The Tenacity of Grace--September 22, 2022

The Tenacity of Grace--September 22, 2022    

"I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.  Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize?  Run in such a way that you may win it.  Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified." [1 Corinthians 9:23-27]

This life--the life of following the Jesus way--isn't play-acting or shadowboxing.  It matters, and it counts for something, what we do with these lives we have.

Sometimes we can forget that and end up just "playing church," where we treat our faith like a quaint little hobby that doesn't make a meaningful difference in the world or in other people's lives on the grand scale.  Especially for folks in traditions like mine [the Lutheran one that] that rightly emphasize being saved by grace apart from our works, we can end up getting sloppy and thinking our actions don't matter in life.  "I'm saved by grace, no matter what I've done" can easily devolve into, "There's no reason to have any discipline or sacrifice in my life, since God is contractually obligated to let me into heaven when I die already because this one time I recited some words about Jesus."  So Paul is here to call us out when we are headed down that path, and to wake us up if we've let ourselves be persuaded by that train of thought already.

In a way, Paul's point is like being in a marriage.  When two people get married and promise each other to be faithful and to love each other "in sickness and in health," that is intended to be an unconditional kind of commitment.  You can rely on it, so that when the day comes that you get a bad diagnosis, you have assurance that your spouse will be with you to face it alongside you no matter what, rather than bailing out on you because it got difficult.  But it would clearly be a misunderstanding of what those marriage promises mean if someone said, "Because my spouse promised to love me in sickness and in health, I have no obligation to do anything to keep my body in good health or avoid dangerous behaviors that could hurt me!"  If anything, the opposite is true--when you make the promises of marriage to someone, you allow another person to bind their life to yours so you have even more reason take care of your own body, health, and life, if for no other reason than that other people depend on you now.  The promise made to you is unconditional, but it also calls forth a response for you to use your whole life--your money, your time, your attention, your energy, and your health--in the service of the one whom you to whom you have made the same promise.  The discipline that comes with all of that doesn't negate that the promise made to you was unconditional, but the promise of unconditional love doesn't give us permission to be apathetic in our lives, either.  

The Christian life has that same paradox to it.  God's promise of love is unconditional, and it is not dependent on our rule-following, good or bad behavior, or how strong or weak our faith is.  You can count on God to be faithful, and not to bail out on us when things get hard... or difficult... or messy.  And yet, we are called to a certain kind of dedication and urgency with our lives in light of that unconditional love.  We are called to give our selves away as Jesus has done for us.  We are called to the difficult discipline of letting our lives be shaped into the likeness of Christ's love.  We are called to rearrange our priorities, our choices, and our values, around the Reign of God.  But we do all those things, not because we are afraid that if we falter, God's love will have turned out to be conditional, but exactly because we know it is unchanging, unfailing, and unconditional.  We will sacrifice what is easy or comfortable or convenient for the sake of loving other people--not with the fear that if we don't do a good enough job we'll lose out on eternal life, but because we know how we have been loved first.

The tenacity of grace doesn't make the Christian life just a bunch of make-believe, but just the opposite; it makes us tenacious in grateful response.  The assurance that God will never quit or give out on us actually spurs us to the same kind of fierce devotion back to God... and to the world that God loves.  Where are the places we've been missing the point and getting complacent in our love, because [shrug], "You know, God will still love me if I'm an apathetic jerk"?  Where are the places we may need to have Paul wake us up and remind us that this life is not play-acting or pretend, but has a whole new seriousness in light of just how serious God takes the promise to love us?

Let's start there... and be done with the shadowboxing.

Lord Jesus, help us to take seriously the relentlessness of your love, so that we will be relentless lovers of all you place into our lives.