Grace Without Buts And Brakes

When people talk about grace, listen carefully. I’ve listened long enough to listen for certain things. I listen for “buts and brakes.” We often speak about grace with a thousand qualifications which reveal a paralyzing fear that grace will be taken too far. Our greatest concern, it seems, is that people will take advantage of grace and use it as a justification to live licentiously. And since bad behavior is apparently the thing that scares us the most as preachers and parents, we end up saying more about what grace isn’t than we do about what grace is.

Matt Richard describes well how naturally we take it upon ourselves to reign grace in when we fear too much of it will result in lawlessness:

I have found that as Christians we many times attribute ‘lawlessness’ to the preaching of the Gospel. Somewhere in our thinking we rationalize that if the Gospel is presented as “too free, too unconditional or that Jesus fulfills the law for us” that the result will be lax morality, loose living and lawlessness. It is as if we believe that the freeing message of the Gospel actually produces, encourages and grants people a license to sin. Because of this rationalization we find ourselves strapping, holding and attaching restrictions to the Gospel so that we might prevent or limit lawlessness. In other words, the Gospel is placed into bondage due to our rationalization and reaction to lawlessness.    Continue Reading...