The End of Magic

The greatest illusion isn’t some card trick that leaves us gasping, or rabbits pulled from a performer’s hat. 

No, far greater is the fantasy that makes us think we’ll satisfy God’s holiness by saying “no” to salty snacks, or overcome our deficits by working longer, harder, better. 

This “sleight of hand” is hardly slight, for we deceive ourselves whenever we pretend our brokenness is of the fingernail—instead of the fatal—kind.  

Grace requires we surrender our illusion that heaven is within our grasp. Only Jesus’ wounded hands will ever lift us from our mud. When we’ve come to doubt ourselves the most, we’re ready to put all our trust in Him. 

Grace always is an “all or nothing” offer. Jesus gives us all His righteousness: we bring nothing to the performance. We’ve got no rabbits in the hat, nor extra cards tucked up our sleeves. 

“In my hand no price I bring.
Simply to Thy cross I cling.”

So stay in grace.

Can You Handle the Truth?

Now would be a good moment to start telling ourselves the truth.

I can no more make myself acceptable to God by right living or good choices than I can learn to levitate, fly unaided through the solar system, or pick strawberries on the moon.

The myth of legalism fools us into assuming that there are just a few steps left between our holiness and the holiness of God. It grossly underestimates both God’s essential goodness and our essential lostness. Oddly, legalism teaches us to lie to ourselves and God about the real picture of our lives.

 Grace, on the other, nail-pierced hand, can tell the awful truth about how far we fall short of heaven’s ideal. Jesus’ holiness covers all our lostness and our wretchedness. And for a change, we need not cringe, for we are loved no less for being sinners, nor ever held at arm’s length.

No, we are pulled into a grace embrace so kind and so forgiving that fear and willfulness begin to disappear. We start becoming like the love that saves us. 

So stay in grace.

More Day to Dawn

“Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.”

It’s every believer’s lot to occasionally grow anxious, to lose peace, to doubt that a good God really wants to do good things for us.  We remember all our sins—years after He has chosen to forget them.  We cringe at indiscretions, which in His discretion He has graciously erased from our life record.  And so we crouch into the future, heads down, half-expecting the worst, or at least the very painful.  Surely all our sins will soon catch up with us.

“But surely He has borne our griefs and carried all our sorrows” (Is 53:4). It is to us—those who have taken Jesus as our Lord—the gospel speaks with special, reassuring power. We need not linger in the half-light of our anxious thoughts about our standing with the Saviour:  “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you” (Is 60:1). 

Grace is for every moment, even those when memories afflict us.  Christ offers all He is to all who seek His joy and light.

So stay in grace.

Cross Purposes

Be wary of the vengeance that your bitterness demands. 

The blade you wield will cut both ways to injure you and those you wound:  you both will bleed.  Retaliation never was so cool and final as it seems in all the movies.  There’s always more to pay—more pain, more cuts, more haggard hearts.  No grudge was ever settled save by love.   

Christ’s wounded majesty and broken law didn’t move Him to abandon us or push us toward our fate.  No, He stepped closer after being injured, and embraced us in our violence.  The spear was taken from our hands; the curses quieted in our mouths.  “With His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

Christ crossed our bitterness with love too great to seek retaliation, and far too kind to give us what our sin deserved.  In this is life, and all our hope.  Grace ends the deadly cycle of our hurt.

So stay in grace.

Staying in the Race

Grace doesn’t gloat when others lose, nor grow dejected when another takes the flag. It isn’t glum when others swell with self-importance, nor filled with glee when rivals lose their footing.

Salvation never was a zero-sum game, for there can be millions—no, make that billions—who finish the course and win the prize. The waiting crown comes in as many sizes as those who run the race.

But finding grace will always be a winner-take-all contest. All whom Christ saves win all of Him—eternal love; enduring hope, and joy that triumphs over sorrow.

We look down into open graves and twisting pain, and say to all the worst that evil brings—“Because He lives, I too shall live.” We taunt death’s weakness—"Oh, where’s your sting?”—and fix our eyes upon that day when we will rise to light and joy and everlasting life. “The prize awaits me—the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on the day of His return” (2 Tim 4:8).

We run to win!  So stay in grace.

A Circle of Forgiveness

As Christ grows greater in our minds, we lose our need to be authorities over what others think and do.

The deepening awareness that we have been wrong more than we have been right—that we are only now approaching the starting point of faith—creates a gentle tolerance for those now camped where we once stopped, or mired in the stuff from which Christ freed us. We learn to smile at vehemence and vitriol, remembering how frequently we used them for bad causes or when we were still unsure.

Grace makes us gracious to the ungraceful, for we see ourselves in them. We remember that their faults are just as pardonable as ours, and no more dangerous.

The fellowship of the forgiven is as vast as the grace that makes it possible.

So stay in grace.

Is It Too Good to Be True?

If you are truly saved through faith, then you are daily praying grace down into the cracks and crevices of life, into the dim and unlit corners where fear and fate and faithlessness more often hold the keys.

Understanding—really understanding—grace rarely happens through a flash of intellectual enlightenment: Paul’s own Damascus Road was just the first of many miles spent learning grace.

Each week we find how weak and meager is our faith, how little we actually trust the great bold verities announced by Jesus and His gospel, how much we fear that what He promises to give is too good to be true.

“Increase our faith” is the most honest prayer we ever murmur—and the one He most delights to answer.

So stay in grace.

When Everything Changes

Our pledges of good behavior are only as good as the people who make them—which is to say, not good at all.  The litter of our broken promises to change, reform, and improve ourselves stretches back like resolutions at the end of January.

And we aim too low. We have in mind trying to suppress our angry words. Christ has in mind an entirely new vocabulary grounded in the knowledge that we—and all others—are deeply loved by Him.  

We imagine chocolates as the foible we intend to fix. Jesus knows that fear is at the root of all our failing—fear of the Father, of each other, of the future. And so His first word to us at every moment of doubt and discouragement is an assurance of His care:  “You can stop being afraid now.” 

Grace always meets us where we are, but never leaves us where we were. The greatest and most joyful change is lived by those who most receive the gift of grace.

So stay in grace.

Sustainability

Breathe deeply now, and let your heart grow quiet as you turn from sins forgiven. “By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before Him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything” (1 John 3:19-20).

It’s not the voice of God that drives you on to fear, or rush, or labor past your strength. 

We dare not make the Spirit own our anxiousness or lack of peace.  God is always on the side of what gives life, builds hope, and moves us even one small step toward balance. 

His grace is meant to keep us breathing, as well as for our saving.  The day that Jesus wants to bring us healing is the day that we are living, not only when our destinies are weighed.  “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

His grace is for today and always. 

So stay in grace.

When Politics Mislead us

How does God’s grace invade our daily conversations?

Certainly not by retreating to our separate corners and hurling brickbats at each other.  Of all the “stuff” we absorb from our angry culture, the habits of accusing and deriding are undoubtedly the worst. 

But as grace finds a home in us, we grow more willing to admit that we might be mistaken.  Receiving grace requires we confess we are wrong, and always have been.  We’ve misunderstood the love of God, imagining Him as only angry, always disappointed. We’ve wandered into deeds that brought us shame and guilt.  We’ve argued for ideas that were vanquished at the cross.  “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Is 53:6).

So grace prepares us for a new way of talking with each other, even when we disagree—especially when we disagree.  “You could be right”—"I might be wrong”: these are the tools of reconciliation and renewal.  Look carefully at grace before you look your opponent in the eye. 

There is no greater joy than laughing with a former enemy.  So stay in grace.

Environmental Truths

Below our deepest hurt and darkest shame, there is the grace of God—forgiving us, rebuilding us, repairing all that’s broken.

Above our highest joy and most euphoric moments, there is the sheer delight of God—applauding us, encouraging, enlarging celebration.

Through every stage of every journey—in trust, in fear; in faith, in doubt; in youth, in gray maturity—we’re never left alone or told to make it on our own.  Despite appearances, the road is never empty.

Around us each are Jesus’ everlasting arms—sustaining us, protecting us, embracing us. His hands are ever on us.

“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Rom 11:36).

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Rom 8:39).

We are befriended by the One who rules all time and space. 

Receive the gift.  And stay in grace.

Drenched But Delighted

Come stand with me beneath the waterfall of grace.

There is no waiting line, no jostling for position. There are no elbows, scornful faces, or murmured whispers of contempt. No one here will keep you from receiving what your withered spirit needs. 

This is the fellowship of the redeemed. This is the company of those who gladly—daily—open their parched lives to the “washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

Grace isn’t some scarce resource, guarded by the worthy, requiring conservation or close rationing as though it might run out. This is the river of life—re-life; renewal; resurrection—flowing from the grace of Him whose great forgiving is “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:4). 

Those who really “get” the grace of God keep pulling all those they love into the healing, rehydrating stream. The waterfall keeps getting wider. More and more will be revived.

Step out of dry and into drenched.

And stay in grace.

Upending Our Economy

The most famous story Jesus ever told was all about our struggle to receive the Father’s grace and love.         

One son insists he isn’t worthy of such kindness. The other argues that loyalty and self-sacrifice should count for more than grace in the father’s economy.  Each wants a different status than his father is bestowing.

But God’s family is founded on His gift of grace, not on our faithfulness or service. Receiving what Jesus is still offering requires we surrender all our notions of unworthiness or value.

Neither “wandering in a far country” nor “staying at home” prepares us to accept a gift that isn’t bound to our behavior. You cannot earn the Father’s love:  you cannot lose the Father’s love. 

Allow yourself a great embrace. Receive His love.

Then stay in grace.

Untiring Grace

Those who fear the coming triumph of grace sadly don’t know the love of which they are afraid.

They want a “gospel” that is really not “good news”—for its litany of “should,” “ought,” and “must” betrays that they don’t understand Jesus as the Author and Finisher of our faith.  They replace the long obedience of grateful love with hours of clenched teeth and self-flagellation, hoping He will notice and approve. They forget that “by His stripes we are healed.”

But I’m a witness that a day will come when each will meet the Love that will not let them go. Grace always knocks at shut doors, closed hearts, and frozen lives, awaiting that glad moment when we admit our helplessness and need.

If you know grace, then you’ve been warmed.

So stay in grace.

Grace Under Fire

Even in our ungracious world, there’s persisting admiration for the man or woman who demonstrates “grace under fire”—poised and composed under disheartening provocations. “It’s just a part of her character,” we enviously say, remembering how frequently we’ve fought our fires with fire.

And while there may be some gallant souls who didn’t consciously learn this grace from God, most we admire act graciously because they know the Giver of this gift.

Our growing awareness of how much we’ve been broken and how well we’ve been redeemed helps us sympathize with other broken people. It makes us long—yes, ache—to see their lives restored, renewed, rehealed. We live to give away what we’ve been given.

Grace had its origin in a love outside of us. It has its present—and its future—in loving well beyond ourselves.

So stay in grace.

The Number of Forgiveness

When we ask, “How often should I forgive?” we pretend what isn’t true—that there have only been a modest number of times when we required forgiveness. 

The answer from the Lord—and from an honest conscience—is that we ought to forgive as many times as we have been forgiven.  That number is unknowable, and, truth be told, steadily growing. 

Forgiveness is a way of being, not a sin-by-sin accounting system designed to make us all good recordkeepers.  It’s in the heart of Jesus to “not hold our sins against us,” to fully, wholly, and yes, joyfully erase the record of our sins when we confess and leave them.  And we’ll do the same for others when we candidly admit how much we’ve been forgiven.   

Grace knows no integers, no fractions, and no decimal points.  This is the life we live when we go walking with the Lord.

So stay in grace.

THE CHOICE THAT HEALS

Grace is always a choice—when God extends it to us, or we extend it to each other.

The decision to forgive, to not hold someone’s sins like death shrouds up against them, is always made in light of other options. No one can require God to love us unconditionally and forgive us unreservedly, for we are the broken, foolish ones who willfully transgressed His law.

And when the broken, foolish people around us disappoint or damage us, grace is a choice we make in echo of God’s kindness.

Only wounded hearts can offer forgiveness: only those with power to mete out penalties and vengeance can pour out grace instead. We are never more like Jesus than when we gift to those who injure us what neither they nor we deserve.

So stay in grace.

THE DAWN OF TRUST

Is there a greater joy than knowing for even one hour that you are in the center of God’s will—that through some miracle of grace, you are aligned with plans the Father made to win you back and win the hearts of those you love?

Is there a better confidence than the one which every Sabbath reminds you that “the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”? 

Can there be a deeper security than when Christ’s word of certainty penetrates your fears and doubts with the assurance, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”?

The answers to those questions, friends, are “no,” “no,” and “no”—nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Your hope will rise; your joy will find its wings. Trust is the dawn from which our daylight grows.

So stay in grace.

All of Grace, Grace for All

“He’s so much better than I am,” we say, proving just how little we know of someone else’s life. “She’s a saint,” we say admiringly, assuming that the woman we can see is always just as good as we imagine.

We assign a top-notch grade to behaviors we observe, and make assumptions that the life consistency we can’t achieve is somehow available to others.

But grace reminds us of the brokenness we share—each one of us—regardless of the estimate of others. Behind the fair façade of piety and cool, we each know just how far we fall below the expectations of our God—and how each well-lived life is only, always, saved by grace.

All ranks, all grades, all estimates are vanities and not realities. If you can find a soul not absolutely saved by grace, then you have found the rarest form of human life.

Give up your search: there is no other way.

And stay in grace.

Gracefully Wrong

Most of us inherited a God no kinder than we were—a deity whose major role seemed meting out tough penalties for willful or impetuous mistakes. 

Like primitive believers everywhere, we read His displeasure in thunderstorms, bruised knees, and lost puppies—for was there anything for which we weren’t somehow to blame?

So it is that finding grace is the great unlearning of our past, the sweet and joyful discovery that in Jesus, our sins aren’t being counted against us. What we sang in innocence was actually, fundamentally true: “Jesus loves me”—genuinely loves me. He can’t imagine a greater happiness than enjoying my trust and affection.

How glorious to have been wrong about it all—to celebrate the truth that undermines our youthful foolishness and fear. His perfect love still casts out fear, and makes us wise unto salvation.

By grace, our thinking—and our living—is renewed. So stay in grace.