“Grace” is a theme that is very dear to Christians. It is a concept that runs all over the Scripture. In the New Testament, all of Paul’s thirteen letters begin with the greeting “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2; Gal 1:3; Eph 1:2; Phil 1:2; Col 1:2; 1 Thes 1:1; 2 Thes 1:2; 1 Tim 1:2; 2 Tim 1:2; Titus 1:4; Phile 1:3). Ephesians 1:6 tells us that God has freely given us grace through Christ. 2 Corinthians 12:9 promises us that God’s grace is sufficient for us in our weaknesses. The best passage on grace is probably Romans 5:6-8:
“At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Even today, the prominence of the concept of grace is demonstrated by the fact that the song “Amazing Grace” is one of the most enduring hymns of all time. I have played it in different beats and music genre. People just love the song. People can sing it from memory. As much as it is a theme sang in songs, it is also a theme that writers and poets write about. Philip Yancey’s book entitled What’s so Amazing about Grace is a top-seller. If you haven’t read it, make that your goal before Christmas.
But what is grace, and why is it so fundamental in our Christian life? Grace literally means “unmerited or undeserved favour.” It is a loving gift, the gift of love, bestowed by God upon a person or people.[1] It is a divine favour or gift freely given to anyone without prior conditions or required merits. This is radical, because it contradicts with our human sense of equality and justice. Whereas humanity thinks in terms of equal exchange or reciprocal giving as the proper norm (which can be called a mathematical logico-causal reciprocity), the concept of grace says that one is given a favour or a gift undeservedly. This conflict between the human mind concerning equal exchange and the mind of God concerning free grace is vividly pictured in Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16. The story tells us that a landowner went out to look for workers in his vineyard and found people at different hours of the day. Some of them worked for only an hour, while the others worked from morning till sundown, but the landowner gave them equal wages. Of course, even today, if this happened, the people who came in early would have complained. But God’s response would be unchanged: “Don’t I have the right to do what I want to do with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” In terms of our salvation, so what if the two-day old Christian gets the same size of mansion as the minister who served 50 years in the church? Instead of jealousy, shouldn’t the genuine Christian be happy that his brother has been blessed?
Now, if grace is truly given to us without prior conditions, and is a divine favour given lavishly and sparingly to us, then wouldn’t it be an oxymoron or a contradiction to entitle my sermon “costly grace?” Or to put the question more succinctly, if grace is freely given, why should it be called “costly?”
GRACE IS COSTLY BECAUSE IT COSTED GOD EVERYTHING
To make the point succinct, grace is infinitely costly because it is grace through the blood of Christ. It is grace given at the cost of suffering, humiliation, scorn and death. It is costly because it refers to the death of the Innocent One – like a lamb led to the slaughter (Isa 53:7). Grace is costly because it is primarily about God making the ultimate sacrifice.
Christianity through the ages has often understood grace as a kind of substance or a thing that comes out of a storehouse, given to people by God at some points. Sometimes it is considered a force, influence, or endowment of power given by God to people in order to fulfill certain particular functions. While these understandings can be truly gleaned from the Bible, they are not the ultimate definition of grace. Grace at its deepest level of meaning refers to the fact that God is a generous God who gives nothing else than himself. Consider this: while God truly blesses and give other things, his greatest gift of all is his Gift of Himself. And we miss the whole point if in our prayers all we ask is his blessing of health, wisdom, and wealth. Has not the Psalmist instructed us to “delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (37:4)? Similar lesson abound in Scripture:
“Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you” (Ps 9:10)
“The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing” (Ps 34:10)
“The poor will see and be glad— you who seek God, may your hearts live!” (Ps 69:32)
“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt 6:33)
God’s gift of Himself is greater than anything in the world. His gift of Himself in relationship and intimate fellowship is his grace. But as we all know, relationship with God can never be restored unless sin is dealt with. So our God did not only offer himself in relationship, but has made the way for the relationship to be restored. And he has done this at a great expense. God in Christ “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Phil 2:7-8). The purpose of this willful condescension, the Apostle Paul wrote, is that in Christ, “we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us” (Eph 1:7-8). For our sake he became man; for our sake he suffered; for our sake he died; and “for [our] sakes he became poor, so that [we] through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). What we are enjoying now as forgiven sinners have been paid at a great price.
GRACE IS COSTLY BECAUSE IT COSTS US NOTHING
You must be thinking that I have gone nuts, and I am contradicting myself. How could something be costly if it costs nothing? But consider this: it is precisely because it costs nothing that it costs everything. Because grace costs nothing and it is free, it lays an axe to the root of all our cherished possessions, achievements and amount of good work. Grace disturbs human self-centredness, for in Christ, God accomplished for us what we want to accomplish for ourselves. Grace exposes the hollowness of the foundations upon which humanity tries to establish himself before God. When we go back to Karl Barth’s distinction between religion and Christianity (religion as humanity reaching out to God and Christianity as God reaching out to humanity), then what is asked of us is to stop being religious. This is because it is in religion that humanity’s self-justification reaches its supreme and most subtle form. Grace abolishes human religion. Since in and through Christ a way has already been opened up into the presence of God for worship in spirit and truth, all previous religion, or religion outside of Christ, is displaced and robbed of any claim to truth. Grace reveals in fact that religion can be the supreme form taken by human sin – and is in fact a form of atheism. That applies no less to the Christian religion in so far as it becomes independent and autonomous, because it may be considered as an attempt on the part of man to secure and entrench himself before God. Grace calls for a radical self-renunciation, a displacement of the self by Jesus Christ.[2]
The gospel of grace is very difficult for us, for it is costly. It takes away from under our feet the very ground on which we stand, and the free will which we as human beings cherish so dearly becomes exposed as a subtle form of self-will. It is the costliness of unconditional grace that people resent. Martin Luther once said that when he preached justification by faith alone, people responded to it like a cow staring at a new gate, but when he preached justification by grace alone, it provoked tumults. This is the reaction of people who want to assert themselves—people who think they are mighty and capable of making a contribution to their salvation.[3]
Because grace is free, we are asked to give up our futile attempts to gain God’s favour. It asks us to stop thinking that we can bribe God with our prayers, fasting, and good works. It asks us to abandon a false sense of assurance that because I am doing this or have done this that God has no choice but to bless us. It asks us to abandon an understanding of an Amazonic or Ebay God whom we can coerce to send us gifts when we pay a bit of this and that.
Grace costs us nothing therefore it costs us everything because the graciousness of grace costs us our selves. With this I mean that it is human nature that we want to control our future—that we want to be involved with what happens to us. We want to be in-charge. This is the attitude and mentality that is promoted by William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
But grace tells us that we are actually not meant to be the masters of our fates and the captains of our souls. Grace attacks the mindset that we have equal power with God in terms of shaping the future. The concept of grace asks us to let go of our own futures and put everything in God’s hands. It is true that in relation to our dealings with the world and our neighbours, we shape what happens to us to a certain degree. But in relation to God, grace tells us that none of what we do can either merit or demerit us God’s favour. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt 5:45). If grace is truly free and is given even to the undeserving, then why don’t we just trust God and always remember that we are in God’s hands? Did we not read that God’s grace is sufficient for us in our weaknesses (2 Cor 12:9).
You know what is even more painful? Grace tells us that our good works and righteous acts, in front of God, are nothing but filthy rags, as the prophet Isaiah wrote (64:6). We are accustomed to clinging to our good works and works of service as assurances that we will be graced and blessed, but the gratuity of grace asks us to think of our good works as nothing. You see, because grace is free, it costs us what is very dear to us: our own self-will, self-assertion and self-conceived capabilities to please God. Paul stressed that “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8).
CONCLUSIONS
Accepting grace is both easy and difficult. It is easy because it is so utterly free, and yet so difficult because its absolute freeness devalues man-made moral and religious currency which we have minted. It is costly because it asks us to abandon our self-reliance and logic. Grace is costly because it asks us to stop looking at what we can do and focus on what God has done already. Grace is costly because it asks us to consider our valued achievements and contributions to be nothing. Grace is costly because it asks us not to think too much or think like an adult. Rather it asks us to remain childlike, trusting in our heavenly Father alone, devoid of sophistication and pretentious self-understanding, where we let Christ be everything, making him shoulder our burdens and bear away our sins, and where we let the Holy Spirit be our sole Guide, Counselor and Teacher.
“And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.” (1 Peter 5:10-11)
[1] Randall Balmer, “Grace,” in Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism (Waco, TX: Baylor U. Press, 2004), 298. Balmer wrongly goes on to say, however, that “This gift of grace from God is different from the gift of life, for it is bestowed freely upon those whom God chooses, most often those who have demonstrated their understanding of their sinful state and submitted themselves to God’s mercy.”
[2] T. F. Torrance, “Cheap and Costly Grace,” in God and Rationality (London: Oxford U. Press, 1971), 56-85.
[3] T. F. Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 35-38.
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