Unexplainable grace

I love coffee.  I have become one of those people who drinks only single origin coffee.  But my personality won’t ever let me become the type that sits back and tells you the “notes” of blueberry and cinnamon that I taste - unless I fall into my guilty pleasure with coffee which is a large dunkin donuts blueberry cinnamon coffee.  (By the way that falls into a class of its on coming in from about 50 origins.)  I love nice, premium, single origin coffees and the best part about it is I don’t know why.  I just like it.  I can’t sit around and slurp it and tell you the “notes”.  I refuse.  It’s not about the status of it for me. In fact, I kind of hate the status associated with it - so much so, in fact, that I actually wish I wasn’t sharing this fact about me with the world at this moment. It’s simply the coffee I like most.

We do this sometimes in our “church culture”.  We sit around and talk about the “notes” of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Piper, and Paul Washer but I fear it’s only to reflect a status.  Because, in our minds, a believer who reads Piper versus a believer who reads Osteen speaks to deeper maturity and growth.  Oh, how dangerous this is.  When we look at someone who, by our estimation, speaks truth on a consistant basis and then esteem them as one who always and only speaks truth is deeply unwise.  When we look at a man’s track record, we begin emulating man instead of emulating God.  Any man who walks with the Lord would tell you not to do this, but rather to carefully filter everything that is said by any teacher or preacher through the Holy Spirit.  This brings me to the point of me writing this blog. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a man who I know very little about outside of some of his writings.  However, he seems to be quoted often in parts of today’s church culture around a concept he coined “Cheap Grace”.  Not to put words in Bonhoeffer’s mouth, but in essence this concept is the idea that proclaiming grace alone with out repentance cheapens grace.  After filtering this through the Holy Spirit, I find unrest.  In an effort to purge and rend my possible critical spirit, I have spent lots of time in prayer and seeking wise counsel about this blog.  Many church theologians have weighed in on the mysterious unexplainable grace that is provided to us through Christ and I dare not think of myself smarter or better than them; I shouldn’t even be compared.  However, I am still not settled in my spirit with this idea that we can somehow “cheapen” something that originated in the very character of a Holy God.

My point is this grace in its true form is something that is limitless and has not ever been affected by man.  I cannot “cheapen” or “make cheaper” anything God has given.  Of course I can take it for granted (and I believe that is the point that Bonhoeffer and others have tried to make) but I believe that Grace has nothing to do with how much I “feel” my sin.  Grace from our perspective has nothing to do with repentance.  Here is the core issue: If grace has something to do with the quantity or quality of my repentance, then it would be based on my effort, strength, or ability.  I have, in that moment, become a believer in a salvation based on my own works.

Church, when can we start being ok with the unexplainable? I don’t understand grace.  It’s too much.  I sin and fall time and again...yet grace remains.  Of course we would never say to keep on sinning because grace is there; rather we fall deeper in love with the Father because grace is there.  We MUST start trusting our intimate relationship with the Father knowing that when I get His heart, I will become more obsessed with Him rather than my sin.  But for the moments that sin still exists, there is grace.  There is so much grace. And I don’t fully understand it, but I am forever grateful for it.