Why We Want Grace to Be a Package

There is no doubt the New Testament delivers a robust message of grace. There is also no doubt the New Testament warns against packaging grace in a message of entitlement. This mistake begins with a misunderstanding of the angelic message to the shepherds – “Peace on earth, good will toward men.” It reaches its most aberrant distortion in the twin questions, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” and “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” Thus, many churches promote grace as a harbor for imagined carnal spirituality. After all, that is what the customer wants; and he wants it so he can feel shrewd in getting a good deal or offended when the contents of the package do not fulfill his expectations.

Many Christians have forgotten or do not want to remember, in our consumer culture, the foundation on which the truth of grace is built. Grace is neither a product nor a package. It has nothing to do with the entitlement one claims when he has bought a commodity. It is, instead, the result of one of the most scorned of God's offered gifts. When that gift is presented, grace will predictably be rejected or distorted; or it will become an atmosphere of exuberant praise and an incentive to purity in those who receive it.

That most scorned of God's gifts is – mercy.

In his allegory, The Holy War, John Bunyan described the counsel of Diabolus to citizens of the fallen city of Mansoul.

My shield is unbelief, or calling into question…all the sayings that speak of the judgment that Shaddai has appointed for wicked men…. If he speaks of mercy, care not for it….

Another part…of my…armor is a… prayerless spirit that scorns to cry for mercy, let the danger be ever so great.

Note: This quote from The Holy War is found near the end of Chapter Three. If you find Bunyan's seventeenth century English difficult you might especially enjoy Ethel Barrett's paraphrase in text or recorded narrative. 

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The Gospel Is Not A Product

There is no excuse for poor preaching. Neither is there any justification for an unfriendly or self-righteous church. However, the reason is not what we might think in today’s culture. Good preaching and a friendly, humble church atmosphere are not “tools” for church growth. They are not packaging for selling a product to a consumer base.

This matter of packaging is more important and sinister than we want to realize. If we do realize it we also realize our vulnerability and the hypocrisy of trying to play the game. A friend who works for a major corporation said something like this not long ago, “Our company had a reputation for making a reliable product. Now the name of the game is how to cut costs in production so we can make money on the packaging.” A friend in another country described a man who raised carrots not for the sake of selling carrots but as a means of selling the packages which contained them. That's where the money was.

The driving force behind good preaching is not the building up of a clientele or the creation of a monument. The driving force is the mercy of God received by the preacher which makes him want to express God and God’s Word in its full, dynamic reality. His is the heart described by one who said he was “a dying man preaching to dying men."

The driving force behind a friendly and humble congregation is not to persuade customers that they have a good product. It is, rather, the natural atmosphere of individuals who have received God’s mercy and, with it, God’s Spirit which creates in them a stand-on-this-hill dedication to truth, a logical attachment to each other as mercy receivers and an empathy for those who need the same mercy even though most may not want it.

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Of Demagogues and Such

The preceding vignettes sought to illustrate self control and self denial as they relate to truth and personal preference. They might not have set well in the era of my childhood - the waning years of the old fundamentalist consensus. 

That era, along with its present day representatives, is indicted as the time when not dancing, not drinking, not playing cards, not going to movies and other such things comprised the good Christian’s resume. It is disparaged as a time of hypocritical (c)hristianity driven by demagogues who built spiritual empires and held their followers to rigid codes while they themselves either engaged in sin or turned a blind eye to it among their friends.   

As I move toward the final propositions of this Withered Grape series on self control and self denial, I need to make an uncomfortable observation. Demagogues lurk wherever a movement exists, and freedomists are not exempt. Like the legalistic movements of old, freedomism has its power brokers jockeying for position. What makes today’s demagogues indistinguishable from good leaders is what made their ilk difficult to see among good fundamentalists. And, yes, there were many good ones.

The demagogue’s message resonates. They are articulate. It is only later their behind-the-scenes motivations are discovered and become representative of the movement as a whole. Freedomists beware, especially if you are moving deeper into the bowels of your movement and its self-styled liberators. Your day is coming; and it may be your children and grandchildren who will struggle with the disillusionment of your era. 

What to do? Apply the same critique to the clichés, proof texts, manners and failures to leaders of your movement that you apply to the other. Let your expectations weigh in the same on both sides of the chasm.  And, above all, ask yourself what scriptures you avoid in rigidly embracing your system of thought.

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I Believe You Will Not Violate Me

Violation is the most reprehensible betrayal of trust and the most damning to those who do it.

To trust that you will not hurt your friend unnecessarily understands that intervention pain can actually be a part of friendship. To believe you will not own him or her is more serious. Ownership is God’s prerogative. The belief that you will not knowingly mislead him or her requires your willingness to distinguish between truth and your opinion based on truth. All of these trust issues include the possibility of failure and room for repentance, confession and restoration of trust. In fact, the process of working through such failures can reinforce true brotherly love. Jesus modeled this in response to Peter’s failure.

Violation, on the other hand, is the deliberate ensnarement of a friend. It defiles his personhood; it minimalizes her self-worth and self-respect; and it can harden their heart toward Christ and the Gospel.

Violation may involve luring a friend into a sexual experience or using sexual satisfaction as leverage for control in a marriage. It can be sordid manipulation – maneuvering him into a position where you control him under threat of exposure. It is the very core of both emotional and physical abuse. It is the heart of a bully and it is the trap of every cult which dominates its followers with a self-proclaimed power to withhold salvation.

The person who can commit such criminal behavior toward one who trusts him as a friend has already abandoned major absolute self denial categories in his life. Those areas will be found in orientations against which he has ceased to do battle. These he knowingly covers with enough of a persuasive veneer to satisfy a community without boundaries. Sadly, the church, which should be the last place he would go undetected and accommodated, can, through a false understanding of love, be his safest haven.

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I Believe You Will Not Mislead Me

I believe you will not hurt me unnecessarily, and you will not own me.

Such is the character of friendship among those who trust Christ. For the person who is trusted, the self-control and self-denial implications are clear. This faith of friendship also says:

I believe you will not mislead me.

Well, of course not. We’re Christians. We’re about Truth. We would not mislead. Yet, many a conscience has been derailed by promoting some convictions (worthwhile or otherwise) as biblically revealed mandates.

Revealed mandates are express statements from Scripture which can be clearly understood with basic principles of language and context. They have to be manhandled in order to mean what they do not say.

There are, however, revealed statements which are understood differently because of presuppositions which affect interpretation. These differences are important enough for groups to form around them. The interpretation starting point of some of us leads us to understand that baptism is for believers and by immersion. Others agree with us on the Truth of the person and work of Jesus Christ but part of their interpretation starting point lets them practice baptism differently. Conscience cannot ignore the matter. Jesus’ commission to baptize is inescapable. So, as we gather with people with whom we agree, we must remember the biblical mandate concerning our attitudes toward all brothers in the faith. 

Then there are personal applications inferred from revealed mandates. We clearly are told to develop renewed minds. Some may infer from that the need to eliminate television, but they mislead if they press for a church policy or make removal of the television a prerequisite for friendship. On the other hand it is also misleading to infer that having a television is what freedom in grace is about. 

It is possible to cause a person's conscience to stumble by well-meaning misrepresentations of Scripture as well as by maliciously contradicting Scripture.

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I Believe You Will Not Own Me

The “kiss” of brotherly-love carries with it vulnerability to pain. Unspoken but very much present is the faith that says I believe you will not hurt me unnecessarily. It also carries with it the vulnerability of becoming imprisoned. Therefore, friendship faith says, I believe you will not own me.

This is a tricky one. The human heart longs to be owned; but there is a difference between this ownership and that of imprisonment. It is a belonging. Even in the marriage covenant where a man and woman can say they “belong” to each other, it is not in the sense of being each other's property. 

God alone can claim the right of ownership. He alone can authentically dedicate himself to developing us in ways that harmonize with how he has made us as individuals with our own story. Yes, his objective is for his glory; but his glory in a believer's life is seen in an ultimate outcome which will also be for our own good. Each of us will be a unique and delightful, sin free, reflection of Jesus Christ. This is why personal, immanent friendship can be attributed to the sovereign, transcendent God. Of all our friends, he is the one who qualifies as the friend who sticks closer than a brother. 

True friendships launch. Whether deep friendships for life or only for a certain period of time, God’s objective is for each friend to move the other forward in their walk with Him. Brotherly love, therefore, will not maneuver a friend into dependency or codependency. 

Churches as well as individuals must tread this path carefully or making disciples will become a matter of organizational control and advancement rather than individual growth in grace. 

Parents, also, must be careful. Fondness of being needed by their child can keep him or her bound to the nest to satisfy the "love language" of Dad and Mom. 

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Contextual Self Denial

These articles have to do with self control and the pivotal issue around which self control itself rotates. That pivotal issue is this: there are options which must be rejected. They are desirable to our own personal kingdom and in conflict with God’s kingdom. This rejection is called “self denial.”

As our focus shifts from matters of absolute self denial to the category which I call “contextual” self-denial, let me put what we have said and what we are about to say this way:

Self denial is not a “step”toward being “spiritual.” Neither is it a self-congratulatory promotion of our will. It is an outgrowth of two spiritual realities which exist in the heart of those taught by God’s Spirit to trust Christ. First, it is an outgrowth of worship. Matters of absolute self denial have especially to do with Jesus’ reiteration of the Law’s command to love God exclusively. 
  

Second, love for God, by its very nature, produces a desire to show his love to our neighbor generally and our brother and sister in the faith specifically. I say love for our neighbor generally and love for our brother in Christ specifically because there is a difference. Or there should be. Actually, it seems as though twenty-first century, western Christianity has reversed the distinction. The community of faith, in some quarters, seems to be much more loving toward those whom they want to win to Christ than toward those who have prayed the prayer. This absence of self control and its core of love-generated self-denial among professing believers seems to be a withered grape in the cluster of the Spirit's fruit. If this is the case, it casts serious doubt on the authenticity of our professed worship in spirit and in truth. It is an irony, and neither the freedomist nor the legalist has a corner on it.

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