God's Amazing Grace

Given, Not Earned

I was dumbfounded.

A year earlier, my friend’s wife had caught him in an affair with another woman. It destroyed his wife and completely rerouted the trajectory of their marriage and family. This man’s man had come to me as a broken, humbled, hot mess. He cried with me every week for a year.

His wife initially took a scorched earth approach. It was understandable, but hard to watch. Though later, they were trying to heal and rebuild their marriage. While he was actively leaning into the marriage, he withdrew and isolated from everyone else when he most needed friends, especially his friends from church.

Long before his wife was interested in extending him grace, I was discussing God’s grace with him, explaining that it was God’s grace that would give him the foundation and resilience to rebuild his life. He would talk in circles about what he’d done and who he’d hurt and eventually crash land with a breathless proclamation of his worthlessness – he “didn’t deserve grace.”

He’d been in church long enough to know better. He knew that no one deserved grace, and that it wouldn’t be grace if you could earn it. Yet, there he’d crash – “I don’t deserve grace.”

The truth was that he’d given grace so much lip service through decades in church that it had become an ordinary word. Nothing special. It was just another lifeless, empty, religious word.

Perhaps his bored participation in the petty practices of religion prompted his wayward steps to stray into something so contrary to God’s Word.

But here we were. After a year of gentle encouraging and more than a few confrontations, I convinced him to return to worship with his church. It was not an easy move. Everyone in the small church knew what he’d done. Several had made it clear that they thought his wife was a “blind fool” for taking him back. Though with a lowly posture, he slowly lifted one foot, then the other, over the threshold of the sanctuary, bracing for both whispers and stares.

What happened next is what dumbfounded me.

When my friend’s eyes met those of the pastor, he knew something was wrong. Unknowingly, my friend had chosen the one Sunday a quarter that his church served communion. And the pastor had a look of horror on his face. After working his way through the crowd, shaking every hand and hugging every neck, he reached my friend… looked him in the eye, and said, “You know you have disobeyed the Lord and cannot take communion.” Then he said something about my friend walking away from Jesus like the rich young ruler instead of being as innocent as a child. Understandably, my friend missed the explanation while being rolled by the rejection.

What????

Surely my friend misheard his pastor.

I was stunned.

Have we drifted so far from the Gospel that we turn weak-kneed, wobbly, guilt-smeared adulterers away from Christ’s table because they are not as innocent as children? Talk about perversions of the Gospel!

If my friend got the jest of what his pastor was saying, he did correctly recognize that the Bible connects Jesus’s comments about children and the story of the rich young ruler in Matthew 18 & 19. Though he completely missed why they are connected. These are not stories of guilt and innocence, but stories of independence and dependence, of supposed competence and utter incompetence.

For Jesus to call us to be as innocent as children would be the harshest of jokes and irony. For who could return to the bliss, often considered innocence, of not knowing what you now know? And what child is not self-centered & emotionally driven?

Jesus pointed to children as our example not because of their innocence, but because they readily accept their own incompetence and need to be dependent, while most of us are more likely to follow the proud and independent path of the rich young ruler.

Something is radically wrong when a pastor rejects a person who has humbly returned from his folly from the table of one known for eating with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes.

My friend’s wife didn’t trust him. His children wouldn’t speak to him. His sister-in-law wanted to castrate him. His friend’s felt betrayed and awkward around him. His own mother was embarrassed by his actions. But Jesus would welcome him with open arms to HIS table.

Is not the Lord’s table exactly where we are to invite the guilty, prideful, shameful, fearful, grateful, and hopeful?

Are we to police the behaviors of those who have long accepted Christ and been part of the family of believers, keeping them from the very grace that the table represents if they have not earned their way?

What exactly are we to remember when we take the bread and the cup?

Is it not that Jesus gave us what we could not possibly come close to earning through good behavior?

Is it not that Jesus looks at the cross, then at us on our worst days, following our greatest failures, and lovingly says, “You are absolutely worth it. I love you this much”?

Seems to me that Jesus’ harshest words were laser-focused on religious leaders who thought it their responsibility to stand between broken people and God, as if God somehow needed their protection. We must find a way to teach the wrongness of sin without pushing sinful people away from God, lest no one will be left to be in his presence.

It is indeed God’s amazing grace that settles upon us with the weightlessness of a single fresh snowflake while crumbling the massive walls we’ve built between ourselves and God.

Why would we withhold God’s grace from anyone?

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Ephesians 2:8-9