Mugged by Mercy
When God rescued me in dramatic fashion back in 1994, I couldn't talk about His amazing grace without crying. I had recklessly and selfishly squandered every good thing God had given me and hurt those who loved me the most along the way. But God never stopped pursuing me. He was patient. He was kind. And he was passionately persistent. Even though I had been running from Him, He never stopped running for me. So when the Hound of Heaven finally tracked me down and magnificently defeated me, I was undone. Moved beyond words at His unconditional love, I couldn’t stop marveling at His mercy.
But a few months after my conversion, the same thing happened to me that happens to so many grateful converts: I got “Christianized.” The Christian Community convinced a young, impressionable me that while I ought to remain grateful for God’s work for me, it was now time to focus on my work for God. Yes, it was God's blood, sweat, and tears that “got me in”, but now it would take my blood, sweat, and tears to keep me in.
I was taught that grace was Divine assistance for the business of “real Christianity”: MY moral transformation.
Sadly, it was the Christian Community that shifted my focus from the cross to a ladder, leading me to conclude that the focal point of the Christian faith is the climb of the Christian. So, while God’s action for me was first in terms of order, it was now my action for God that was first in terms of importance.
Thankfully, it was Ephesians 1:3-14 that recaptured my heart. Those verses showed me the size and scope of God's grace in a way that shifted my focus back onto the center of Christianity: God’s amazing grace in the person of Jesus. In fact, those verses made me feel silly (and angry) that I would have ever shifted the spotlight from God's action for me to my action for Him.
These verses contain NOTHING but good news. God is the subject of EVERY verb: He does ALL of the giving and we do all of the receiving. In the face of all our doing, striving, toiling, and laboring, Ephesians 1:3-14 sings about a God who has done everything for us—from first to last—in spite of the fact that we have done nothing to earn or deserve His love.
In Greek, these verses are one long run-on sentence. The Apostle Paul is so overwhelmed by the sheer greatness and grandeur—size and sweetness—of God’s amazing grace that he doesn’t even take a breath. He writes in a state of controlled ecstasy about the mugging nature of God’s love. He goes on and on and on and on about the blessings we have, not because of what we have done for Jesus, but because of what Jesus has done for us. We have been blessed, he writes, “in Christ with EVERY spiritual blessing."
He makes it clear that God the Father appointed our rescue (v.3-6), God the Son accomplished our rescue (v. 7-12), and God the Spirit applied our rescue (v. 13-14). We have been chosen, graced, redeemed, rescued, adopted, and sealed forever in Christ. And we are all of these things solely and exclusively because of Jesus’ sacrifice and obedience, not ours.
So when they tell you that real Christianity is about you—your work, your holiness, your performance, your progress, your morality, your transformation, your devotion, or your anything—remember: the foundation of Christianity is God’s faithfulness, not ours. I am alive today, not because in my darkest moments I held on to God. I am alive today because in my darkest moments, God never let go of me. I’ve abandoned God more times than I can count over the course of my life, but He has never once abandoned me. And He never will.
The Christian message is not about the wood of a ladder so that we can climb up to God, but the wood of the cross on which God came down to us. After all, Christianity is not for good and strong people who try hard; it’s for bad and weak people who finally give up and throw themselves on the forgiving mercy of Jesus who has already done everything needed “to the praise of His glorious grace.”
It. Is. Finished.
