One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (16 page)

The law says, Do, and life you’ll win;
but grace says, Live, for all is done;
the former cannot ease my grief,
the latter yields me full relief.
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So the Law serves us by showing us how to love God and others. But we fail to do this every day. And when we fail, it is the Gospel that brings comfort by reminding us that God’s infinite approval of us doesn’t depend on our keeping of the Law but on Christ’s keeping of the Law for us. And guess what? This makes me want to obey him more, not less! As Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “When I thought that God was hard, I found it easy to sin. But when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast to think that I could have rebelled against One who loved me so and sought my good.”
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Ultimately, though, even if we wanted to be free of the Law, we never could be. It is written on the heart; it is a part of our DNA. Rebellion and conformity are simply two sides of the same coin. As Martin Luther wrote in his “Treatise Against Antinomians,” “For if you resolve to [annul] the Law … you do no more in effect, but throw away the poor letters
L.A.W.
…”
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Or as Gerhard Forde is reported to have observed, “We may leave the church, but the Law goes with us.” Christian or non-Christian, the Law is as inescapable as oxygen. This is why Jady Koch writes, with tongue firmly in cheek, that “bigfoot called my unicorn an antinomian.”
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Bob Godfrey, president of Westminster Seminary in California, used to say in class that there have been many antinomian controversies throughout history, but in many cases the legalists won them by default, since the antinomians never showed. In other words, they’re hypothetical in the truest sense.

These claims certainly line up with my nearly twenty years of ministry experience. I’ve never actually met anyone who has been truly gripped by God’s amazing grace in the Gospel who is then so ungrateful that they don’t care about respecting or obeying Him. But this is not to imply that my fellow believers’ concerns are entirely unfounded.

MAKE A RULE OR BREAK A RULE

If the human propensity to self-justify is as widespread and deep-seated as the Bible claims it is, then we will use anything at our disposal in its service—even God’s grace itself. Like entitled children, we will pervert and subvert the gift of God’s one-way love to validate our self-centeredness, we will make grace into a new law. Our understanding of grace becomes a new righteousness of our own for us to wield like a weapon; we will use it like a shield to protect ourselves from the guilt and culpability the Law brings rather than as the only refuge from it. Remember, Christ came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.

What I think is going on in these situations, more often than not, is that these antinomians are not actually engaging in lawlessness but are wrapped up in a different form of legalism
.

Spend any time in the American church, and you’ll hear legalism and lawlessness presented as two ditches on either side of the Gospel that we must avoid.
Legalism
, they say, happens when you focus too much on Law (big L) or rules (little l), and
lawlessness
when you focus too much on grace. Therefore, in order to maintain spiritual equilibrium, you have to balance law and grace. If you start getting too much law, you need to balance it with grace. If you start getting too much grace, you need to balance it with law. I have come to believe that this “balanced” way of framing the issue can unwittingly keep us from really understanding the Gospel of grace in all of its radical depth and beauty.

It is more theologically accurate to say that the one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the Gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the Gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”). In other words, there are two “laws” that we typically choose from: the law that says, “I can find freedom and fullness of life if I keep the rules,” or the law that says, “I can find freedom and fullness of life if I break the rules.” Either way, you’re still trying to save yourself—which means both are legalistic, because both are self-salvation projects. “Make a rule” or “break a rule” really belong to the same passion for autonomy (self-rule). We want to remain in control of our lives and our destinies, so the only choice is whether we will conquer the mountain by asceticism or by license. Again, in the strictest sense, true antinomianism is really the only impossible heresy: if people reject God’s Law, they will simply replace it with one of their own making.

So it would be a mistake to identify the “two cliffs” as being legalism and lawlessness. What some call license is just another form of legalism. And if people outside the church are guilty of break-the-rules legalism, many people inside the church are still guilty of keep-the-rules legalism.

I make this diagnosis with such conviction, because I have engaged in both. You’ll recall that I spent the first twenty-one years of my life trying to find my identity and righteousness by being “bad.” At twenty-one, the God who loves sinners miraculously saved me, and I experienced a period of intense joy and gratitude. But then something unexpected began to happen. God’s grace gradually, imperceptibly faded from importance, and my response to grace took its place as the focus of my life. Once again, what I was doing became preeminent. I began to try to find my righteousness, my identity, freedom, and fullness in life by
keeping
the rules.

Up until that point, I struggled with what is the typical non-Christian response to the rules: break as many as you can and with as much gusto as you can!
Now, my struggle was with keeping the rules and, of course, making sure that everyone else did too. I actually came to believe (although I never would have said it in this way) that God would love me more if I was good and always colored inside the lines. I had my spiritual to-do list and relished every occasion to check something off it. Once again, I was building my own identity, my own righteousness, but this time it was a religious “Christian” righteousness, an identity of being the good son. I was just as enslaved to the Law when I was rebelling against it as when I was trying to follow it on my own strength.

You might say I switched from being the immoral woman to being Simon the Pharisee. And I became more loveless, more fearful, more driven, and more demanding. More
exhausted
. We’ll look a bit more closely at this tendency in the next chapter, but suffice it to say, it is no wonder that so many Christians who experience this kind of boot-camp mentality in the church walk away altogether.

GOD DOESN’T NEED OUR GOOD WORKS (BUT OUR NEIGHBORS DO!)

What usually follows the laziness and license objections is a concern that championing the cause of unconditional grace overlooks or understates the importance and necessity of good works. This concern revolves around what someone means by “good works” and, more specifically, who are they for? There is a lot of confusion inside the church today regarding these questions. Misunderstanding this issue may be, in my opinion, the primary thing that keeps Christians feeling exhausted.

No one dealt with this better than Martin Luther. One of his most helpful contributions was his distinction between passive righteousness and active righteousness. This distinction was Luther’s way to describe the two relationships in which Christians live: before God vertically and before one another horizontally.

Luther asserted that our righteousness before God (
coram Deo
) is received and defined by faith. Our righteousness before one another (
coram mundo
), on the other hand, is active and defined by service. The passive righteousness of faith (vertical righteousness) is what makes us right before God—fully and finally. The active righteousness of works (horizontal righteousness) serves the well-being of creation and culture by loving and serving our neighbors.

This distinction is so helpful because whenever we discuss Christian growth, the doctrine of sanctification, or the practice of godliness, the insinuation is that
my
effort,
my
works,
my
faith,
my
response, and
my
obedience keep me in God’s good graces—the more I do “for God,” the more He loves me. This, however, undermines the clear biblical teaching that things between Christians and God are forever settled because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross (Rom. 8:1, 31–39; Col. 2:13–14). When we imply that our works are for God and not for others, we perpetuate the idea that God’s love for us is dependent on what we do instead of on what Christ has done. We also fall prey to what John Piper calls “the debtors ethic”—paying God back for all He’s done for us.

However, when we understand that everything between God and us has been fully and finally made right—that Christians live their lives under a banner that reads “It is finished”—we necessarily turn away from ourselves and turn toward our neighbors. Forever freed
from
our need to pay God back or secure His love, we are now free
to
love and serve others. We work for others horizontally (active righteousness), because God has worked for us vertically (passive righteousness). The Christian lives from belovedness (passive righteousness) to loving action (active righteousness). His love
for
us begets love
from
us. “We are objects of love before we are subjects who love,” as my friend Jono Linebaugh likes to say. So, good works and the imperatives that describe them are not called for to establish standing with God, but to serve our neighbors. Life after justification does not eliminate good works, it just “horizontalizes” them.
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This is what Paul was getting at when he said in Galatians 5:6, “The only thing that counts is faith [passive righteousness] expressing itself through love [active righteousness]” (
NIV
). Faith alone, in other words, gives the power to love.

Passive righteousness tells us that God does not need our good works. Active righteousness tells us that our neighbors do. The aim and direction of good works are horizontal, not vertical. So on the horizontal plane—in creature-to-creature relationships (active righteousness)—we can happily talk about effort, action, good works, etc. But it’s important to remember two things.

First, it is the passive righteousness of faith that precedes and produces the active righteousness of love for others. Or, to put it another way, our active righteousness, which plays out horizontally, is the fruit of our passive righteousness we are given from God, vertically.

Second, and this is extremely important, our hearts work like magnets that always draw the horizontal (nonsaving) plane toward the vertical. Like a car with bad wheel alignment, we will naturally veer toward viewing our good works as a way of keeping things settled with God on the vertical plane rather than as a way of serving our neighbors on the horizontal. So while we never want to eschew talking about and praising the works of faith-fueled service that spring out of a forgiven heart, we err on the side of emphasizing the passive righteousness that inspires such works.

DISCIPLINED ABOUT DISCIPLINISM

You might ask, “What about the seemingly vertical work of spiritual disciplines? Aren’t practices like prayer, Bible reading, going to church, etc., a work that is directed to God? And what about fighting sin in our lives? Isn’t that an ongoing work intended to keep God pleased with us?” These are important questions.

Many Christians have assumed (and have been taught!) that Bible reading, prayer, etc., is the way to keep God happy with us—that the more we pray and read our Bibles, the more He will love us. Consciously or not, we often do these things to maintain God’s favor. Such reasoning, whether explicitly taught or implicitly caught, could not be more mistaken or toxic! We read the Bible and pray and go to church and partake of the sacraments, because it is in those places that God reminds us that things between Him and us are forever fixed. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and everything we need, in Christ we already possess.

Moreover, when we read the Bible and go to church, pray, etc., we hear descriptions of what loving our neighbors actually looks like on the ground of everyday life. Liberated from the burden and bondage of using the Law to establish our righteousness before God, Christians can look to imperatives not as conditions that have to be met but as helpful descriptions and directions for serving one’s neighbor. The Law, in other words, norms neighbor love—it shows us what to do and how to do it. Once a person is emancipated from the natural delusion that keeping the rules makes us right with God, and in faith believes the counterintuitive reality that being made righteous by God’s forgiving word precedes and produces loving action, then the justified person is unlocked to love. In his hymn “Jesus Christ Our Savior,” Martin Luther put it this way: “Fruit of faith therein be showing that thou art to others loving; to thy neighbor thou wilt do as God in love hath done to you.”

If we fail to read our Bibles and pray and so on in this spirit, we will turn even those things—good things!—into self-salvation projects. In fact, we might turn them into self-salvation projects anyway. Praise God that His mercy extends even to those of us who fail to integrate it.

The same reasoning applies to how we fight sin and resist temptation. Sin and temptation are always self-centered after all, or as Augustine put it, “mankind turned in on himself.” Failing to believe that everything we need we already have in Christ, we look under every worldly rock and behind every worldly tree for something to make us happy, something to save us, something to set us free. The works of the flesh—“sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Gal. 5:19–21)—are simply the fruit of our attempts to save ourselves.