Cheap Grace
Excerpt from Romans 3:1-8
"But if through my falsehood God's truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?"
Reflection by Donna Schaper
This is one of those questions form Paul that has a trick inside it. Like its more famous partner, "What then shall I sin more so that grace may abound?" the trick revolves around the matter of cheap or inexpensive grace. Cheap grace is when we count on God to forgive us so much that we persist in sin. Sin can be defined in many ways. Here I mean it as missing the mark of our true humanity. We lower the bar God has set for us and imagine that God's overwhelming love for us sinners is such that we may as well have another drink or cheat another client or forget another homeless person's name. Cheap grace tosses us into the hell of relativity where we sense a deep inconsequentiality about our lives.
Rich grace, the kind that shows up in the coin of changed behavior, is so moved by God's anyway love for us that it begins to live on a different plane. Instead of thinking that what we do doesn't matter, we know it does. We are almost driven to show others what it means to be secure. We are compelled to be different than what we were, so drawn and magnetized are we to the high bar of true humanity. It is not so much achievement, although saved people do achieve, as it is lighting up on all of our cylinders where before we were only showing one or two bars. Instead of being burnt out, we are lit. Instead of being sad, we are happy. Instead of being bored, we are engaged.
One of the organizers of the Washington, D.C. Occupy movement came to a national meeting of faith leaders at our church three days before Christmas. She was 75 in age, a former self-described "lieutenant in Dr. King's army." She said that the Occupy movement had turned her into water and she just felt poured out, so reinvigorated was her hope for human right and human rights. She said she felt like we had another chance to make our mark as a democracy. She said she had remade a decision that she had made a long time ago. She used these words, "What I do really does matter."
Cheap grace drives you to inconsequentiality. Grace drives us to consequentiality, not the kind that makes us self-important so much as the kind that pours out, overflows, gets everything that was all dry all wet again. We are NOT to sin more so that grace may abound. Just the opposite: we are to make our mark as creatures of a God that was not fooling around.
Prayer
When we are tempted to devalue ourselves, Gracious God, drive us to the deep grace that is the well of our wells. Amen.
Excerpt from Romans 3:1-8
"But if through my falsehood God's truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?"
Reflection by Donna Schaper
This is one of those questions form Paul that has a trick inside it. Like its more famous partner, "What then shall I sin more so that grace may abound?" the trick revolves around the matter of cheap or inexpensive grace. Cheap grace is when we count on God to forgive us so much that we persist in sin. Sin can be defined in many ways. Here I mean it as missing the mark of our true humanity. We lower the bar God has set for us and imagine that God's overwhelming love for us sinners is such that we may as well have another drink or cheat another client or forget another homeless person's name. Cheap grace tosses us into the hell of relativity where we sense a deep inconsequentiality about our lives.
Rich grace, the kind that shows up in the coin of changed behavior, is so moved by God's anyway love for us that it begins to live on a different plane. Instead of thinking that what we do doesn't matter, we know it does. We are almost driven to show others what it means to be secure. We are compelled to be different than what we were, so drawn and magnetized are we to the high bar of true humanity. It is not so much achievement, although saved people do achieve, as it is lighting up on all of our cylinders where before we were only showing one or two bars. Instead of being burnt out, we are lit. Instead of being sad, we are happy. Instead of being bored, we are engaged.
One of the organizers of the Washington, D.C. Occupy movement came to a national meeting of faith leaders at our church three days before Christmas. She was 75 in age, a former self-described "lieutenant in Dr. King's army." She said that the Occupy movement had turned her into water and she just felt poured out, so reinvigorated was her hope for human right and human rights. She said she felt like we had another chance to make our mark as a democracy. She said she had remade a decision that she had made a long time ago. She used these words, "What I do really does matter."
Cheap grace drives you to inconsequentiality. Grace drives us to consequentiality, not the kind that makes us self-important so much as the kind that pours out, overflows, gets everything that was all dry all wet again. We are NOT to sin more so that grace may abound. Just the opposite: we are to make our mark as creatures of a God that was not fooling around.
Prayer
When we are tempted to devalue ourselves, Gracious God, drive us to the deep grace that is the well of our wells. Amen.
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