students of jesus

Grace grows in community—but not just any community.

This is a difficult message for many people these days because by community I mean the church. The same Father-God who adopted us into his family intends that we should live together as family. This is a difficult message because in modern times the church of Jesus is largely out of joint. We have created a Christendom where we can choose churches the way most people choose restaurants: according to our individual tastes. By most estimates there are more than 25,000 Christian denominations worldwide. Not individual churches, denominations. How can we grow in grace when we a free to wander from one family to another?

It’s an old story. Ask nearly any Christian: you’ll hear stories of church drama, church fights, and church splits. But it doesn't have to be like this. Listen carefully the Apostle Peter:

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 4:8-11)

It’s easy to miss the word grace in this passage, but you’ll find it right in the middle, which is where grace always belongs. Our words and actions are the practical expressions of God’s grace. God wants to show his grace through the love, hospitality, encouragement, and service in the community of faith. We extend grace to others precisely because we’ve received grace from God. Among our families at home—and among the family of God—we are called to be caretakers of grace. Too often we have become merely consumers of grace, and it has led to a church for every taste and preference the consumers can imagine.

One church in my hometown has an interesting way to determine “membership” in the congregation. “If you’ve hung out with us long enough to have your feelings hurt by someone in the church,” says the pastor, “and then decided to forgive and stay here anyway, welcome to the family!” This pastor isn’t trying to excuse bad behavior or ignore the flaws of his church, he’s trying to playfully indicate that living within a faith community is the perfect opportunity to extend grace to others. Grace grows among family (or at least it should).

Not only does grace grow in the community we call church, it grows in the most unlikely corners of the church: among our shortcomings, our hypocrisies, and failings. If everyone in the church had his or her act together, what need would there be to extend grace? Look closely at the passage above: the Apostle Peter calls us to use our gifts in service toward one another. We steward the grace we have received by the way we speak and act toward others in the church.

Have you thought about grace as a stewardship? If not, here’s a wonderful exercise: trying reading the parable of the talents (it’s in Matthew 25 and also Luke 19) as a teaching about grace. The Master leaves something of great worth with his servants (substitute grace for gold), and when he returns, he looks to see whether we have used his gift wisely.

Best of all of all is our reward. In Matthew’s version of the parable, the Master not only praises the good stewards, he extends an invitation: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” says the Master. “Come and share your master’s happiness!” When we distribute the grace of God we will receive his praise, and something more: an invitation to enter into his joy. Through grace, joy increases for everyone.

Sin is ravaging the church today, but the old ways of talking about sin clearly do not help us. We have to find new ways of talking about it. Could this be true—the degree to which we choose to vilify the sins of others is the degree to which we feel compelled to hide our own? That’s a formula for alienation without and cancer within.

Our need is great: God’s people, who the Bible describes as “holy and beloved,” and “a royal priesthood,” are suffering the effects of sin. In North America church-going Christians are shipwrecked on the same shoals of those who do not claim to walk with God. Sin—my sin—is all the more devastating among we who claim freedom in Christ. The church, God’s future bride, and the “pillar and support of the truth” is unable to attain her divinely appointed destiny because the effects of sin are not only personal, but also corporate.

These three: the personal costs of sin, the corporate weakness caused by sin, and the loss of our destiny, each cry out for our attention:

The Personal Costs of Sin

Sin isn’t about breaking the rules: it’s about breaking relationship. Consider Adam and Eve: their sin did not cause God to stay away from the Garden. Our first parents hid from the Creator. They tried to hide their nakedness from one another. What was broken was their ability to relate to God, not God’s ability to relate to them. What was broken was their ability to see the beauty of God’s work in their spouse. Sin does, indeed, cause separation, but we are the ones running, and we’re running from the one who knows us best and loves us most; we are running from each other.

Corporate Weakness Caused by Sin

When the community of faith ignores its own sin the entire congregation is weakened. There was a time when Christian community life evoked a sense of awe among its own people: we saw the presence of God in one another and loved one another because God we could see God’s favor on every person gathered. (Take a moment to see the glory of the early church, depicted in Acts 2:42-47 and Acts 4:31-35.)

We are not limited to Bible times to see the possibilities God’s people. When Rome was in decline, Celtic Christians burned bright a thousand miles away. The friends of Saint Francis were a joyful loving community while Europe was in darkness. The Moravian and Wesleyan communities testify to the beauty of holiness. Even our own personal experiences offer glimpses of the order and peace when God’s people dwell together in unity. Sadly, the consequences of sin go beyond the me-me my-my choices we make. Personal sin erodes the strength of the church.

Loss of Our Destiny

Finally, our message and mission as God’s people are lost when we ignore the dreadful cost of sin. Do we need to elaborate? What glory does a church gain by calling out the sins of others while ignoring the sin within? We criticize those outside the church and turn a blind eye to our own practices. We rank sin and (unsurprisingly) consider the sins of unbelievers worse than our own. We cry out against the sexual habits of others while our own sexuality falls far short of God’s good intentions. We condemn the greed of others while we build ever-bigger church silos. Examples abound: the world doesn’t care whether the church is missional or attractional if they smell the same scent of death among us.

Old Sin, New Ways

If we dare talk about sin we must do so personally first. And second. If we demonstrate the joys and blessings of obedience our talk of sin becomes sound counsel: “Here is God’s best intention for you—anything else falls short of the quality of life for which you were born.”

There is beauty in holiness, adorned in the humility of a people who know they are forgiven. This is the beauty of Heaven, where God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. That starts with me. The world desperately needs the aroma of the bread of life, not the harsh stink of criticism and judgment. Imagine the savor and beauty of a holy people. Perhaps we could start a conversation about sin by envisioning the abundant life Jesus offers?

You’re in the garden, pulling whatever weeds catch your eye, whichever ones will yield and give way, root and all. Head down and sun on your back, you don’t even notice the gentle bead of sweat that blooms across your forehead as you work. Then comes a small breeze that brings a soft coolness upon your moist skin. You look up. You see nothing. Renewed and unaware, you return to the task. The returning is grace.

Grace is the breeze that cools. Grace is what only God can do in the midst of your labors. Grace is the whispered word of peace that breathes life into our effort and makes it the work of God. Grace is the calm instead of the storm. Grace comes again and again. It comes so often we think of it as grace returning, but in fact it never left: what comes again and again is our return to grace.

Grace is the foundation of God’s work in us, the firm footing from which we can reach and stretch and work and do, the still point that enables any effort--which no effort can improve or change. When the Psalm urged us, “Be still and know that I am God,” he did not mean that all our labors would cease, only that any effort separated from grace is vain effort indeed.

A return to grace is like a return to breathing: grace breathes life in us, a life that we so often take for granted. A return to grace does not mean grace had ever left us at all, only that we become awake to it again. Grace is the atmosphere of our life with God. Each moment it passes through us, unnoticed; yet we would cease to exist without grace. Our great need is to breathe deep of God’s inexhaustible gift. Before we sing God’s song we must fill our lungs with grace. In God’s kingdom, no matter what we sing, it’s in the key grace. 

Why not receive Students of Jesus in your inbox? Subscribe to our email newsletter and never miss a post.

Only fools and lawyers argue over the law, and both are highly trained specialists. The rest of us should leave such work to the experts. Sometimes they unite in their work, giving us ordinances prohibiting the transport of ice cream cones in your pocket, or banning birds from flying over city landmarks.

I’d be content to leave the law to the fools and lawyers except for a troubling practice among religious people: they are in the habit of treating the Bible—especially the Old Testament—like a book of law. If there is anything worse than city ordinances against public singing before 8:00 in the morning it’s when religious people become religious fools and lawyers with respect to the Bible.

It’s understandable. The Old Testament sometimes calls itself “the Law” which is an unfortunate translation because life is more like a living room than a courtroom. Hebrew scholars, rabbis and Christian professors alike, would like us to know “Torah” can mean instruction, teaching, or even “the way.”

The Old Testament, that portion of the Bible we so often avoid, was the “Bible” that shaped Jesus’s spiritual formation. Jesus was nourished on the stories of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph—and that’s just Genesis! Jesus chanted the Shema, memorized the ten words from Sinai, and paid close attention to the rituals of Leviticus. Jesus sang the Psalms, puzzled over the prophets, and marveled at the courage (and stupidity) of people portrayed in the Biblical narrative.

Jesus did not grow in wisdom and stature by memorizing the rules; he became a deep person by engaging the Old Testament with all his faculties: his mind, his heart, his imagination, his hopes, his questions, his fears, and his spirit.

Jesus knew his Bible as something beyond the scroll in the synagogue. It was all around him. He saw grass whither and fade, and then reflected on things that last forever; he saw the clumsy gait of an ox and saw the folly of following a prostitute to her house; when the thunder answered the lightning he heard the voice of God; he gleaned insight from industrious ants. The sweetness of honey tasted to him of his Father’s wisdom. When he wrestled with the poetry of Isaiah, Hosea, and the prophets the wisdom of God spoke to him through his parents’ marriage, the oil his mother used to cook, the tramping of soldiers through his home town, and the in-breaking of God’s mercy in each new sunrise. Jesus did not need some someone to bring the Bible alive, his world was alive with the Bible. He understood at a gut level that God’s word was living and active, and that everyday life teemed with the deep truth of the word of God.

Meanwhile, in our modern age, we think “Bible study” is the stuff of ancient languages and word origins. Like either lawyers or fools (you decide) we ponder over the meaning and application of cross-cultural studies or socio-psychological interpretations. We think Bible study is more like hard work and not at all like a feast. We march with grim determination through our “quiet times” and we wonder who will make the book of Job feel more like Jimmy Fallon.

The Bible—both Old and New Testaments—is the Father’s indispensible grace-gift to followers of Jesus. Our Lord has modeled every aspect of life for us. We can follow his example, including his loving embrace of the written word, which brings us to the Living Word.

Why not receive Students of Jesus in your inbox? Subscribe to our email newsletter and never miss a post.