Living Out Grace

This past weekend was our Healthy Relationships Seminar. Dr. Jeff & Linda Hood presented sessions on parenting, overcoming anger, and marital issues. Couples and singles attended, and while some couples were married believers, others were nonbelievers or 'unchurched,' and some are in unmarried relationships that also reflect their lost state.

I remember last year a woman who spent the following few months wrestling with her faith among us said that she brought her checkbook to the seminar because, in her experience, churches are always after your money one way or another. She was literally shocked that we never asked for anything.

This year a woman wrote in her evaluation: "I came to see what they were selling, but then I found out that they were just giving." What this woman experienced was a taste of grace. Grace is giving. It is counter-cultural. It doesn't command allegiance, but by its sheer power it demands it. Grace is one of the key factors that seperates Christianity from all other world religions. In reality if we put religions on a shelf in their various sections, Christianity really doesn't belong there. Not really. Until... we remove grace from the equation. We replace it with control, with legalism, with certainty not in what Christ has done but in what we've done through our religion. Then, we put Christianity back on the shelf as just another religion. We rob it of its power. Then, when I have conversations with people in our city, they say Christianity is the same as all the other religions, and as far as the graceless religion they have often encountered, its true. But when we open up the Scriptures and let the Word speak and take down our idols of religiosity, control, and self-justification, then we are free to live in community, participate fully in mission, and give -- give as we have been given to. Nothing kills fervor like religion, and nothing wakes up our hearts & makes us alive like Jesus.