I’ve noticed a few things about people who’ve experienced profound invasions of God’s grace in their lives.  They are very humble about themselves and their understanding of how God works.  When it comes to matters of faith they typically don’t say too much beyond the basics because it’s hard enough to get the basics right.  And, their message to others abounds with thanksgiving because they know without the Lord they are nothing. Take, for example, John Newton, who through his famous hymn “Amazing Grace.”  Or take Rev. Ben Weir, who describes his experience of pain and fear as hostage in Lebanon as a river of God’s grace.  Profound experiences of grace don’t just happen among famous faith proclaimers, though.

 

I think that if you were to look hard enough each day you’d see expressions of God’s grace.  I think of a couple that I know, both of whom are divorced from painful marriages, but who late in life rediscovered each other.  They were childhood sweethearts, but God had seen fit to let them move apart, marry, and have families on their own.  Now, in their marriage to each other they celebrate one another as the great second chance of God’s grace.

 

I think of a World War II veteran who confessed to me that he had a problem with love; it was an addiction.  He said that on his way back from France after the War he held a love note from a French woman in one pocket and an engagement ring for his American love in the other.  Weighing the two, he put away the love note for good, confessed to his bride to be, and asked her to marry him expecting her to say, “No.”  Instead, she took him firmly by the shoulders and said, “I love you, will always love you, and you will never love another.  I will marry you, you will marry me, and we will never go back on our words ever again.  I forgive you as God has forgiven me.”  Grace changed his life in that moment.

 

Grace allows us to forgive; to move on graciously through pain; to let go of our pasts and walk humbly toward an unknown and undeserved future.  Without grace, who are we and what can we do?  Nothing.

 

I have to confess that one of the sins of my youth was in putting up parameters around God’s grace.  I remember looking at drug addicts from the safety of my television in a well-to-do suburb outside of San Francisco and thinking arrogantly how bad they were.  I remember thinking that women who had abortions deserved God’s judgment, or that ministers who were divorced had no business preaching.  I remember defining my faith exclusively through the lens of a privileged teenage youth in a large white upper middle class church whose experience of pain was being fussed at for getting a B on a paper.  I had so much to learn.

 

And it’s because I had so much to learn and change, I think, that God has, through His grace, allowed me to experience a few things since then.  I met two teenagers in Chicago who needed food, and who were willing to do certain things I won’t mention from the pulpit in order to have food.  I didn’t think they were bad, all I remember doing was smiling at them, shaking my head, and asking them what they wanted from McDonalds and buying it for them.  But when I gave it to them, I said “Remember that it is Jesus who has given this to you.”  I had a good friend who had had an abortion years before I had met her and she still grieved that decision.  I remember sitting with her after church one day as she told me about it in tears.  By then I had known enough of God’s grace to be able to say to her while holding her close and crying with her that she was forgiven, and that it was time to let her decision go into the hands of her Forgiving Father.  And it took my own wife leaving me when I thought I had it all together to know that by God’s grace alone do I have the privilege to proclaim the gospel.

 

I admit all this because there are two ways Christians tend to understand grace, and I’ve journeyed along both ways.  First, there’s the presumptuous approach that says grace looks a certain way or comes to certain people, and then there’s the wounded way that knows only by God’s grace can anyone stand.

 

That first attitude about grace is what Paul faced head on in Galatians.  Let me share a bit of the background with you.  The dominant theological and practical issue in Paul’s day was that there were two types of Christians: one type were from God’s chosen people, the Jewish nation, and the other type were Gentiles.  But, those who were Jewish believers thought Gentile believers first had to become Jews to become Christians and many of them despised Paul for his message of free grace to the Gentiles.

 

These original believers were true believers, but they thought they were the instrument of salvation.  It had always been that way going back to Abraham, Moses, David, Esther, Ruth, and Mary.  True Jewish faith for them meant recognizing that Jesus was the Messiah, but to accept this didn’t mean someone could avoid being Jewish first.  In fact, for our earliest brothers and sisters Jesus’ birth within a Jewish family, his ministry as a fulfillment of Jewish scripture, and his death and resurrection surrounding Passover strengthened their ties to a Judaism that had begun to disappoint and oppress them.  Through Jesus they found a radical new and even more complete devotion to the Jewish faith.

 

But, the problem with this was that they also bought into a notion of grace burdened by conditions.  Grace applied if... they were Jewish.  Grace applied if... they followed Jewish customs and laws.  Grace applied if... they kept Jewish observance of feasts and rites.  Paul railed against this doctrine because he recognized the lie of the evil one behind it, and he was frustrated that people would trade in free grace for a brand of faith that essentially nullified Jesus’ death.

 

Paul was a Jew, but he had put Christians into prison and sent them to their deaths.  Paul was an heir of the covenant, but he had replaced the promise of covenant with adhering to tradition.  He knew what it meant to pervert God’s grace because he had been a chief corruptor of it.  The vigor with which Paul writes his Galatian Christians arises from his conviction that never again would he participate or allow his faith-children to participate in the perversion of grace.  Grace is free to us and is available to each of us because it was bought with Christ’s blood.  No one can do anything to make it better or more palatable, and no one can dare ever hold grace back from someone through conditions we impose.  To do so is to play God in someone’s life, and this is exactly what the evil one tries to do: replace God with himself.

 

What Paul’s writing against, then, isn’t a light matter, and neither is it something we should be dismissive about.  One of the uncompromising truths about our faith is that we stand by God’s grace alone, and it’s not for us to decide how God’s grace looks or works in someone else’s life just because they make us uncomfortable.

 

But, long is the list of ways we try to do just this.  We’ve done it by mocking one form of worship if it doesn’t square up with our tradition.  We’ve done it when we take one part of scripture and use it against someone because of gender or race, while completely neglecting other parts of scripture.  We’ve done it by holding a sin over someone’s head for any length of time, as if our sin were really any worse in God’s eyes... and, by the way, He forgave us.  We’ve done it by thinking we are speaking the words of God to someone by quoting scripture against someone without knowing that person like God knows her or him.  In short, we’ve all tried to play the part of God.  Paul tried it and it led him into a life of killing Christians.  Maybe that gives you some perspective then of why he was so vehemently opposed to people shortchanging others with conditional grace.  Human-imposed conditional grace leads only to someone’s death, whether it be physically, emotionally, or spiritually.  So I speak with Paul first to myself and then for others, let God alone be God.

 

Now I can imagine that there are protests to what I’m saying.  What about homosexuality?  What about adultery?  What about addiction?  What about... you get the idea.  God has charged us with the ministry of reconciliation, and this means that we must always be discontent with a person’s sinful lifestyle as defined in scripture.  I cannot accept cultural authority on matters of sin because scripture never does and I accept scripture because it has done a pretty good job keeping people close to God for over 3,000 years.  But whereas we may be discontent with someone’s sinful decisions and behaviors, we’re forbidden from playing God and deciding whether or not God’s working in someone’s life.  It’s His grace to give, not ours.  Neither is it our duty to assign a particular path of grace to someone because that privilege belongs to God alone, just as He has done with us.

 

The good news is what lies at the heart of today’s message, so let’s remind ourselves about this.  If you can resurrect the worst thing you’ve done or thought, then no matter how it compares with anyone else that is a bad sin for you.  Now picture yourself holding it in your hands as you sit.  Now without you having anything other than accepting Jesus as your Lord, I want you now to imagine God reaching down and taking that awful sin out of your hands.  Him removing that sin doesn’t entitle you to serve as God in someone else’s life, it’s simply cause for great humility and we leave this sanctuary today with a precious reminder about this uncompromising truth.  God adores you, God forgives you, and He does this without precondition.  So go live freely and take the joy of your freedom to others.  Hallelujah.  Amen.