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| Josh Hughes leading a night where God's grace was "center stage" ... Good Friday Service at Four Oaks Church 4.6.12 |
What is it that so often keeps us from recognizing the grace of God in our lives? Could it be that we are looking for a different kind of grace? All too often when we find ourselves in the middle of great difficulty we both long and plead for the grace of relief. Yet in many of these same circumstances God may be bestowing upon us the grace of rescuing us from ourselves. We want the trial to end because we don't like the pain we are experiencing, yet God may want the trial to remain in our lives until it has completed the work He sent it to do. We tend not to rejoice in our sufferings like Paul did in Romans 5 because we much more prefer a life of comfort than the character that a God-sent difficulty can produce. Still, God loves us too much to relent. He didn't shed the blood of His one and only Son to leave us to ourselves. He didn't reveal His truth to us only to have us lost and confused in the middle of our own stories. No, we have been and are being rescued by an activist Redeemer. He does not get discouraged; He does not get tired; and He never gets distracted. He is intensely focusing on finishing what He has started in us. So if it is heat that we need, He will not provide relief until the trial's redemptive heat has done its designed work.
It is very important in the darkness of our trials to recognize the grace of God. If our definition of grace is too narrow, and if what we expect that grace to offer is too limited, we may be crying out for grace at the very time it is being showered on us. It is quite possible to be the focus of divine love and rescue while at the very same time be interpreting what is happening in our lives in a completely different way. Perhaps the cross is the quintessential example of this. If we had been there on the day when the Romans & the Jews tortured and killed our Messiah, we would probably have interpreted this as the ultimate defeat, just as His disciples and His own mother did. It would have been very difficult to gaze up at Christ hanging on the cross between two thieves and see it as a wonderful moment that would produce such great gain for those close to Him ... not to mention the tens of millions who would subsequently believe. No, we would likely see Him hanging there, seemingly unable to help Himself, and we would most likely think that it was a horrible failure of all that was good, true and beautiful. We would have left Golgotha's hill with the deepest of sick feelings in the pits of our stomachs, and we would have woken up the next day not really able to believe that we had just watched Jesus, the Promised One, die. And almost certainly, we would have been confused, perplexed and not have had any idea of what to think or do next.
Yet we now know that the cross was not a defeat. No, it was actually the victory of ALL victories. Probably no one said it better than Paul in Colossians 2:15 "And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross." No, the cross was NOT a moment of defeat that was later turned into a victory. The cross was NOT a failure that was overturned by the resurrection. Paul makes that point quite clearly. This moment, which on its surface looked so much like a defeat, was actually history's greatest moment of triumph! The Promised One, the Hope of Israel, was NOT taking the failure-inducing death blows of the enemy. No, this was the Messiah's moment of greatest power. For the cross was the very place where He showed the world just what He alone was able to do. No man or power or principality was taking His life from Him. No one was snatching victory out of His hand. No one was undoing all of the gracious good that He had done. No one was robbing His followers of their lives and futures. He was on the cross because that is EXACTLY where He both wanted and chose to be. He hung in torture because He KNEW that was precisely what was needed if there was ever going to be any hope for those who would believe in Him. No, He did not hang there in defeat. He hung, instead, in triumph. That afternoon on Golgotha's hill was NOT a demonstration of the power of the enemies of Christ. Paul declares exactly the opposite. Christ was making a public spectacle of their lack of power and control. They threw everything they had at Him, but in the end, they were simply unable to keep Him from providing redemption for His people. With all of their twisted justice and angry violence, they could NOT stop Him.
The cross publicly mocked their powerlessness. Jesus hung there because He chose to, His Father wanted Him to and He, Himself, wanted to. He showed divine love and control as He willingly submitted to ridicule, shame and torture, because He knew what He had come to do, and nothing was going to get in His way or stop Him. What looked so very much like a crushing defeat was, in fact, an unadulterated triumph. Things are not always as they seem.
And for us as well, it is quite possible, at the moment of their unfolding, for God's processes of grace to look like the enemy's actions of triumph. The loss of a job, the breakup of a relationship, the struggle with sickness, the death of a dream, the presence of financial hardship, or the failure of an accomplishment can all look like evil has triumphed over good. And if we are only looking for the grace of relief and expecting it to produce the fruit of release, we will tend to credit the enemy with far too much power and tend to think of our Lord as being much too distant and weak. This is why a "things are not always as they seem" perspective on grace is so important for us to understand.
What we need to do instead is to let the goal of grace define our expectation of what the process of grace will look like. If we are able to do this then we will be much better at recognizing the grace of God as it operates in, around and through us. Paul's words to Titus are helpful for us in this regard in chapter 2 verses 11-14. There Paul tells Titus that the goal of God's grace is, "a people that are His very own, eager to do what is good." We will never be able to consistently recognize the grace of God in our lives, let alone understand our struggles, without this goal serving as our interpretive lens, as all that God is doing in our lives has this one goal in view. His grace has been given so that He will have a people that are in every way eager to do what He says is good. It is both a subtle and a subversive grace. It is designed to once and for all destroy the culture of self-absorption that so easily seduces and controls us all and is tailored to produce a counterculture of zeal for divine good. It is a grace that often takes us to places that we would have never desired to go and produces in us what we never could have achieved for ourselves. It is a grace that will finally take our eyes off our agendas for ourselves and put them, instead, where they were designed to focus in the beginning -- on God's kingdom and His glory. It is only when we forsake all the other "goods" that would control us and live under the control of the zeal to be good in His eyes, that our lives truly become happy and most satisfying. Why? Because we are finally living like we were designed to live.
Yes, a people who are eager to do what is good is grace's ultimate goal, but what is the process? Paul says that the process is purification [a.k.a. sanctification]. Our hearts are corrupted by other goals. We are not pure in heart. We tend to give our hearts to whatever appears to offer us comfort, identity, pleasure, meaning, success or station [all things which we are meant to find only in God]. Yet God's goal is to produce in us a singleness of heart. And He tends to do this by demonstrating to us that nothing outside of Him can ever satisfy. So, He will allow our dreams to die, or success to ruin us, or our friends prove to be unfaithful, or our bodies to fail us, or our good efforts to be shown to not be so good after all. All of this is often very painful to go through, but it is NEVER random pain. It becomes the painful grace of purification, and therefore, a very good thing to go through. Remember that "things are not always what they seem" in the view of grace. Many of us just need to correct our vision so that we can clearly see that ours is a story of grace as well.
