“For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham, who is the father of all of us.”
– Romans 4:16
I hear from time to time a comment along the lines of, “I feel like I didn’t hear much preaching about grace when I was growing up.” Maybe not all of us share this sentiment, but there are enough that do share it. And I think Romans 4 has just given us an excellent reason as to why that is.
Grace is scary. That may not sound right at first, but it’s true. Grace, by its very nature, is unpredictable. It has no discernable point of origin, which means we cannot study it, predict it, and replicate it. That’s because grace means gift. A gift, by its very nature, is something that was not asked for, paid for, summoned, or earned. A gift is given because the giver is generous. Have you ever received a gift that was so generous it made you uncomfortable? Perhaps you felt you didn’t deserve the gift, or that your own generosity had now been exposed as lacking. Yes, grace is scary. We’re not sure what to do with it. A system of cost, debt, and reward makes a lot more sense to us than grace does, because grace (again, by its very nature) costs nothing; it is generated solely in the heart of the giver without provocation.
When Paul writes to the church in Rome, composed of Jewish Christians and gentile Christians, a question lingers over the church: what role does Jewish law (called Torah) play in our faith? Are things like sabbath, circumcision, and a kosher diet required to qualify for membership in the Church? The Jewish Christians in Rome would like the answer to be yes, and therefore their gentile brothers and sister ought to start following the Torah as well. This isn’t a silly question, since these Jewish believers sit upon a rich history of being obedient to God through observing Torah teachings and rules. Of course they’re asking questions like this.
But if Torah is the barrier to entry for membership in the Church, there’s a big problem: what happens to grace? If belonging to God and his family, from Abraham all the way to the Church, is dependent on our ability to follow a set of religious regulations, then we’re trying to accomplish on our own what is actually meant to be a gift, not asked for, paid for, summoned, or earned. The promise that we would belong to God now and forever must depend on faith (Christ’s faithfulness stirring up faithful living from us) so that it would all rest on grace, on God’s astonishing generosity toward us. We belong to God now and forever because it’s what God wants, what God has orchestrated. Too much emphasis on rule-following will make us forget that.
Yes, grace is scary. Grace doesn’t keep score, and we like to keep score. We like to have a way of measuring how righteous we are and how righteous our neighbor is. But grace, by its very nature, is impossible to measure, which means we have to stop measuring each other’s righteousness and instead love one another as fellow recipients of the astonishing gift of belonging to God because God wants to belong to us. The grace of God floods the Church even though we didn’t summon it and can’t measure it. It scares us, but if we respond to it with astonished gratitude, it will scare us less and less.
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