This week we’re exploring how following Jesus impacts our lifestyle by one principle: grace. Grace is one of the most important, life-changing aspects of Christian story. Here’s how the Bible talks about grace:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
(Ephesians 2:4-10 ESV)
Here is an easy way to remember the meaning:
God’s
Riches
At
Christ’s
Expense
A friend had a young child at home, and a baby on the way and his mother loved to help out by cleaning up the house. One particularly stressful time she was coming down to decompress the situation by cleaning up the house. My friend came home that day to find his wife madly cleaning up the house, before the mother in law arrived. She didn’t want her mother-in-law to see a messy house, even though she was there to clean it as a gift.
We so often we think that we have to have cleaned up our lives before we can accept what God wants to give us. We don’t have to have sorted ourselves out before we can accept God’s free gift of forgiveness, his grace.
When you ask someone why they don’t like Christianity…you’ll often hear “it’s just a bunch of rules.” I don’t need a book to tell me how to be a good person. If that was true, I wouldn’t want to be part of this religion either.
But it’s not true…that’s the religion that Jesus came to get rid of, and not his hope for us. Here’s the version of Christianity that people are usually describing:
Obey God’s laws
God will accept you
He’ll provide you with loving care
He’ll give you a new status, as a servant of God.
This is a law religion, the kind of thing the Pharisees liked to promote. Jesus didn’t have very nice things to say about that!
The problem is – no one has ever obeyed God’s laws perfectly enough to earn God’s love. Actually, there was one person – Jesus. He knew our hopeless situation, and did something about it. Jesus was all about grace. This involves the same steps, but in a different order:
God loves and accepts you…unconditionally
God will provide you with loving care. He wants to be part of your life today, not some day in the future.
God will give you a new status: Child of God adopted into his family
You now return God’s favour with thanksgiving and living in his way.
In grace…we are given God’s love, care and fatherhood as free gifts, even before having proven ourselves worthy, and that gives us a lot to live up to!
Question: Where have you typically seen laws and rules in your faith? As the way to earn God’s love, or respond to it? Why?
Reminder: Earlier in this series, we saw the importance of reading the Bible together in sync, so our new daily bible readings start today in our mobile app and web site.
Read the Bible in Sync Today
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Matthew 6:2-4 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Why does Jesus talk about rewards for giving generously? Why not just encourage altruism?
He knows us. Having created us, and been one of us, he knows us and our motivations intimately.
If he had commended doing good acts for purely altruistic reasons, do good just to be good, help others just for them, give to charity just for the charity, we’d very quickly have found a way to make it about us.
A reputation for generosity, or a feeling of goodness..we can make these our God...the source of our ultimate worth.
This is what Christians have traditionally called sin...putting something earthly in God’s place.
Generosity should be a good thing, but when it becomes our Gods, becomes pride and self-conceit. These can pretend to be better rewards than God himself.
It's hard to avoid...human nature. Seems whenever we give, someone will notice. Either others notice, shower us with praise.
Or, Even if we hide it from others, we shower ourselves with praise.
Jesus’ claim is that these are small rewards in the grand scheme of things...and we’re wasting our time if we receive them, as we can easily believe we’ve been “paid in full”
And so Jesus commends something different...do it just for God.
Whether you give money, time, medical help, gifts, talents, whatever.
Hide it from others, hide it from ourselves, and give to others because God loves them as his own children.
Give in order so they will see God loves and values them…and wont’ even notice us.
Our heavenly father sees this kind of thing – his children becoming more like him – and rewards it with his attention, himself, far more rewarding than the temporary attention of any human, even ourselves.
In God’s presence, we realize that anything less, like worldly praise or feeling smug, was a poor substitute.
Jesus can commend this because it’s his way.
We now realize how spiritually poor we are. We’ve been accepting the applause of others & ourselves instead of God, we’ve let our pride and self-conceit replace him!
But all the same, from the safety of heaven, as God the creator and sustainer, came to earth.
He gave up his safety and majesty in the most selfless act possible. He died for us, and gained nothing but a restored relationship with us, a relationship that asks us to follow him into our own selfless acts of service.
When giving is done for God and God alone, a much greater reward awaits…God!
Challenge: What practical steps can you take to be more generous to others, and to keep the focus on God instead of yourself?
