Grace for Righteous Living

There is probably a person you find it almost impossible to love. Every time they come to mind, something in you rises up to accuse. Jesus put His finger on why. The one you judge, you cannot love. The moment you take a seat as judge over someone, it becomes impossible to walk in love toward that person.

That is why, before Jesus ever asks you to love anyone, He does something about the law. If God had not taken the law away, He could never have expressed His love toward you. And if you had never received His love, you could never turn and give it away.

The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.

John 17:22-23 (NASB)

The witness that saves the world

What God is after here is a gospel community: a people who have received His love, and are then able to show that love back to Him, to one another, and to the world. A community like that is so powerful and so attractive that the whole world sees it and is drawn to it, and to a relationship with God.

This, not miracles, not signs and wonders, not money or wealth, is what will save the world. The most powerful witness Jesus has on the earth is the love of brethren. Moral law does not make Christianity unique. There are religions with equally admirable moral codes. What makes us different is love. That is what Jesus introduced into the world.

And none of it can happen while the law is the basis of the relationship. As long as you feel that God relates to you on the basis of law, you will feel judged and condemned, and you will never really receive His love. And what you have not received, you cannot give.

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.

Acts 1:8 (NASB)

We are called to be witnesses of Jesus. Witnesses of what, exactly? Of His love. When did you see it? When He showed it to you directly, and when He showed it to you through a brother or a sister. You witnessed it. So you can stand up and testify: Jesus is love; He loved me. You cannot say that honestly if law is the basis of your relationship with Him.

Grace does not hand you a license

Once you have been saved by grace through faith, you meet a dilemma. Do you go back to the law, the 613 commandments that could not save you, that condemned you, and let them regulate how you live? Or do you stay with grace, with what God has done for you and in you without any contribution from you, and let that teach you how to live?

Scripture is blunt. Venture back to the law and you make yourself a transgressor; you bring yourself under a curse, and you fall from grace. So the law is not an option. Grace is the only way, and the same grace that saves you also teaches you how to live.

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age...

Titus 2:11-12 (NKJV)

Notice the word: grace teaches. So grace, even though it completely removes any earning of God's blessing by your effort, does not give you a license to sin. It teaches and it enables you to live a godly life. The question is how.

How grace actually teaches

Think of the woman caught in the act of adultery. The law said stone her. Then grace appeared and delivered her from the death she deserved. Why could Jesus do that? Because He was on His way to the cross to die for her, and not for her alone but for everyone, including the men holding the stones.

But when that story ends, it is not even clear she has yet received Him. So He tells her, go and sin no more. Why give her that instruction? Not so she could succeed by willpower. If she walked out to sin no more on her own strength, she would fall straight back in. The law shows her she needs Him. That is its whole purpose. He also said, I am the light of the world; follow Me and you will have life. He told her to go, so that she would come back to Him and find rest.

Here is the pattern. Grace teaches you by first showing you what God has done for you. That is why grace is of faith and law is of works, because grace can never teach you what you have not first believed. He shows you how you have been loved, and if you believe it, you hear Him call you to love as you were loved. He shows you how patient He has been, and if you believe it, you hear Him call you to be patient. He shows you His kindness, and you hear Him call you to be kind.

Law does not work like this. Law says thou shalt and thou shalt not, and the very passion to do the opposite is stirred up in your flesh. Grace strikes first at the wickedness of the heart. Even though you were wicked, He loved you, saved you, was kind to you, and in that moment the wickedness is cut away, because in God's economy the way to defeat evil is to overwhelm it with good.

A woman who did what she had first been shown

There is another woman in the Gospels. Jesus is at the home of a Pharisee He had healed, and a woman of the city bursts in. She bends over Him weeping, breaks open an alabaster box of costly perfume, pours it on His feet, wipes them with her hair, and kisses them again and again. She gives Him everything she can, out of sheer love. Why? Because she had been forgiven and transformed, and she came.

Look closely, and everything she did for Jesus was something she had first seen Him do for her.

• She went after Him at great risk to her own life, because she had seen Him come after her at the risk of His.
• She worshiped and completely surrendered to Him, because she had seen Him surrender everything to the Father for her sake.
• She poured out all she owned on Him, because she had seen Him give His all and make it hers.
• She wept over Him, because she had seen Him weep over her.
• She wiped His feet with her hair, her glory, because she had watched Him wash her sins away.

Somehow she had seen Him in Gethsemane, crying, My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from Me. And she had heard the Father answer: yes, My Son, this cup can pass, but if it does, this woman will drink it and perish. And she heard Him say, not My will, but Yours be done. She surrendered to Him because He first surrendered for her.

So let me ask you plainly. Would you put your life on the line for the body of Christ, for this church? You only will if you have first seen how grace came after you. Do you still speak in terms of my money, my job, my car, my business? Perhaps you are still trying to be saved by how well you keep the law. If grace has truly saved you, you begin to see that He took His life and made it your life, His righteousness and made it yours, His seat in heaven and gave it to you, until you start to say His time, His life, His money, His business.

Two invitations

As long as you keep staring at the ten commandments, at the 613 you could never keep, your eyes stay veiled to the glorious gospel, to what God has already done in Jesus, the very thing that transforms you so that you can then do it toward God and toward others. The enemy's worst attack on the church is exactly this confusion of grace and law.

So there are two words I want to leave you with. The first is for the person who has not yet come to the end of himself, who still wants to be saved by his own effort. To you the word is almost blunt: go and try. Take six weeks and keep just one of the commandments perfectly, then come and let us talk. And come forward, so that grace can be prayed over you.

The second is for the person who already knows the real problem is the heart, that it is bent out of shape, deceitful, and beyond fixing by willpower. You do not want to hear go and sin no more. You want to hear, go in peace, your faith has saved you. Come too. Believe what has already been done for you, and let that love make you new. That is where a righteous life finally begins.