Give Me Grace or Give Me Death
Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
2011 was a year of new beginnings. The Keller clan began their mass exodus from southern Oregon, north bound, to what I affectionately called the land of milk and honey. Ie Portland.
The one bummer about leaving my hometown was leaving the first healthy, vibrant, broken, and loving church community I ever belonged to. It was a group of late teens to late twenty somethings, gathering and arguing and crying and leaning on each other in the burgeoning years of adulthood and self actualization. It felt like a spiritual home for a spiritually homeless young adult.
Yet there I was, in the hippest of the hip spots in the PNW, arriving at an old school cathedral church in downtown Rip City, surrounded by dozens of GQ models. I mean congregants.
One of the pastors approached me, who I wasn’t sure was a pastor at the time. First words out of his mouth?
“I love your long hair.”
Looking back at him, he was a shorter, trendy Michael Fassbender. Black on black vans, tight but not too tight pants, and a slick, flowy monotone black shirt.
If this super cool guy dug my long hair, you sure bet I was definitely fine being the “long hair, don’t care” dude at this merry gathering of young adults. I was relieved to be honest. I really needed to fit in. I isolate if I don’t.
It was a bummer, then, to be approached by another long hair don’t care fellow. He stole my identity and role already. But then he asked “do you listen to metal?”
You bet I did that too. Fast forward a few hours and we were en route to a pub. I was twenty at the same, far removed from high functioning alcoholism. Several people were there, several people I never met because they didn’t approach me about my hair or music taste. But one brunette with brunette eyes stood out to me. Yet that’s another story for another time.
Two weeks later, I met Bernie and noticed his outdated not-that-hip We Came as Romans shirt. He also listened to that metal music. And he guessed I liked the band before I asked him about it because of my long locks.
I love turning catchy adages or slogans to make click baity titles for writing. It’s satisfying to use a common expression, tweak a word, sometimes even a tense, and have an entirely new thought to explore and dive into. Further, it’s interesting to explore the origins of things we say often but have no idea of their original meaning. Just Google “the rule of thumb” to grasp what I’m talking about.
Give me liberty or death is more American than apple pie. We cherish our freedom in the US. It’s actually an idol. Another essay, another time.
But I really love my freedom to be. I am 100% red, white, and blue in this way. Liberty looks good on me (I think).
Yet we live in a world where a lot of people aren’t free. Most of the clothes we wear are made by those who aren’t free. Only 150 years ago an entire demographic of people here in the states were not free. And if we press just a little further, and think just a little deeper, many of those around us are not free.
Enslaved to shame, to workaholism, to drugs, to trauma, to poverty, to alcohol, to porn, to you-fill-in-the-blank.
We pride ourselves for caring a lot about freedom, but it seems we care mainly about our own freedom and not the freedom of our neighbors.
So what can those who are enslaved, literally or figuratively, with actual chains or spiritual chains, do to become free? And how can those who are free help those who are stuck in bondage?
Hanging out with Bernie was easy. A few conversations beyond We Came as Romans I discovered his love for Lord of the Rings. He collected swords for crying out loud. And he gave me an inside scoop on that brunette with brunette eyes.
But two months later I didn’t see him. I was getting concerned. He always went to The Bridge on Wednesday. I chatted with him when I had to “go to the bathroom” during the loathsome talk to your neighbor portion of Sunday service.
I texted him and got no reply. He was one of a several folks where I got no answer. I was starting to see how impossible it seems at times to make friends in a big city.
Yet I did get a reply. A few days later. It just said, “can I call?”
I texted immediately “of course.” On the other end he was already a few minutes into a sob. He had slept with his long-term platonic but maybe something more friend Sarah. He had talked about his love for her many a time, describing how he was 80% sure she didn’t reciprocate.
The 20% lucked out. But she took the test. And came back pregnant.
He had reached out to other guys he knew in the area. They all replied with the same sentiment.
“You shouldn’t be sleeping with her. Christians aren’t supposed to have sex before marriage.”
Sage wisdom. It’s like telling an elementary school aged kid who missed the game winning basketball shot that he should’ve made it instead.
I was stunned. Not only is that short sighted it’s also a deficit of empathy. Not only is it adding insult to injury, it’s adding salt to that exact wound. Not only is it an entirely religious answer, it is wildly unbiblical.
It is completely lacking grace.
The word grace gets thrown around a lot, like love, but that doesn’t mean we should use it any less or reevaluate whether we know what it really means for our increasingly graceless culture.
Growing up grace was all about how God wasn’t mad at me even though He had every right to be. Like I was a misbehaved puppy and He was a temperamental dog trainer who fortunately was feeling nice to me (but mean to others).
No preacher ever said it like that but that’s how I internalized the word whenever anyone used it. Grace lost its luster when it was all about how great God was and how terrible I am.
Disclaimer: I am not saying we are not sinful. I am not saying Jesus died for perfect saints. I am not saying we deserve God’s lavish goodness toward us.
However, why would God extend grace to “wretches?” What is God’s posture toward His adopted kids if He sent his “paternal” Son to die on their behalf? What sort of kingdom is this King promoting where the last are always first, and the first are always last?
Let’s ask Father Brennan for some guidance.
I really felt for Bernie. Other people close to me had experienced the shame grenade of “well you shouldn’t have done that.” I wasn’t without a lot of purity blunders myself. To be honest, it didn’t seem like I was any authority of how to be a pure guy.
I wasn’t quite sure what to tell him, only that I wanted him to know God was still with him and still loved him.
“God can still work this for good. He always finds ways to be redemptive, and He always gives grace to the humble. Even if you don’t feel like He loves you right now, He always has and always will.”
After my sloppy sermonette, Bernie sighed. A few seconds later he asked, “you must really love Brennan Manning.”
“Brennan who?”
“Brennan Manning.”
I inaudibly shrugged through the phone.
“You don’t know who Brennan Manning is?!?”
Weeks later I was at Powell’s independent bookstore. Another term for heaven. I saw an old, tattered copy of The Ragamuffin Gospel. I had no idea who a Ragamuffin was, but the tagline whizzed by my doubting mind and straight to my insecure heart.
“Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-up, and Burnt Out.”
My soul whispered “woah.”
I think I read it in three days, tops. The guy wrote with such absurd vulnerability and raw pointedness that I couldn’t put the book down even if I wanted to. Every other Christian book I read before then did nothing for me (sorry, just being real). It was all about do this and do that. Think this and think that. Just try harder and God will reward you. God helps those who help themselves. That sort of thing.
But this guy was saying things like “my deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it” and “I have been seized by the power of a great affection.”
This God he described was reckless in His love, unyielding with His compassion, firmly rooted in His grace. The super good feeling about Jesus I first had when I was five years old came back.
Finally, God felt like God again.
This is what God’s grace does to spiritually exhausted souls. Jesus wasn’t speaking in hyperbole when He said His yoke was easy. He didn’t have a duplicitous meaning when He taught us to remain in the vine as His branches.
But how quick are we to reflect on the grace of God as if it were an afterthought? An elementary, simple truth that we’ve graduated from? How often do we neglect God’s gracious posture toward us when we are ruthlessly critical of ourselves? When we dismiss the plight of others and just wish they’d move on?
In my life, it’s been a journey to be a gracious and kind person. When I was in high school, in college, and even a few years after that, I wasn’t very gracious or very kind. I was moody, critical, constantly passive aggressive, and withholding from those close to me. What made it all the worse is my nagging belief that God’s stance about me matched my stance about myself.
Clearly, God was as petty as I was. Clearly, He cut people down as often I did. Clearly, there was no way He could love me because I sure didn’t love myself.
But this is not the God of the Scriptures. This is not who Jesus revealed when He remarked about only doing what His Father was doing. This isn’t who Paul was referring to in Colossians with whom “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in... and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Often in my life, I have pushed toward freedom thinking it will provide what I most deeply want. I’ll think if I’m free to date this person, I’ll be happy. If I’m free to get this job, I’ll be secure. If I’m free to join this group instead of that one, I’ll be content. But in all that striving and longing for something or somewhere or someone else, I wreak havoc on myself and those around me. Happiness, security, and contentment come and go. We can do things to help acquire them, but ultimately circumstances are out of our hands. Staking a claim that I will only be fulfilled with a certain outcome often hinders me from attaining that outcome and makes that desired outcome disappointing if I do get it.
All this striving, all this working, all this moving is meaningless, as the Wisdom teacher in Ecclesiastes aptly and depressingly notes. It is only a chasing of the wind.
But with God, a gracious, loving, compassionate, and kind-hearted God, the entire script is flipped. What had no value now is invaluable, what once was broken and beyond repair is being restored right in front of disbelieving eyes. God’s grace constantly unravels our conception of reality. God’s grace is always better, (key word, always) than we think it is.
A.W. Tozer once said “what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” I wholeheartedly agree. I’ll add this though; the thing we ought to think about most when we think about God is His grace.
In solitude, in prayer, in worship, in doubt, in struggle. During times of joy, times of hope, times of depression, times of anxiety. After seasons of growth, seasons of loss, seasons of strife, seasons of contentment.
No matter what we endure, we endure it well by the grace of God alone. The best man I could ever be, the greatest words I will ever write, the most loving actions I will ever do are possible solely by the provision of God’s character and posture toward me. Apart from Jesus, as He tells His disciples in the gospel of John, we can do nothing.
Simply put, by God’s grace, or, as my pastor likes to call it, His empowering presence, we are able to defeat the enemy, defeat our sin, and, ultimately, able to defeat death. Therefore, give me God’s grace; otherwise I will ultimately die to the things of this world. The only freedom that lasts is the freedom Christ freely gives. It is only by and through and for Him that I am saved, I am healed, I am born again.
I haven’t talked to Bernie in a long time, but I remember the sheer joy on his face upon seeing his daughter for the very first time. Although, yes, he “shouldn’t” have slept with his platonic friend, by God’s grace, he now has a wonderful family. By God’s grace, in the guise of the voice of this sinful ‘ragamuffin,’ Bernie was able to see and walk into a redemption only the God of Israel can bring. By God’s grace, Bernie found redemption where before there was shame.
This is the power of good news. This is the power of a good God. This is the power of the gospel of grace.