Grace & Truth @ Me
by Jared Johnson
“The Last Best Word”
I don’t know that there will be, for me, this side of eternity, a better discussion of grace. Philip Yancey’s opening chapter of What’s So Amazing About Grace?, just by its mere title, says so much.
Grabbing a copy of his book is worth a purchase just for those 8 short pages.
New https://philipyancey.com/books/whats-so-amazing-about-grace-2023/
Used https://www.hpb.com/whats-so-amazing-about-grace/M-3476033-T.html
If you never read it, please close this blog now, get his book, and read it instead of this.
Obviously I can’t quote his entire chapter but it’s just too good not to put some of it here!
As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open and try to stuff my thoughts inside. I’ve found that words tend to spoil over the years, like old meat. Their meaning rots away. Consider “charity.” When King James translators contemplated the highest form of love they settled on “charity” to convey it. Now, we hear the scornful protest, “I don’t want your charity!”
Perhaps I keep circling back to “grace” because it’s one grand theological word that hasn’t spoiled. I call it “the last best word” because every English usage I can find retains some of its original glory. Like a vast aquifer, the word underlies our proud civilization, reminding us that good things come not from our own efforts, but instead come from the grace of God. Even now, despite our secular drift, taproots still stretch toward grace. Just listen to how we use the word.
...
I dare not – and the danger is very real – write an ungracious book about grace. ... Grace doesn’t offer an easy subject for a writer. To borrow EB White’s comment about humor, “[Grace] can be dissected, like a frog, but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” I just read a 13-page treatise on grace, which has cured me of any desire to dissect grace and display its innards. ...
For these reasons, I'll rely more on story than syllogism.
I’d far rather convey grace than explain it.
It just gets better from there.
All through this month, we had great content about living in tension between grace and truth. Of course, for our perfectly good Father, there is no tension. He feels heartbreak over us, but there’s no “balancing a teeter-totter" tension for Him between grace & truth as there is for us.
Much of our thinking-out-loud this month has been an attempt to rightly balance grace for others with truth for others. But that ignores 100% of grace-and-truth for me. I need grace & truth as much as any “they.”
It’s our human default to hear “grace & truth” and, in our infinite capacity for hypocrisy, unthinkingly bring grace up close and personal to us, while pushing truth out against others. We operate in a “grace for me, truth for thee” mentality all too often.
We’d probably get a long way to balancing well between them, though, if we deliberately reverse our default. If we “make room for others’ faults” (Eph. 4.2, Col. 3.13) in grace but reserve truth’s scalpel for ourselves, much of our felt tension dissolves.
Scripture’s most intense passage critiquing our “interior world” and how it impacts our exterior interactions is Matthew 23. If we can just set aside, for a moment, our default and defensive protest that “I’m not a Pharisee!,” quite a lot comes spilling out of Jesus’s words.
They crush people with unbearable religious demands but never lift a finger to ease the burden. (v. 4) If I pile on rules and expectations regarding “what it actually means to be a Christian,” especially unstated rules and expectations, I do this. I become a Pharisee.
Everything they do is for show. On their arms they wear extra wide prayer boxes with Scriptures inside, and they wear robes with extra long tassels. (v. 5) How much posturing do you and I do, both through overt actions and through more passive “signaling” behaviors? Doing so makes me a Pharisee.
You shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves and you don’t let others enter either. (v. 13) How often am I an obstacle to Jesus’s “the Kingdom is like...” teaching? If I subvert what Jesus said about “sowing seeds” of God’s Word by rationalizing, I slammed the door of God’s Kingdom in someone’s face. If I undercut His words about salvation for everyone, even and especially for “lazy Johnny-come-latelies” a’la Matt 20’s Parable of Vineyard Workers, I have become a hypocritical Pharisee.
Blind guides! You say it means nothing to swear “by God’s Temple,” but it’s binding to swear “by the gold in the Temple.” Blind fools! Which is more important!?... (v. 16-17) If my theology, abstract or lived, requires any red yarn and a big bulletin board, I have become a Pharisee. Nothing Jesus taught, nor anything else in Scripture, requires mental gymnastics. Imagine Jesus is indeed in my life’s center. If a nonbeliever looks at my life, do they, in fact, see Him, or is a whole mess of confusing rat’s nest “theology” blocking that view? That was how Gnostics thought – they were always chasing secret, insider knowledge, making inferences and connections that weren’t there – and neither John nor Paul had any patience for their worldview. Paul also told us our heavenly Father’s not a god of confusion but of clarity (1 Cor. 14).
You’re careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law – justice, mercy, faith. You should tithe, yes, but don’t neglect the more important things. Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel! (v. 23-24) It's so easy to major in minors. Just like ancient Israel, I already know what’s good and what God requires of me – to do what’s right, to love mercy, and to live humbly before Him (Micah 6.8). I choke down camels of injustice, callousness and expedience while continuing to manage minor behaviors that make me feel like I’m obeying.
You’re so careful to clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you’re filthy – full of greed and self-indulgence! (v. 25) You’re like whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. (v. 27) “Image management” is anti-Jesus.
You build tombs for the [truth-tellers] your ancestors killed, and you decorate monuments of the godly people your ancestors destroyed. (v. 29) Yet again, Jesus confronts performative hypocrisy. When I claim, as His hearers did in verse 30, that “I wouldn’t’a done that!,” it’s hollow nonsense. It belies that I really would have joined in with their sin. Remember Shakespeare’s “Methinks he does protest too much?” Had I been there, I would have been there. CS Lewis described “chronological snobbery.” We assume we have better understanding now than people before us did. “I wouldn’t join in with that” is chronological snobbery, assuming I know better; that I'm above-average, just like everyone else around Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Woe-Be-Gone.” Thousands followed Jesus at different times. Only 11 were with Him in an upper room at His last meal. None were with Him hours later. Despite Mel Gibson’s deeply emotional Passion portrayal of Mary weeping at her son’s scourging, there’s no biblical testimony that any of His friends were with Him during His trial, beatings, walk, and impaling. (John, Mary, etc. showed up again after He was impaled & had been hanging on His cross for some time.) Of all His thousands of followers, none were with Him on His death march. Simon from Cyrene carried Jesus’s cross, not any of His closest 11 friends. Everyone went AWOL: Pete, John, Jim (Zebedee’s son), Andy, Matt, Phil, Bart, Tom, Jim (Alphaeus’s son), Thad & Simon. The shepherd was struck, and all His sheep scattered (both Zech 13.7 & Matt 26.31). He was alone. That means, had I been there, I’d’ve been a heckler clamoring for Jesus’s crucifixion, or at best, an apathetic and cowardly bystander. In His infinite wisdom, when Jesus said these words “to Pharisees” 2,000 years ago, the shoe fits my foot, right now, today. He said this hard truth at me.
When truth comes at me, I so deeply need grace.
Both Proverbs 20.10 and 20.23 bluntly declare that God “detests double standards.” Yet we so often act in “standards for thee, but not for me” ways. We act like that regarding our chosen political parties, favorite sports teams, about our homes or jobs, with our money, how we assume others are motivated versus our own motivations, and more.
When I act that way, I’m trying, by my behavior, to negate Hebrews 4.12. God’s Word is alive, active, powerful, sharper than any blade, cutting right into my soul and spirit just like a blade divides a bone from its marrow. But when I act like “cutting truth applies to you; infinite grace applies to me,” whether consciously or not, I use His Words, His Truth, as a clumsy bludgeon. God’s Word isn’t a sledgehammer. It’s an exacting scalpel by which only He carries out divinely perfect soul surgery.
Jesus, @ me with truth that only You can bring.
Truth for me.
Grace for thee.
I’d far rather convey grace in my living than nit-pick it apart and explain it with perfectly true words.
I’ll convey grace to you if I yield to Truth working in me.
