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December 15 - December 24, 2019
Obviously His love for failures and nobodies was not an exclusive love—that would merely substitute one class prejudice for another.
“If you really want to understand a man, don’t just listen to what he says but watch what he does.”
The child doesn’t have to struggle to get himself in a good position for having a relationship with God; he doesn’t have to craft ingenious ways of explaining his position to Jesus; he doesn’t have to create a pretty face for himself; he doesn’t have to achieve any state of spiritual feeling or intellectual understanding. All he has to do is happily accept the cookies: the gift of the kingdom.
Children do not focus on the tigers of the past or the future but only on the strawberry that comes in the here and now.
Moreover, because Jesus was looked upon as a man of God and a prophet, they would have interpreted his gesture of friendship as God’s approval on them. They were now acceptable to God. Their sinfulness, ignorance, and uncleanness had been overlooked and were no longer being held against them.
The blood of the Lamb points to the truth of grace: what we cannot do for ourselves, God has done for us.
He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace. But many of us don’t know our God and don’t understand His gospel of grace. For
The disciple living by grace rather than law has undergone a decisive conversion—a turning from mistrust to trust. The foremost characteristic of living by grace is trust in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.
To trust Abba, both in prayer and life, is to stand in childlike openness before a mystery of gracious love and acceptance.2
The tendency in legalistic religion is to mistrust God, to mistrust others, and consequently, to mistrust ourselves. Allow me to become personal for a moment. Do you really believe that the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is gracious, that He cares about you? Do you really believe that He is always, unfailingly present to you as companion and support? Do you really believe that God is love?
Or have you learned to fear this loving and gracious Father? “In love,” John says, “there is no room for fear, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear implies punishment and no one who is afraid has come to perfection in love” (1 John 4:18). Have you learned to think of the Father as the judge, ...
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Our world is saturated with grace, and the lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit but in matter—in a deer leaping across a meadow, in the flight of an eagle, in fire and water, in a rainbow after a summer storm, in a gentle doe streaking through a forest, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in a child licking a chocolate ice cream cone, in a woman with windblown hair.
God intended for us to discover His loving presence in the world around us.
It is only the reality of death that is powerful enough to quicken people out of the sluggishness of everyday life and into an active search for what life is really about.
The spirituality of wonder knows the world is charged with grace, that while sin and war, disease and death are terribly real, God’s loving presence and power in our midst are even more real.
His love moves beyond justice and proves more salvific than spelling out the ground rules all over again.
“Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of Your universe. Delight me to see how Your Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His, to the Father through the features of men’s faces. Each day enrapture me with Your marvelous things without number. I do not ask to see the reason for it all; I ask only to share the wonder of it all.”
And the more we reproduce Him, the more we forget about Him and the agony of His third hour. We turn Him into gold, silver, ivory, marble, or whatever to free ourselves from His agony and death as a man.
The third, who prudently wraps his money and buries it, typifies the Christian who deposits his faith in an hermetic container and seals the lid shut. He or she limps through life on childhood memories of Sunday school and resolutely refuses the challenge of growth and spiritual maturity. Unwilling to take risks, this person loses the talent entrusted to him or her. “The master wanted his servants to take risks. He wanted them to gamble with his money.”5
We cannot will ourselves to accept grace. There are no magic words, preset formulas, or esoteric rites of passage. Only Jesus Christ sets us free from indecision. The Scriptures offer no other basis for conversion than the personal magnetism of the Master.
Grace tells us that we are accepted just as we are. We may not be the kind of people we want to be, we may be a long way from our goals, we may have more failures than achievements, we may not be wealthy or powerful or spiritual, we may not even be happy, but we are nonetheless accepted by God, held in his hands. Such is his promise to us in Jesus Christ, a promise we can trust.7
Impostors in the Spirit always prefer appearances to reality. Rationalization begins with a look in the mirror.
In order to free the captive, one must name the captivity. Max’s denial had to be identified through merciless interaction with his peers. His self-deception had to be unmasked in its absurdity.
Tough love had made him real and the truth had set him free.
The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.
to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend to believe we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss.
Even the desire to say grace is itself My gift.”
Authentic faith leads us to treat others with unconditional seriousness and to a loving reverence for the mystery of the human personality. Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity, personality, and reality. It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion.
The spirit of Caiaphas lives on in every century of religious bureaucrats who confidently condemn good people who have broken bad religious laws. Always for a good reason of course: for the good of the temple, for the good of the church. How many sincere people have been banished from the Christian community by religious power brokers as numb in spirit as Caiaphas! The deadening spirit of hypocrisy lives on in prelates and politicians who want to look good but not be good; it lives on in people who prefer to surrender control of their souls to rules rather than run the risk of living in union
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Relief comes from rigorous honesty with ourselves.
Lord Jesus, we are silly sheep who have dared to stand before You and try to bribe You with our preposterous portfolios. Suddenly we have come to our senses. We are sorry and ask You to forgive us. Give us the grace to admit we are ragamuffins, to embrace our brokenness, to celebrate Your mercy when we are at our weakest, to rely on Your mercy no matter what we may do. Dear Jesus, gift us to stop grandstanding and trying to get attention, to do the truth quietly without display, to let the dishonesties in our lives fade away, to accept our limitations, to cling to the gospel of grace, and to
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The question had become not “What does Jesus say?” but “What does the Church say?” This question is still being asked today.
We accept grace in theory but deny it in practice. Living by grace rather than law leads us out of the house of fear into the house of love.
“In love there is no room for fear, but perfect loves drives out fear: because fear implies punishment, and no one who is afraid has come to perfection in love” (1 John 4:18).
We have undoubtedly heard that freedom is not a license for lust. Maybe that’s all we’ve heard—what it isn’t.
Freedom in Christ produces a healthy independence from peer pressure, people-pleasing, and the bondage of human respect. The tyranny of public opinion can manipulate our lives. What will the neighbors think? What will my friends think? The expectations of others can exert a subtle but controlling pressure on our behavior. As the chameleon changes colors with the seasons, so the Christian who wants to be well thought of by everyone attunes and adapts to each new personality and situation. Without a stable and enduring self-image, a woman may offer radically different aspects of herself to
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Depending upon company and circumstances, a man may be either a sweet-talking servant of God or a foulmouthed, bottom-pinching boor. Continuity of character is conspicuously absent in both sexes.
In Christ Jesus freedom from fear empowers us to let go of the desire to appear good, so that we can move freely in the mystery of who we really are.
For most of us it takes a long time for the Spirit of freedom to cleanse us of the subtle urges to be admired for our studied goodness. It requires a strong sense of our redeemed selves to pass up the opportunity to appear graceful and good to other persons.
Living by grace inspires a growing consciousness that I am what I am in the sight of Jesus and nothing more. It is His approval that counts.
A little child cannot do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer.
Jesus’ tenderness is not in any way determined by how we pray or what we are or do. In order to free us for compassion toward others, Jesus calls us to accept His compassion in our own lives; to become gentle, caring, compassionate, and forgiving toward ourselves in our failure and need.
Usually we see other people not as they are, but as we are.8
“O Ira, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?”
Second journeys usually end quietly with a new wisdom and a coming to a true sense of self that releases great power.
The wisdom is that of an adult who has regained equilibrium, stabilized, and found fresh purpose and new dreams. It is a wisdom that gives some things up, lets some things die, and accepts human limitations. It is a wisdom that realizes: I cannot expect anyone to understand me fully. It is wisdom that admits the inevitability of old age and death. It is a wisdom that has faced the pain caused by parents, spouse, family, friends, colleagues, business associates, and has truly forgiven them and acknowledged with unexpected compassion that these people are neither angels nor devils, but only
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If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the cross.
When Scripture, prayer, worship, ministry become routine, they are dead. When I conclude that I can now cope with the awful love of God, I have headed for the shallows to avoid the deeps. I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.
Get the picture? Jesus didn’t ask her if she was sorry. He didn’t demand a firm purpose of amendment. He didn’t seem too concerned that she might dash back into the arms of her lover. She just stood there and Jesus gave her absolution before she asked for it.
