Breaking The Chain

I might be putting the cart before the horse here but for some reason this sticks out in my mind as a good place to start.


We've all heard this dual deifiniton: Mercy is when we don't get what we deserve, Grace is when we get what we don't deserve. We deserve hell, mercy is us not receiving that punishment. Grace is getting the forgiveness we can never earn. 


We are taught, rightfully, that grace is what allows us to repent, God gives us grace! Once we repent he extends his grace to forgive us. Is that all? No. When we fall, the grace of God is there for our forgiveness. I will not contend this because it is true. I have depended on this grace of God my whole christian live. 


When we need forgiveness, BOOM, grace! 


So, that leaves an interesting conversation open. What if we abuse grace? We tend to run to a particular scripture.  Romans 5:20 - Romans 6:2

²⁰ Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, ²¹ so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 6

¹ What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? ² By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

I have often taken this scripture and explained that grace is not a pool we jump into when we feel like sinning, but instead it is the hand waiting to pull us out of the pool of sin. Once again there is no lie here. 

Another way that some look at this scripture is that our faith is a tight rope, and grace is an ever expanding safety net, we can't fall from our faith without being caught by a net of grace. Again, a beautiful thought of God's ever readiness to catch us is in our times of despair and bad decisions. 

Here is the problem, grace and forgiveness have been synonomized ( a word I made up to suggest that they have become almost synonyms, the two words being chained together and grace being used exclusively in the context of forgiveness).  

Here is where the problem enters. Although God's grace is needed for our forgiveness, grace should not be chained to forgiveness. A lot of people think of grace in relation to forgiveness. It's a safety net for when we fall, it's a way to get back in right relationship with God.  We need to break this chain. If we allow this synonamy (once again, a word I made up to suggest the words are not the same but stuck together) our view of grace may become very narrow. 

Grace has a danger of becoming an event. If grace is related only to forgiveness, then the greatest happening of grace was at our salvation, we had a giant grace event. Now we fall and jump from grace event to grace event. We come to God when we have broken through the guilt of what we have done and ask him for grace... again. 

Grace is necessary for forgiveness, however when we chain grace to forgiveness we miss out on the fullness it is supposed to be! 

I think I should stop there. Blog posts are supposed to be short. 

Describing grace is like trying to describe every raindrop in a storm. There isn't enough ink, there isn't enough paper, there aren't enough words. So, excuse me if I stumble through these posts, they are from the heart. I pray you keep coming back, this message has made my soul burn more than it has in years. Some of you might find it obvious, but for those of you who haven't stumbled across this yet, it is faith changing!

Tyson

Journey

First, thank you for coming to Rocks Are Dumb. Last week as I was vacationing in Florida I had a revelation of grace. If you follow me on twitter or facebook you would have read the status update:

"I fear that my view of grace has been horribly narrow.It's not just a means to return to good, it is the life blood of our growth in God."

I need to make a correction, it should say " It's not just a means to return to God". Either way it worked. That tweet came from a place of new discovery. I'll fill in more details later but for now I'll just say that I encountered grace as I had never encountered it before. I realized that my very definition of what I thought grace was was wrong. Well maybe not so much wrong, but as stated horribly, horribly narrow.

Rocks Are Dumb is going to be my playground as I explore exactly how deep this discovery goes.

I earnestly pray and ask that you join me on this journey. I can tell you with all confidence that this revelation has been the deepest, and most burning moment of my faith in 10 years or more. My hope is that those who haven't come to this place will discover it with me, that your faith will be strengthened as I wade through questions and realities of God's nature that seem to be to big for my soul to absorb.

Shortly after my first tweet I added this : "What is this revelation of grace? My soul can't wrap around it. Like trying to drink the ocean through a straw. I'm breathless"

Join me, comment, interact, lets wrestle with questions together. Bring a straw and your thirst and we will work together at discovering the true depth of Gods grace!

Tyson