What's So Amazing About Grace?

by Philip Yancey

What struck me about my friend’s story is that women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him.

“The great Christian revolutions,” said H. Richard Niebuhr, “come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.” Oddly, I sometimes find a shortage of grace within the church, an institution founded to proclaim, in Paul’s phrase, “the gospel of God’s grace.”

a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient.

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.

Grace came to Norre Vosburg as it always comes: free of charge, no strings attached, on the house.

Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate. Sadly, to a world desperate for this grace the church sometimes presents one more form of ungrace. Too often we more resemble the grim folks who gather to eat boiled bread than those who have just partaken of Babette’s feast.

God’s arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away.

To God himself, it feels like the discovery of a lifetime.

Obviously, Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.

grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us.

Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

We risk missing the story’s point: that God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God’s requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

Gomer did not get fairness, or even justice; she got grace. Every time I read their story—or read God’s speeches that begin with sternness and dissolve into tears—I marvel at a God who allows himself to endure such humiliation only to come back for more. “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?” Substitute your own name for Ephraim and Israel. At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistible power of love.

When God looks upon my life graph, he sees not jagged swerves toward good and bad but rather a steady line of good: the goodness of God’s Son captured in a moment of time and applied for all eternity.

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more—no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.

This book is wrecking me.

Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it.

Behind every act of forgiveness lies a wound of betrayal, and the pain of being betrayed does not easily fade away.

I and the public know What all school children learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

“Despite a hundred sermons on forgiveness, we do not forgive easily, nor find ourselves easily forgiven. Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be,” writes Elizabeth O’Connor

The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness. And people write songs with titles like “Amazing Grace” for one reason: grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations. Grace alone melts ungrace.

At last I understood: in the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God’s hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

Forgiveness is not the same as pardon, he advises: you may forgive one who wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong. If you can bring yourself to the point of forgiveness, though, you will release its healing power both in you and in the person who wronged you.

There is one major flaw in the law of revenge, however: it never settles the score.

“Forgiveness is not just an occasional act: it is a permanent attitude,” said Martin Luther King Jr.

Jesus’ approach to “unclean” people dismayed his countrymen and, in the end, helped to get him crucified. In essence, Jesus canceled the cherished principle of the Old Testament, No Oddballs Allowed, replacing it with a new rule of grace: “We’re all oddballs, but God loves us anyhow.”

Jesus’ most memorable story, the Prodigal Son, likewise ends with a banquet scene, featuring as its hero a good-for-nothing who has soiled the family reputation. Jesus’ point: those judged undesirable by everyone else are infinitely desirable to God, and when one of them turns to God, a party breaks out. We’re all oddballs but God loves us anyhow.

He added a chilling remark, “As a gay man, I’ve found it’s easier for me to get sex on the streets than to get a hug in church.”

If we truly grasped the wonder of God’s love for us, the devious question that prompted Romans 6 and 7—What can I get away with?—would never even occur to us. We would spend our days trying to fathom, not exploit, God’s grace.

In other words, the proof of spiritual maturity is not how “pure” you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

Jay Kesler, president of Taylor University, told me about his own brush with legalism. Shortly after deciding to follow Christ as a teenager, he felt overwhelmed by all the new rules imposed on him. Confused, Jay walked around his backyard in Indiana and noticed his faithful collie Laddy, merrily gnawing on a bone while stretched out in the glistening wet grass. It struck Jay that Laddy was possibly the best Christian he knew. Laddy did not smoke, drink, go to movies, dance, or carry protest signs. He was harmless, docile, and inactive. At once Jay saw how far he had strayed from the life of freedom and passion to which Jesus had called him.

Jesus proclaimed unmistakably that God’s law is so perfect and absolute that no one can achieve righteousness. Yet God’s grace is so great that we do not have to. 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.

Jesus came to found a new kind of kingdom that could coexist in Jerusalem and also spread into Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth. In a parable he warned that those farmers who concentrate on pulling up weeds (his image for “sons of the evil one”) may destroy the wheat along with the weeds. Leave matters of judgment to the one true Judge, Jesus advised.

First, as should be clear by now, I believe that dispensing God’s grace is the Christian’s main contribution. As Gordon MacDonald said, the world can do anything the church can do except one thing: it cannot show grace. In my opinion, Christians are not doing a very good job of dispensing grace to the world, and we stumble especially in this field of faith and politics.

For Jesus, the person was more important than any category or label.

They concentrated on changing lives, not changing laws.

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

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite.