students of jesus

Last year I saw a real dancer dance. I sat just ten feet away and watched: I marveled at the motion. His leaps seemed effortless; his steps flowed like water; his hand opened a pathway through which his arm, his shoulder, his torso, and his legs followed. As I watched, the music melted away and I watched as motion, pure motion, become a paintbrush. Air was a canvas; the painting vanished after each step, yielding straightaway to another. When the dance ended, I was left with a memory of the painting. Months later, the memory remains.

Nor is the memory about the dancer, but rather the dance. Although the dance did not exist apart from the dancer, he and the motion were indistinguishable. He disappeared in the dance.

The single word for this description is “graceful.” Yet such grace was anything but natural: this grace came as the result of years of discipline, practice, effort and sacrifice. The dancer, I’m sure, had fallen and suffered injury again and again. Certainly he had struggled with doubt, embarrassment, pain, fear, awkwardness, and discouragement. What emerged from the studio was a kind of resurrection, a resurrection of grace and beauty.

Grace grew from effort and focus. His motion inspired others. His art gave glory to God, and while it had the look of spontaneity it was anything but spur of the moment. Such grace grew from devotion: love of craft and creator.

I saw grace in motion, and my idea of grace deepened and grew. What he had done in the natural, I began to desire in the Spirit. What does grace look like in everyday life? No dictionary can tell the tale; no theologian can describe the beauty: we must see it firsthand—but look sharp, this kind of grace disappears as quickly as it comes.

What if grace dances all around us? What do you suppose such gracefulness looks like in our relationships with others? And in what studio do we learn the dance of divine love?

Grace is birthed in a stable and though it is homeless, it welcomes whoever celebrates its coming. Grace pulls back the veil between heaven and earth; it turns the night sky into the glory of God. Grace is where shepherds dine with Magi and humble young parents play host to perfect strangers.

Grace wanders; he does not build a house. Grace searches for welcome. Grace calls at every door, but never trespasses. He stands at the door and knocks, ready to bring a feast inside. Vagabond grace is the beggar bearing treasure. We welcome the wretch into our home; he reaches into his threadbare bag and pulls out gifts more precious than gold. His satchel holds love, joy, and peace. He bestows patience and kindness. He fills the room with the fragrance of goodness, and leaves behind a map to faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Grace is the subtle hand of God before our very eyes. Grace gives thanks for a humble meal, and thousands sit and eat. Grace never condemns, yet somehow commands us to go and sin no more. Grace walks the pavement and it turns to gold.

Grace supplies our deepest need. We want a deliverer; God sends grace. We want to see power and the glory; God sends grace and truth. We want a king; God sends a Servant. Grace rules the world without title or rank. Grace has legions at his command, and never once calls for their aid.

Grace is never a tyrant—but forever a king.

Here’s our problem: we suffer from a grace too small. We’ve lined up the chairs in neat little rows and called it grace. We suffer from domesticated grace. We think grace is pleasant to receive. We think it’s ours to give, as if could ladle spoonfuls of grace from Niagra. We never noticed: it has broken free. Right now it’s running wild in the streets. 

Grace isn’t safe: it’ll wreck your world. Grace assaults and grace subverts. Grace grabbed one man and knocked him off his ass. It rendered him blind and healed him three days later. Grace put him in danger time and again: shipwrecked three times or more, beaten with rods and sticks, stoned and left for dead. Grace used him like a ragdoll, overthrew an empire, and saved us all—even him, the foremost of sinners.

Grace assaults us in so many ways we are dizzy and dumb from its constant battering. We seldom see it coming, and after it’s gone we rarely know it what, exactly, just happened. Grace whispers and howls at the moon. Grace asks, and it’s the one telling us how it’s gonna be. It binds the strongman.

Grace sneaks into a crackhouse and holds the baby in the crib. It breaks into prison and sets the dealer free. Grace says, “Come, let’s reason together” even when the other side is incapable of true reason. Grace has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Grace will pick you up in Kansas and set you down in Oz. You’ll pick up crazy friends along the way and discover the boss behind the curtain is just as screwed up as you are. Grace gives you ruby red slippers stolen off a dead woman’s feet, and they show you the way home.

Grace is a strong man’s game. It’s God’s game. He invented it and plays it full out. Good luck against Him. Grace huddles with the opponent, calls the play, and then runs the ball right up the middle. The enemy knows it’s coming, but grace never audibles: it executes the play—just try to stop it.

There’s only one way with grace. Surrender.

Grace is the atmosphere of our life with God. Each moment it passes through us, unnoticed, yet we would cease to exist without grace.

Too often we have shortened grace into a simple retelling of forgiveness, but it's so much more. Our great need is to breathe deep of God’s inexhaustible gift.

Here are dozen quotes that will draw us into God's grace more deeply still. So fill your lungs. Then sing.

“We are born broken. We live mending. The grace of God is the glue.” ~ Eugene O'Neill

“Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.” ~ Philip Yancey 

 “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are are but does not leave us where it found us.” ~ Anne Lamott

Grace is not opposed to effort, it’s opposed to earning. ~ Dallas Willard

“Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking man can get them himself without grace.” ~ Simone Weil

 “In the New Testament grace means God’s love in action towards men who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves.” – J.I. Packer

“Grace saves us from life without God--even more, it empowers us for life with God." ~ Richard Foster

“God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” ~ Proverbs 29:23 and James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” ~ Simone Weil

 “I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.” ~ Philip Yancey

“If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn't care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn't understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just.” ~ Timothy Keller 

“If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.” ~ John Mark McMillan

I once forgave a man for being an ass, but he was offended by my mercy. It turns out mercy cuts like a knife. Mercy triumphs over judgment, but is it not also true that without judgment mercy cannot exist? 

The same truth, softer: in Narnia, Aslan the Christ-figure lion bounds into the scene and sets things right. Most of us love the story with a too-convenient love. We love Narnia because we do not live in Narnia. But consider Edmund, the traitor/king: for him Narnia was no walk in the park. Edmund met the hard truth of his own resentment toward his brother, and his willingness to betray his family for a mess of Turkish Delight.

In Narnia large issues are at stake: The creatures of the realm long for Aslan’s appearing. Says Mr. Beaver:

 “Wrong will be right when Aslan is in sight,

  at the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more.

When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,

  when he shakes his mane we shall know spring again.”

Yet neither sorrow nor winter happened by chance. The Lion brought judgment to realm, and those who had chosen poorly were brought face-to-face with their choices—and how their hearts had influenced those choices.

My asinine friend protested, “Maybe I am a bit blunt, but who are you to say so?” He might possibly agree he was a sinner, but he resented the judgment in the message even though it contained was mercy and grace. Perhaps, too, he did not care for the messenger.

That great man after God’s own heart, King David, cries out, “search me, Oh God, and know my heart . . . See if there is any wicked way in me.” This a pious prayer. Equally important is how God answers: who will deliver the results of God’s search? We prefer justice at a distance, and cannot abide it too close to home. Justice at a distance is comfortable because it rarely examines--me. It allows me to be on the right side of the equation every time. I find myself loving Justice as an ideal, but hiding from the judgments over my own life.

The formula, Justice, good; judgment, bad is alchemy. It causes me to believe things may be set right without the hard work of seeing something is wrong. The trap: I want only to embrace this truth by settling for the justice in far-away things and hide myself from the wrong in my own life. Justice at a distance is the easy work of loving the brother we cannot see, while we avoid the reality of our actions toward those we can. We can easily identify the far-away wrong in others while running from the close-to-home wrong in ourselves. And the chilling truth is in a world with no wrongs, all manner of evil thrives. Do I really want to create a home-environment where evil can thrive in me?

Jesus spoke to us with a liberating genius: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Perhaps this is why Peter suggests, “It is time for judgment to begin in God’s household.” We need not be afraid of this kind of judgment for one shining reason: this judgment points to mercy, and leads to freedom. “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?” asked Paul. “It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.”

Here is the good news: the only true source of judgment is the very one who has demonstrated he will pay any price to set us right. Will we welcome such severe mercy in our lives? It’s the path to a life beyond mere forgiveness, into freedom.