we realize that love is not something that we understand through abstract speculation but from the investigation of something very concrete, that is what it is and not something else, we come to understand that Christian thinking is not a philosophy, but a science. There is an objectivity of the love of God in Christ. We are not free to say whatever we like about love, but must stay close to our source of knowledge, the actual concrete reality of Christ. Everything we say and think about love is judged to be true or false in the light of God's actual self-revelation and in no way else.

Ultimately, this is not all that different from how Jesus taught us to think. After all, in John's gospel, we read that, when Thomas said to Jesus, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, how do we know the way?" Jesus responded, saying, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the father but through me." Whatever we may mean when we say that anything else is true, for instance, we mean something different than when we say that Jesus is true. Jesus is truth, and Jesus is love.

All of this is to show that it is not all that unusual that we should conclude that, at the end of the day, Jesus is grace. If this is so, then the title of this sermon that has been on the sign all week is just a little bit misleading. After all, it poses the question, "What is grace?" when, in reality, that question is altogether a wrong question. Strictly speaking, there is no real and solid answer to that question as it is asked, for Jesus Christ is grace and Jesus Christ is not a what at all, but a who. The answer to the question shows us that our question itself needs to be questioned. We ask what grace is and God gives us the answer, "Jesus Christ." By doing so, God shows us that our question should have been "Who is grace" in the first place. And, seeing that this is the case, if we then were to try to force God to answer the question precisely as we have stated it, saying, "No, I will not accept a person as my answer, I demand that grace not be a who, but must be a what," we will never understand God. No amount of stamping our feet will change the fact that grace is a who, a person who confronts us in majesty. But when we realize this to be so and allow who Jesus is to shape our understanding of grace, we also realize that grace has not been cheapened by it, but is far greater, far more glorious, and far more challenging than we ever imagined it could be.

Indeed grace is challenging; it is, perhaps, the single most challenging concept that we have to learn as Christians. It is challenging because it goes against all our instincts that come naturally to us as human beings. It is challenging because it goes against all our training that is bred into us as Americans, since we are a very self-sufficient people. In Christ we see that grace something that is absolutely radical in nature. God did not wait for us to get our act together before he came among us. Paul reminds us that it was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us. John says in our passage that "We love, because he first loved us." It does not matter how good of a life you have lived, it does not matter how young you were when you became a Christian. Even if you have been a Christian for as long as you can remember, the fact remains that you did not take the first step. Before you could make decisions for yourself, before you could speak, before you were even born, God was at work. God always makes the first move. If there is ever a moment when we think that we might be able to get ahead of God, the very fact that that thought crossed our mind shows that God has already been working in our lives.

But grace doesn't just come first. The Galatians were behaving as if God started the work, but then they had to work really hard and finish it. This is what Paul says in one of his most feisty letters. "You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit are you now being perfected by the flesh?" Christ is not merely all in all at the beginning of our Christian life, but is all in all every step of the way. The moment we say to Jesus, "Thanks for all you've done, but I can handle it from here. I really needed you back then, but now I need to prove to you that I can do it," we have turned our back on grace.

After all, isn't the fact that we need grace at all proof that we can't do it on our own? Do our problems with sin only go skin deep? Does sin not rather have all too strong a hold on us, a hold that nothing short of the blood of Christ can release? The radical nature of grace can be best understood in light of the Christian doctrine of substitution. Since the days of the very first disciples, the work of Christ has been understood, at least in part, as being a substitution for us who are sinners. It seems as though everywhere you look, you will find sermons and songs that all make the point that, even though it is us who have deserved death and that Christ did not deserve death, Christ died for us on our behalf and in our place, so that we would not need to suffer the condemnation for our sin. It is not as though God simply pretended that we never sinned, but that God came among us and suffered the penalty that we deserved in our place. This is a key idea of the Christian faith.

But we almost always hear about Christ's substitution for us only in terms of his death. Is that all there is to it? Can we simply reduce the concept of grace to a kind of legal transaction, that is, we have a debt, then Christ pays it, so we are free? Again, that is part of it, but is that really all we believe as Christians? I have met many people who would say this is indeed all that Christian faith has to say, but I am more and more convinced that there is more to it than this.

Do we only need a God who dies for us, as amazing as that is? Is our need for grace really so limited that, so long as we have Jesus die for us, so that we do not need to suffer spiritual death, we are alright with the rest of our lives untouched? There was a debate in the early church as to whether, when God became a human being, he took on a human mind, like the one you and I have. Some said that he did not, since the human mind is the source of all kinds of evil in our hearts and lives. This evil was so great, they argued, that Jesus would be tainted by our evil and this was unthinkable. There were others, however, who disagreed. They pointed out that, when Jesus touched a leper, he did not become unclean, as the law said he should, but that he cleansed the leper by his touch. Jesus was not made less God by becoming a human being, rather, he cleansed and sanctified humanity by what he did. They pointed out that, if Jesus did not take on a human mind, then our human minds remain unredeemed and unsaved, that such a position would force us to say that there is some part of our sin that not even God is powerful enough to overcome. If only part of our humanity fell, then Jesus could be only part human, but if the whole of our humanity is fallen, then Jesus had to take on our complete humanity. The unassumed, they said, is unhealed.

It seems to me that the message of grace shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, though we do need it, but we also need a God who lives for us, who is faithful when we are faithless, who worships in spirit and in truth, while we get distracted by the liturgy and music and our own problems, who, by the power of the Holy Spirit, implants his own life into our lives. It is as John says in our passage for this morning, "By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given to us of his Spirit." And he does all this before we ever asked, before we even realized there was a problem. In fact, we never really understand just how big a problem we have until we see how much grace does.

Grace tells us that, on our own, we are not good enough, but grace also tells us that we are not accepted in the eyes of God based on whether we are good enough or not. It is grace that tells us that, as John says, perfect love casts out all fear. But whose love is it that casts out the fear? Surely it is not our love, which is weak, broken and fickle, but it is God's love, God's perfect love that casts out all our fear; for as important as it is, it is far less important that we loved God than it is that God loves us.

Grace tells us, "Come," not because you have your act together, because if grace waited for us to be worthy, we would never come at all. Listen to these words of John Wesley about the soul being awakened to God. "The Spirit or breath of God is immediately inspired, breathed into the new-born soul; and the same breath which comes from, returns to, God: As it is continually received by faith, so it is continually rendered back by love, by prayer, and praise, and thanksgiving; love and praise, and prayer being the breath of every soul which is truly born of God. And by this new kind of spiritual respiration, spiritual life is not only sustained, but increased day by day, together with spiritual strength, and motion, and sensation; all the senses of the soul being now awake, and capable of discerning spiritual good and evil." Wesley urged the Methodists to think of the grace and Spirit of God as being like the air that we breathe, the natural response to taking it in is to return love, prayer, and praise.

In Jesus Christ, grace has transformed our lives, has overwhelmed us with a mighty love that casts out fear. It has come before we knew we needed it and so is available the moment we turn to God, and grace covers every aspect of life, from now until the end of our days. And so, let us go into the world as people who know, not what grace is, but who grace is. Let us pray.

AMEN