Amazing Grace: Conclusions, Part 2

Knowing God. A true understanding of grace helps us better understand God. In fact, we can only caricature God if we misunderstand grace. When we see God as he truly is — a being who loves us so much that he gave his Son for us so that we can live with him eternally — we can get over some awful, false understandings.

I truly believe that we often see God as the Great Test Giver — and we prepare our entire Christian lives to sit for the Great True-False Test in the Sky, thinking that our position on the “issues” will decide our eternal fate.

And we sometimes see God as a Great Puzzle Maker, who hid clues to our salvation in the silences of the scriptures, so that only the very clever among us could figure it out and so make it to heaven.

Both views are just as false as can be. God gave up his Son to a cruel death so that we could be saved. A being who does this isn’t trying to make it hard or tricky. He’s desperately trying to help us make it. And this realization changes everything.

Knowing the Bible. If we could just get this one thought into our brains, we’d understand the Bible so much better.

For example, I’ve often wondered why so many of the Epistles end with practical advice on every day living — especially on living together. Why spend so much instruction on how to love our neighbors when that doctrine is plain and what we really need is clearer guidance on how to worship and how to organize?

Well, after more years than I care to admit, it finally dawned on me that God’s priorities are easily seen in God’s word. And if my priorities aren’t being met, then I have the wrong priorities!

The scriptures say precious little about how to conduct a worship service or how to organize a church. For example, we have no clear guidance — virtually none — on what deacons are to do! The instructions we have on how elders are to be appointed is that Timothy or Titus is to ordain them. How on earth are we to apply that teaching today?

But we have vast, detailed instructions on how to get along with each other. For example, Romans 12-15 are four chapters on how grace teaches us to get along! This tells us that our life as a community is not just important — it’s of the essence. It’s the heart and soul of Christianity.

False priorities. God loves us. Therefore, we must love others — even our enemies.

Get that, and you get everything. Get it wrong, and you get nothing.

(Gal. 5:6b) The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

We celebrate our salvation by faith, but the point of this generous gift is that we are saved to do good works — to do acts of love and generosity.

(1 John 3:16-18) This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

But if love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom. 13:10), then nothing else is. We think Jesus died so we’d all sing a cappella on Sunday morning, but God is worshiped — and worshiped very well — in heaven.

He doesn’t need worshipers so much as servants who will, as the body of Christ on earth, live as Jesus lived and continue his mission to the world.

Community. “Community” has become something of a buzz word among theologians lately. And it’s a good one. It’s one way to translate koinonia, also translated as fellowship, sharing, or communion.

The point is that our salvation is not just a change in our individual relationship with God. It’s also becoming a part of God’s community on earth — the body of Christ. It’s becoming a part of Jesus’ mission — not as an individual but as part of a Kingdom, a body, a community.

This is not so much about the institutional church as it is about being together with fellow believers. You see, the mission is too big and too important to accomplish by yourself.

If you see God’s mission as getting you into heaven, then God’s work was finished when you were baptized and now you patiently wait on death (making life as a Christian rather pointless). But if God’s mission is to change the world by creating a community of Christ-like people who follow in Jesus’ footsteps, then you have to work with others.

A lot of us have trouble with working as part of a larger group. Fortunately, God has gone to great effort to set up his church in a way that should make it easy to work together. We often fail in accomplishing God’s plan, but he’s given us all that we need to make it work.

[to be continued]