Continued
from yesterday - Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful
truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and
our bootstraps are cut. Once the fervor has passed, weakness and
infidelity appear. We discover our inability to add even a single inch
to our spiritual stature. Life takes on a joyless, empty quality. We
begin to resemble the leading character in Eugene
O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown: “Why am I afraid to dance, I who
love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid
to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors
of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”
Something is radically wrong. Our huffing and puffing to impress God,
our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix
ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are
nauseating to God and are a flat out denial of the gospel of grace.
(Brennan Manning)
It is high time for the church to honor its
Founder by embracing sola gratia anew, to reignite the beacon of hope
for the hopeless and point all of us bedraggled performancists back to
the freedom and rest of the Cross. To leave our “if’s” “and’s” or
“but’s” behind and get back to proclaiming the only message that
matters—and the only message we have—the Word about God’s one-way love
for sinners. It is time for us to abandon once and for all our
play-it-safe religion, and, as Robert Farrar Capon so memorably put it,
to get drunk on grace. Two hundred-proof, unflinching grace. The
radicality of grace is shocking and scary, unnatural and
undomesticated…but it is also the only thing that can set us free and
light the church, and the world, on fire.
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