This is a follow-up to my last post: http://pismo.blogspot.com/2014/10/score-card-christians.html in which I call out Christians (including myself) for falling into the legalistic trap of 'rating' our faith by what we've done, good or bad, and using that as a barometer for spiritual health, acceptance by God, etc.
Well this post is the counter-balance to that. Because if legalistic score-keeping is the one (most common) extreme, then the opposite extreme is what I call the grace-riders. This is when we DO understand the nature of God's grace and the 'it is finished'ness of the Gospel. But then we use it as a kind of "get out of jail free" card and as a way to keep sinning and then kind of say, "Well, Jesus paid it all. Thank God for grace!"
Not that any of us literally say that, of course. We aren't usually so blatant in the ways we take Jesus for granted. But if we do understand grace and the idea that Jesus already paid for our sins, we often use that as a license to let ourselves off the hook when we mess up. We abuse grace.
Put another way, on the one legalistic score-keeping extreme, when we sin we are riddled with guilt and shame and we mark ourselves off on our scorecard; or, on the contrary, when we get something right we self-righteously, smugly mark it on our scorecard and use it to feel that we're better than others. On the other, grace-riding extreme, when we sin we just wave it off and say, "Oh well, that's what grace is for!" And we don't really deal with the underlying issues and need for repentance, we simply ride the grace train and take it for granted.
I believe that the issue comes down to how we view God. We often view God as an employer or a boss. And even if our boss is good and we know our boss will have grace with us when we mess up, that only goes so far. Eventually, if we mess up enough times, a boss will terminate his relationship with us.
But if we instead view God as our Father, then the dynamic changes. A father never stops loving his children. He always wants what is best for his children. And when you understand that God's guidelines for sins and righteousness are for our own good (in our best interest) then being obedient is not an issue of following a boss's rules because breaking them will eventually result in termination of the relationship, but because breaking a father's rules results in breaking the heart of the father that created us and loves us and wants what's best for us.
That is, we aren't obedient to God because we're afraid of him canceling his relationship with us, or that he will stop loving us, or...whatever. We are obedient because we know that God's love for us is unconditional and that he always wants what's best for us and we want to give him honor and respect him accordingly.
In some ways, understanding grace should ultimately result in less sin than a legalistic mentality does. We shouldn't ever get caught up in the score-keeping. But we also can't fall into the trap of grace-riding either, taking for granted the great sacrifice that Jesus made by using it as a license to continue sinning.
Romans 6 (read it!)
