Hello,

Is grace easy?

Some people have told me, after hearing me, that in preaching grace I make Christianity too easy. That is their comment when I say what I read the Bible to be saying, and that is that my relationship to God, and likewise yours, is founded on and continues to be built on God’s unconditional love for you and me. Ephesians 2:8,9 puts it this way, “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” 1 John 3:1 says it this was, “See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.”

“You mean,” they tell me, “that a person can say or do anything and still consider themselves to be fully embraced by God’s child-claiming love?”

And when I say, “Yes,” they say that’s too easy and it cheapens the cost of Jesus’s suffering and death.

“I don’t think so,” is my response, “and as a matter of fact I think to live entirely trusting in the grace of God is a very hard thing to do.” I think it is a very hard to entirely entrust oneself into the care and judgment of another. Consider the angst that comes with trusting a doctor when you are facing a life-threatening illness…especially when the doctor’s treatment doesn’t seem to be doing much to the illness. We are told to get a second opinion…or a third or a fourth, or we take things into our own hands by grabbing onto something that proposes a miracle cure. Consider the research that someone who is accused of a serious crime puts into in hiring an attorney, and then when one is in trial to keep their mouth shut and let the attorney speak. Or consider the hesitancy of jumping out of a 10th story window with the promise of a person below, “I will catch you.”

If it is that hard to completely entrust oneself to another in worldly matters, it seems to me that to do so in eternal matters is infinitely harder. I have found this to be true over and over again as I have presided over funerals. People have come up to me and said, “I know that my mom is in heaven because she was such a good Christian person.” Or they have said of one whose life was not so faithfully adorned, “I know that down deep my dad believed.” Although it may be true that there are things about you and me that God smiles upon, it is hard to lay those aside as still not making us worthy of God’s love more than others, or even at all. It is hard to completely let go of our hold, even our hold on our goodness, when it comes to one’s relationship with God. It is not easy. It is hard!

And to those who say that to proclaim that those whose lives show little to no semblance of God’s love are still children of God cheapens the cost of Jesus’ suffering and death, it seems to me that to have to add anything to Jesus’ suffering and death to enable God’s love for someone actually cheapens what Jesus went through. Anyone who washes clothes would say the same thing if you had to run a load through a second time with an additional ingredient to get them clean. Dr. Mark Hoffman, of United Seminary says it with this clarity, “Grace but….isn’t grace.”

All of this is to say that the reason that the Bungee Cord is always a message of God’s grace, of God’s unconditional love and welcome, is that I think it is hard to trust in God’s grace. But in the end, to do otherwise is deadly, as deadly as saying to a person to whom you have offered a glass of water, “Don’t worry. This glace was full of arsenic but I got it pretty clean.” The “arsenic” in our lives eats away at our relationship to God and others. It is the smallest spiritual cancer cell just waiting to explode.

It is clear to me, as it was to St. Paul in the 8th chapter of Romans, that Jesus wants us to know that he is all we need to be held in the embrace of God, and as Ephesians 2:10 says that through Jesus we have been transformed into children of God who have the “genes” to do God’s work. I hope that in every Bungee Cord you read you are reminded of and reassured of what God, by his grace, has done for you. God has made you one who God will eternally call his child, and one who has been made to bring God’s matchless love to the world.

Child of God….have a great week!

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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