Chapter Seven: Understanding God’s Grace

For example, some have been known to take Paul’s words “You are not under law but under grace” to mean that we are no longer subject to the moral will of God and thus free to live as we please.

Others would not go that far but believe that God’s grace means that He overlooks much of our sin or, to use a popular expression, “cuts us some slack.” Others think God “grades on a curve” and, of course, since most people think they are better than others, they believe they will come out all right on the curve.

One well-meaning author who wanted to magnify God’s grace even went so far as to express his concept of grace as “the idea that we are accepted and loved by God just as we are, and that God’s approval does not have to be earned; it is simply there.”

All of these misunderstandings of God’s grace have resulted in an atmosphere of what we call “cheap grace” or “easy believism.” Theologically, this attitude, or actual belief in some cases, is known as antinomianism, which means “against the law.”

This attitude is not new. Even in the era of the apostles, Jude wrote of “ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality” (Jude 4). Paul anticipated a possible misunderstanding of his teaching on grace and spent the entire chapter of Romans 6 refuting it. So the attempts to pervert the grace of God into a license to sin, or to live as one pleases, is nothing new, but it is widespread today.

It is no wonder then that many pastors and Christian leaders are concerned about any emphasis on living by the gospel, or living by grace. They see it as opening the door to a more antinomian spirit that is already a curse on our culture. I understand their concern, but I believe that the solution is not to mingle works with grace but to teach the true nature of it and the biblical response to it. To say it another way, I believe that a correct understanding of God’s grace and a consistent reliance on it is the only sure foundation for progress in spiritual transformation.

In 1844, Archibald Alexander, the first president of Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote a book titled Thoughts On Religious Experience, in which he addressed the subject of hindrances to growth in grace. (What Alexander called growth in grace is what I call spiritual transformation.) In his book, Alexander listed five hindrances to growth in grace. The last four are common hindrances that we would recognize today, but it is the first one that is worthy of our attention. He listed the first hindrance as “a defect in our belief in the freeness of divine grace.” He continued, “To exercise unshaken confidence in the doctrine of gratuitous pardon is one of the most difficult things in the world; and to preach this doctrine fully without verging toward antinomianism is no easy task, and is therefore seldom done.” So this was a concern in the early nineteenth century just as it is today. Ministers were afraid that the preaching of grace would lead to antinomianism.

This was also true in the early seventeenth century. Episcopal bishop C. FitzSimons Allison, in his book The Rise of Moralism, traced a trend among ministers in England at that time to combat the alarming spread of antinomianism by adding works to faith as the basis of one’s standing and acceptance with God.

Back to Archibald Alexander. He continued, “But Christians cannot be but lean and feeble when deprived of their proper [nourishment]. It is by faith that the spiritual life is made to grow; and the doctrine of free grace without any mixture of human merit is the only true object of faith.”

Why would Alexander mention as the first hindrance to spiritual growth a defect in our belief in the freeness of divine grace? His reason can be summarized as follows: We are too prone to depending on our own performance for assurance of our acceptance with God, and we are too prone to depending on our own moral willpower for the ability to grow spiritually.

So, according to Alexander, the remedy for tendencies toward antinomianism is not to add works to grace but to continually emphasize the grace of God. But in order to do this and not open the door to cheap grace or easy believism, we need to have a correct understanding and heartfelt appreciation of the grace of God.

To understand grace, we must realize we are not just undeserving of God’s favor and blessing; we are all ill deserving. We all deserve the curse of God because none of us has abided “by all things written in the Book of the Law” (Galatians 3:10). The word all in this context means “absolutely all,” no exceptions.

There is only one person in all of human history who has perfectly and completely obeyed the law of God: our Lord Jesus Christ, as we saw in chapter 4. In Deuteronomy 28, Moses set forth to the nation of Israel a series of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. Though the application was strictly for the Israelites in the Promised Land, the principle behind it is an eternal principle. God blesses obedience and curses disobedience.

But we have not completely obeyed, and even our best efforts toward obedience always fall short. None of us has ever on our best days earned the blessing of God. And, apart from Christ, we would all be under the curse. So what is the solution to our dilemma? It is found only in Christ, who, as our representative and substitute, earned the blessings for perfect obedience and suffered the curse for our disobedience.

Therefore, I believe that a biblical definition of grace is “God’s blessings through Christ to people who deserve His curse.” It is because of Christ and His sinless life and sin-bearing death that we do not receive the curse we deserve but instead receive the blessings from God we do not deserve.

At this point, I should clarify the relationship of “gospel” to “grace.” Technically, the word gospel refers to a message. It is the “good news” of what God has done for us through Christ. As I indicated earlier, though, I use gospel as a shorthand expression to denote all that Christ did in His sinless life and sin-bearing death together with the fruit of His work. As seen in my definition of grace, God’s grace focuses on the fruit — the blessings that come to us as a result of Christ’s work. And it is important to realize that all of God’s blessings to us are expressions of His grace. All of them come to us as a result of the work of Christ for us. Not a single blessing from God comes to us apart from the work of Christ on our behalf. Not even one!

In light of that understanding of God’s grace, do you see how shallow and misguided such a concept of grace as God’s overlooking some minor sins is? And do you see how completely the definition of grace as “the idea that we are accepted and loved by God just as we are and that God’s approval does not have to be earned; it is simply there” misses the mark of describing true biblical grace?

The truth is, God’s approval does have to be earned. That is what Christ did for us. The difference between God’s “unconditional” acceptance and the acceptance purchased for us by Christ is a massive difference. Failure to understand this leads to a critical misunderstanding of grace. A concept of grace that does not include our ill-deservedness and Christ’s work for us will lead people down the wrong path of “cheap grace.” But a concept that does include our ill-deservedness and Christ’s work for us leads to gratitude for that grace, which leads to loving obedience.

The first pastor, in an interview, said, “I don’t believe that obedience earns God’s salvation of our souls, but it certainly earns God’s favor in our lives.”

The pastor who said those words is a good man who sincerely wants his people to live in obedience to God. He is concerned about the abuses of grace I’ve already described earlier, and I share his concern. Moreover, he is my Christian brother and a fellow laborer in Christ’s kingdom. So, though I disagree with him, I do not quote him to criticize him.

Rather, I quote him because I believe he speaks for the vast majority of evangelical Christians. They may not have thought it out as he has, but their intuitive theology says we are saved by grace but we relate to God in this life by our works. That is what I assumed for probably the first fourteen years of my Christian life.

One of the dangers of this thinking is that it can lead people to think God owes them a reward for their obedience. Their perspective in life is, “If I do certain things, I expect God to come through for me.” And when He doesn’t, they think, What’s wrong? Why isn’t He doing something to help me, and what more can I do?

In the opposite direction, some people live in fear that because of their sin, God will punish them. One person wrote, “Needless to say, my walk with Jesus was one of not feeling good enough, always on the performance treadmill, and one of great fear of a God who was just waiting to pounce on me when I messed up.”

This is the trap. If we think we earn God’s favor by our obedience or disfavor by our disobedience, we will expect God to come through for us or, at the other extreme, will always be living in fear that “the other shoe will eventually drop.”

The apostle Paul spoke to this kind of thinking when he wrote in Romans 4:4, “Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.” Paul wrote those words in the context of justification, but if we believe in the “present reality” of our justification as described in chapter 5, then Paul’s words apply to our day-to-day relationship with God just as much as they do to our salvation.

The second pastor, who has been with the Lord for a number of years, wrote, “Jesus Christ bought and paid for every answer to prayer you will ever receive.”

That’s an expression of grace. It fits well with the word grace as an acronym meaning God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. That is similar to my definition, “God’s blessings through Christ to people who deserve His curse.”

The question is, do we really believe we deserve the curse of God? Do we have such a view of the holiness of God — that is, both His transcendent majesty and infinite moral purity — that we see even our “small” sins (small in our own eyes) as what R. C. Sproul calls “cosmic treason”?

I fear that in our day, even among sincere believers, we have lost sight of the exceeding sinfulness of sin. By contrast, godly men of earlier centuries saw their best deeds as falling so far short of the perfection God requires that they could be justly condemned for even their fervent prayers. And the famous nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon is quoted as saying, “All my labors are marred by sin and imperfection. As I think of every act I have ever done for God, I can only cry out, ‘Oh, God, forgive the iniquity of my holy things.’”

Do we see that we can never earn God’s favor or blessing by our obedience considered in itself? Peter wrote that we “offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). Though Peter did not define “spiritual sacrifices,” I think we can assume he included our worship, obedience, and service. And he says that all of that is acceptable to God only through Christ. The Puritan John Owen expressed it this way:

The question, however, is do these good works earn any merit with God? The answer, if we believe that even our best deeds are defiled and imperfect, is that all merit is ascribed to Christ alone. Consequently, all rewards to us from God are due strictly to His grace alone.

Lefèvre d’Étaples (pronounced Luferah Daytapplah), a Frenchman who lived 1455–1536 and was a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, wrote,

Paul wrote to Timothy, “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1). The verb be strengthened is what is called (in grammar) a present passive. Present means a continuous, ongoing action. Passive means something is done to the subject. We might render Paul’s words this way: “Be continually strengthened by a source of strength from outside of you.” And what is this source? It is “the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” It is the power of God coming to us through Christ and applied to us by the Holy Spirit.

It is important that we see God’s power as an expression of His grace, for we have now reached a transition point in our study of gospel-based transformation. Up to now, we have focused on the gospel as the foundation and motivation for our pursuit of spiritual transformation. Beginning in the next chapter, we will focus on the process, and critical to that process is the work of the Holy Spirit to work in us and to enable us to work. That is why the content of the next chapter focuses on the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. And, remember, this transforming work is an expression of God’s grace just as much as is our salvation.