Grace vs. Law: How to Make Sense of the Contradiction Part 2

Despair

In the 7th grade I began my Christian walk. From the age of 13 until I was 21 years old the primary focus of every sermon that I heard was God’s law and practical applications and steps for defeating sin. The highlights and notes in my Bible bore this fact out.

When I would do my daily devotions I would dwell on passages that told me what my behavior should be. Those passages made sense. Those were the ones that were drilled into my head day after day and week after week. The passages that I didn’t understand, the ones I couldn’t connect with were the passages that tell of God’s grace, His mercy and His forgiveness offered to us on account of Jesus Christ. The reason I couldn’t understand these passages has a lot to do with how my pastor would apply them in his sermons.

My pastor would only mention grace passages when he was preaching an “evangelistic” sermon. Grace and mercy were only ever offered to non-believers. If you were a dirty rotten sinner and the Holy Spirit happened to have led you to church on a Sunday that my pastor was preaching and evangelistic sermon (this only occured a couple times a year), then you would hear him offering you Jesus’ forgiveness and Jesus’ shed blood and God’s love and Christ’s mercy. All you had to do was come down the aisle and kneal at the altar and give yourself to God and then you would recieve this precious gift. But once you were ‘in the club’ and had made Jesus your personal Lord and Savior it was time to get to work and time to move on to more practical teaching. From that time on you were taught that grace and mercy were were ‘baby stuff’ and doctrinal ‘milk’. If you wanted to grow into a strong Christian then you needed meat and meat could only be found in God’s law.

The verse that stood above all others at my church was “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)

Because of this I never really paid much attention to Bible passages that taught about grace and mercy. My pastor, my youth minister, my small group leader, my Bible teachers all made it clear that grace and mercy didn’t apply to me anymore because I was already a Christian.

I remember having lunch with one of my youth pastors and sharing with him my fear and frustration about my sin and my inability to reign it in and ‘be perfect’. I will NEVER forget the answer that he gave me. He told me, “Chris you don’t need to worry and fret about this so much. Just love God.”

I felt so empty leaving the restaurant that day. “Just love God”?!?! What kind of advice was that? My problem was that I didn’t love God. If I loved God I wouldn’t keep struggling with my sin. I went home and threw my Bible against the wall of my room. But I later came to my senses and decided to once again to ‘pull myself up by my bootstraps' and give it another college try.

Looking back on it now I realize that the teaching and preaching of my church literally cut me off from all hope of salvation.

I diligently searched God’s law for little shreds of hope and tiny crumbs of sunlight that could tell me that I would be okay. But, there is no comfort in God’s law, there is no forgiveness offered to me in God’s law.

God thunders from Sanai ‘Thou Shalt Not’! But, those are the exact things I do.

God tells us, “Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live”. But there isn’t even a day that goes by where I don’t break God’s laws.

Jesus said, “Be perfect”. But, I am not perfect. I am so far from it that I commit sins on a daily basis that earn me the eternal fires of hell.

Some of my high school friends have walked away from Christianity. Who could blame them. Others have become Theological Liberals. It’s as if their solution for silencing the thunder of Sinai is to pretend that Sinai was a myth. Act like it never happened. Pretend that it is just a "story" that is supposed to motivate us to be better people and make a positive difference in the world.

Both of these responses make perfect sense to me. A person can only live in despair for so long. That is exactly what this type of preaching did. It created utter despair in me.

I was literally withering under the heat of God’s law.

But what I didn’t know is that is exactly what God’s law is supposed to do to us. What was missing in my life was absolution.

More in the next post.

Comments

[Kelly]

Great posts! I can't wait till we get out of the grips of despair here and move along the Gospel! Oh, the anticipation. :o)

Despair was your reaction to the Law. The other dangerous reaction, as you know and have seen, is self-righteousness-- the belief that we really can sufficiently do it if we try hard enough. After all, God would never had commanded anything we couldn't do, right? My husband tells of a friend of his in the Holiness movement who was convinced that now that he was "in," he didn't sin anymore. My husband knew this guy and knew better. After questioning him a bit over things like breaking the speed limit, it was clear that the guy didn't consider those things to be "really" sin! In order to maintain this false front of perfectionism and the "victorious life," he was having to resort to dishonesty and self-deception.

And all these books that give us a manageable little set of steps and principles in order to please God, keep his Law, and be "real" Christians are likewise leading people into ultimate despair or false security: places where the Gospel is not welcome.

[Kirby L. Wallace]

By coincidence, I've been writing on the same subject:

http://www.kirbywallace.com/KirbyWallaceIndex.asp?action=uniuslibri&articleid=36

Hope you like it...

[Theresa K.]

Chris,

I love the title of this post: Despair. It is an apt description of the state of being of many evangelicals, fundamentalists and pentecostals. Despair that they will never be good enough for God.

My book was Happiness is a Choice (by Minirth and Meier). I must have at least half of that book highlighted! I keep it and a few of the other law-based books I used to study on my bookshelf. I used to make lists of all the things I need to do in order to please God and therefore be happier. Not that there is anything wrong with lists or trying to be discplined, but without the grace message that none of us can ever please God nor be good enough for God the lists just provide more guilt for Satan to bind us with. I believe that Satan loves it when Christian despair.

[Frank Marron]

Chris, these are good posts! The true Gospel, which is usually hidden from believers under huge piles of legalism, is that Christ is our Substitute. What we never could do perfectly, He did forusin our stead. The modern American mind cannot accept this substitutionary message. Perhaps you could touch on this a bit in a post?

[Steve Lownes]

Good post Chris. I worked at Focus on the Family, too, during the Arcadia, Monrovia and Pomona Years. It was ugly. I went through exactly what you went through. I married a woman from Focus and she later divorced me because God told her to. I became "Unspiritual" after converting to Lutheranism and going to a "dead church" I think were her words. Anyway great post. Keep it up.

[Andreas]

Thanks for a great post.. It's necessary to hear the law explained / expounded, and I must say I'm looking forward to the grace part! :)

God bless you brother.

[Larry Hughes KY]

This is spot on the money. I became a Christian late in life by a strong proclamatin of Christ crucified but lost him in my SB training. But it sounds the same. At one point I contemplated ending it all but only the fear of not knowing restrained me. I though, if I'm lost, no need running to the gallows. But 'death' seemed to be a relief from the doubt and struggles with sin. And not the external peccadilos, the real internal that I felt very sharply, "I don't love God". But you'd never confess that in such churches for fear of being hung. In fact it would shock them so much they wouldn't know how to respond, "you don't love God." They don't grasp that problem.

You throw in the baptism issue, did I have faith before or not, and what were/are the signs of this and I went WELL beyond navel gazing. I would analyze and rack myself inwardly to the nth degree trying to see if what I did was faith, right down to the last blasted detail.

I went to promise keepers, spent hours in prayer, this help group that help group, rededicate, walk the aisle, give all this time. But immediately afterward it would come, "did you really give all, surely not."

No absolution whatsoever, no Gospel. If a man stares into the Law long, if the Gospel doesn't come he must fall away for the searing Law of God forces one to flee the God of wrath by either denying the full strength of the law by some form of "I can do it and have" OR denying God out right. Nitchze did this very thing. He looked into the Law of God and sans the Gospel concluded as only man can, not being able to stand the searing truth, "It must not be true, I don't see my ability to do it." From there the Quintessential atheist is birthed.

Larry

[Scott]

Galatians 3:24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
Gal 3:25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.

The Law's purpose was to differentiate the Israelites from the rest of the world. To show that their God was different from the pagan gods. The Law pointed toward Christ and only He was able to keep the Law -- nobody else ever has.

Gal 3:26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

People today seem to forget the last five words in this verse -- it is through faith that a person is saved and faith alone.

Mat 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Think about "being perfect" in a slightly different manner -- "perfect" as in mature or finished. While believers are in their vessels of flesh, they should strive for maturity in Christ, but recognize that they are carnal creatures. Even Paul recognized his sinful state, but he did not despair. Instead he kept pressing forward, repentant and seeking God's forgiveness.

Heb 13:20-21 Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, (21) Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

So can a believer in Jesus Christ be perfect? Yes, as long as he or she is Spirit led. Are believers perfect? No, because they do succumb to their flesh. Believers do not have to sin, but they do choose to sin. But God is a God of grace and mercy and forgives those who are repentant (1 John 1:9). The Holiness movement deceives people and those who say they do not sin, deceive themselves -- see 1 John 1.