Life-long Grace (Part II)
PART II
The Pattern of Grace
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
(John 14:18,19)
The way you meet Jesus for the first time is also the way he deepens your relationship with him. He came to you, after all. He made his grace real in your life. He will continue to. He will not leave you alone. God gave his own Spirit to live in us as a guarantee of his grace (Acts 2 tells the story). The Helper and Comforter, as Jesus calls him, prays for us, gives gifts to us, and always, always brings us back to Jesus (John 14:26). The Holy Spirit uses Scripture, other Christians, and anything else lying around the house to hit grace home to us.
Christians grow into grace. We grow into what it meant when Jesus saved us. I have been a Christian my whole life. Sadly, that means I have done all of my sinning as a Christian too. Yet the mark of a Christian is not that I’m better than others (St. Paul himself said he was the worst! I agree… he was. But I’m next! Seriously, I am more aware of my sin now than ever. It’s still very present in all my patterns, triggers, doubts, and fears. Yet I am also more aware that I am loved and forgiven there too). The mark of a Christian is that she is forgiven. Christians grow their testimony of God’s grace in their life—how Jesus intervened, shed light, and loved over and over. We live the cross.
The Holy Spirit applies what Jesus did on the cross to us again and again. The theologian Martin Luther described the pattern in a Christian this way: A Christian, he says, “is at one and the same time a sinner and a righteous person. He is a sinner in fact, but a righteous person by the sure reckoning and promise of God that he will continue to deliver him from sin until he has completely cured him. And so he is totally healthy in hope but is a sinner in fact. He has the beginning of righteousness, and so always continues more and more to seek it, while realizing that he is always unrighteous.”[1]
God acts upon us, again and again, to uncover where we are hidden, mad, and in pain. Jesus exposes the darkness and makes it into light (Ephesians 5:13, 14). He magnifies pain in order to forgive, comfort, and bring new life (Read more in Magnifying Pain). He is killing everything in us that is not in him. A Christian is now “in Christ.” Author (and Anglican!) C.S. Lewis describes how Christ frees our genuine identity: “To be in Christ is to be ‘very much more themselves than they were before.’”[2]
God’s grace makes you, you. He puts you in Christ where you come alive, even though you die. We need him as much as when we first meet him as when we take our last breath on earth. We need his grace our whole life long. Every life stage shows us challenges, curveballs, surprises. None of us get through our lives and think, wow, I knew what I was doing all along! God promises us that he saved us once and for all and he makes that real to us every day in every need.
[1] Wilhelm Pauk, ed, Luther: Lectures on Romans. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knoxville Press, 2006), E-book edition, p. 127 <https://nazlimoloudi.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/the-library-of-christian-classics-1961-luther-lectures-on-romans.pdf>.
[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Chrsistianity (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 161.
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