What's So Amazing About Grace?

by Philip Yancey

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith.

The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room.

Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.”

Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.

Aware of our inbuilt resistance to grace, Jesus talked about it often.

Shakespeare put it succinctly in Merchant of Venice: “How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?”

Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and yes, even Nazi Germany, for all three of these conflicts took place in so-called Christian nations.

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,

“We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

King said, was not to defeat the white man but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority. . . . The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

the exhibit that demonstrated how the early discrimination laws against the Jews—the “Jews Only” shops, park benches, rest rooms, and drinking fountains—were explicitly modeled on segregation laws in the United States.

In the words of C. S. Lewis, “St. Augustine says ‘God gives where He finds empty hands.’ A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift.” Grace, in other words, must be received.

Legalism may “work” in an institution such as a Bible college or the Marine Corps.

But there is a cost, an incalculable cost: ungrace does not work in a relationship with God.

You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it.

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people’s rules seem excessively strict.

hypocrisy means, simply, “putting on a mask.”

The church, says Robert Farrar Capon, “has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that she has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our songs, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music but to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch.”

Legalism stands like a stripper on the sidelines of faith, seducing us toward an easier way. It teases, promising some of the benefits of faith but unable to deliver what matters most.

A relationship with God...and in the case of governments and politics, freedom.

At first glance legalism seems hard, but actually freedom in Christ is the harder way. It is relatively easy not to murder, hard to reach out in love; easy to avoid a neighbor’s bed, hard to keep a marriage alive; easy to pay taxes, hard to serve the poor.

The ultimate effect of legalism is to lower one’s view of God.

Compared to a holy and perfect God, the loftiest Everest of rules amounts to a molehill. You cannot earn God’s acceptance by climbing; you must receive it as a gift.

By striving to prove how much they deserve God’s love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don’t deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

and believing that God gives gifts to the undeserving, is a foundational flaw. The preequisite for receiving God's Love is to desires it in a state of humility.

The cartoons show that Christians increasingly are perceived as rigid moralists who want to control other lives.

Because they do! lol...but only "for their own good." You gotta break some rules to save souls :/

as Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees, a concern for moral values alone is not nearly enough. Moralism apart from grace solves little.

Nietzsche gave this warning, which applies to modern Christians: “Be careful, lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon.”

evangelical Christians were attracted to Hitler’s promise to restore morality to government and society. Many Protestant leaders initially thanked God for the rise of the Nazis, who seemed the only alternative to communism.

I said that the man I follow, a Palestinian Jew from the first century, had also been involved in a culture war. He went up against a rigid religious establishment and a pagan empire.

For many years dissidents in Eastern Europe met in secret, used code words, avoided public telephones, and published pseudonymous essays in underground papers.

By working in secret, always with a nervous glance over the shoulder, they had succumbed to fear, the goal of their Communist opponents all along.

pollster George Barna discovered that born-again Christians in modern America actually have a higher rate of divorce (twenty-seven percent) than nonbelievers (twenty-three percent); those who describe themselves as fundamentalists have the highest percentage of all (thirty percent).

Jesus reduced the mark of a Christian to one word. “By this all men will know that you are my disciples,” he said: “if you love one another.”

Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

One of his critics accused him of setting the church back fifty years. Graham listened, lowered his head, and replied, “I am deeply ashamed. I have been trying very hard to set the church back two thousand years.”

The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

The Brazilian government even allows Prison Fellowship to oversee a prison run by the Christian inmates themselves. Humaita Prison employs only two staff members and yet has no problems with riots or escapees and has a repeat offender rate of four percent compared to seventy-five percent in the rest of Brazil.

As C. S. Lewis has noted, those most conscious of another world have made the most effective Christians in this one.