It has been a while, but I hope to write more regularly about what God is doing in my heart and life. One of the things I love about the body of Christ is that we have the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14). We have a fellowship, a deep and purpose-filled relationship with the very Spirit of God. This Holy Spirit resides within each and every one of us and that means every believer is connected no matter where we are emotionally or geographically. This has been a truth that never ceases to astound me. The same Holy Spirit that is sanctifying you to God (Rom 15:16; 2 Thess. 2:13) is the same Holy Spirit that is working in me.
This is why I love to hear people’s testimony of what God is doing in their midst. I love to hear about the little things people experience that enable them to see God’s fingerprints on their life. For instance, it moves me to hear of the one who suffers from depression experiencing an answered prayer through merely waking up in the morning and knowing it’s a new day or when a person tells their story of genuine trust in the Lord despite suffering and odds. I love to hear the testimony of God’s perfect timing revealed or even the experience of a shapeless form, piece of steel or unhealthy greenery suffering the slow and painful experience of molding, shaping and pruning from a loving father. Hearing the stories of how God is moving and working in lives of the people around me lets me know that God is moving in real and unique ways. It reminds me in the time of waiting to keep waiting because God is near. The same Holy Spirit that is working in you is working in me.
One of the major things on my mind lately is the idea of grace-driven effort. I read the Village Church Pastor’s Blog entitled Dwell Deep as often as I can. Within this blog, the Village Church Pastor, Matt Chandler has been tackling this idea of Grace-Driven Effort. This is a topic that has always been interesting to me. For some time, there has been a lingering trend of thought in the Christian Community that magnifies grace in our personal walks with Christ over obedience or holiness. Rightly so because we would not even have the capacity for obedience or holiness without the grace we receive, "that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). But it is more like the unbalanced product of only appreciating one side of something. This kind of idea that Jesus only had one thing to say, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). Somehow as long as you are doing this thing, nothing else matters; a kind of anti-fundamentalist disposition. I am not sure if this comes from a seeker movement or the post-modern movement or maybe just a response from college students graduating from youth groups that taught them following Christ equaled behavior modification; i.e., not seeing rated R movies or cussing. So it seems that the pendulum has swung from holiness movements to grace movements and has hung there for some time.
I fell headlong into this movement because somewhere along the way I found myself as that college student who was neck-deep in self-righteousness. I was coming to terms with the fact that I just could not be holy on my own. I could not clean myself up enough to please God. No matter how hard I tried, I still came back dirty.
So began my first encounter with grace; a pinnacle moment when my life was shouting, “I just can’t do this anymore!” and God was responding with, “Thank you Captain Obvious! Finally! Now maybe I can accomplish something in your life.” So began a long journey of living by grace. I began with short prayers in difficult moments when the temptation arose to be holy out of my flesh. “God help me! Give me the strength, the fire, and the will to follow you.” Little by little, I watched as the more God enabled me to spend time in prayer and in study the more strength and desire I had to follow Him. I would only act when I felt the desire from God, a shaky practice at best, but nevertheless, one given by the Lord to lead me uniquely and personally.
For days, months and years I resisted any spiritual discipline for the sake of not falling into the trap of self-righteousness or legalism. If you add that to a guy with a predisposition to Calvinistic theology, you get one heck of a fatalist. I became a dedicated podcaster of Matt Chandler, listening to multiple sermons a week that fiercely proclaimed the gospel and how it had been ripped away and twisted by fundamental moral deists. Yet, I always knew somewhere deep inside that I was ignoring giant pieces of scripture; such as, the letters of Peter, James, and most of Paul’s outside of Romans 9. Peter’s words haunted me with his quote of the Levitical text, “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16).
I wondered if anyone knew how to reconcile these passages of scripture to the gospel and rescue me from fatalism. My answer actually came from the gospels; from the words of Jesus to be exact. In Matthew 5:17-20. Jesus blindsided me with His words in verse 20, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Wow! For so long I had got it wrong. Jesus did not want his disciples to be the opposite of the Pharisees; He wanted them to be MORE than the Pharisees. In verse 17-18, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them…not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” It is not that Jesus did not want us to live righteous lives. He does not want us to live self-righteous lives, but live life with a righteousness that comes from God. When that happens our lives are characterized by love; His love. Jesus is the only one that can accomplish the fulfillment of the law and enable us to live righteous lives, so it is in fact by grace that we follow Christ. But then Paul finishes the thought in Romans 6:15-18 when he says, “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means…you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”
We must pursue the things of God and the commands of Christ with grace-driven effort. Ephesians 2:8 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” But it is by that same grace that we have been given “every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Eph. 1:3) and “an incomparably great power for us who believe” (Eph. 1:19). The same power that raised Christ from the dead is living in us through the Holy Spirit giving us the ability to choose the things of God and to live the life of obedience and holiness that Jesus calls us to.
In John 15, Jesus says, “I am the vine; you (disciples/followers) are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” It seems that one can gather from this passage that if your life is not bearing fruit, you are in danger of being thrown into the fire. This passage always made me wonder if it was possible to lose your salvation, but I believe Jesus is talking about people who confess Christ as their Lord, yet there is no true heart-change signifying that they were not truly saved to begin with. Is it not possible for weeds to grow in your flower bed? Some of those weeds even bud and produce a flower, but that doesn’t make them flowers. They are still weeds.
Jesus confronts this issue in John chapter 6 when many disciples leave Him after hearing a hard teaching. In verses 63-65, 70, Jesus says, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say that, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled Him….have I not chosen you, The Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!”
We have to walk a fine line as followers of Christ. On one hand we cannot to do anything without grace. But if we have grace and do nothing with it, then we are still found without grace. The only way to pursue Christ is to pray for God’s strength and mercy to enable you to follow Him and to utilize His Holy Spirit to guide you, teach you, and sanctify you. But once the Holy Spirit convicts us and gives the knowledge, wisdom, and ability for the task, the ball is in our court. Jesus separates the true disciples from the weeds when he challenges us in John 14:15 when He says, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”
“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, and obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.” – D.A. Carson
