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Preaching graceHere’s the painful news. It’s hard, distressing, but it’s true, and you probably know it already. Evangelical Christians are not widely thought to be full of grace. The secular media regularly describes us in terms which we hardly recognise but which, to them, are self-evident. They don’t describe us as filled with love for others. They call us hypocrites, shrill, bigoted, judgmental, mean-spirited and Ð worst of all Ð Pharisaical. Even some fellow Christians have jumped on the bandwagon, and have been known to describe us as the Taliban, people who don’t know the meaning of God’s kindly welcome. This is not the place to explore why this has happened, but the frequency of the perception gives us a unique hurdle to our evangelism. We, of all people, are thought to be grace-less and hard, where the people who have gone soft or even abandoned the Reformation doctrine of ‘grace alone’ are thought to be loving, kind and accepting. So what do we do about it? If the mud sticksFirst, we need to examine ourselves and see where the caricature is true. Where we have emerged in the national consciousness recently it has been on the contentious moral issues of human embryology, sexuality and so on. Those things are rightly our concern, but too often people have heard what we disagree with without understanding why. We must always ensure, when we have the chance, that we explain clearly why we get so worked up about these questions. They matter to us not because we are morally or culturally in denial. They matter because of what they do to people. People matter to God and they matter to us. That is a grace-filled motivation that should dominate our contribution to these questions. Three sad divorcesSecondly, we need to keep together what others want to place as opposites. Some Christians speak as though standing up for the ‘hard truths’ of God’s judgment and his hatred of sin is an ungracious thing to do. But we reject this divorce between ‘truth’ and ‘grace’ as if concern for one makes the other diminish. No, Jesus was ‘full of grace and truth’ (John 1.14) and they were not at war in him. We also reject the divorce between a gospel of grace and a call to repentance, as if Jesus merely accepted people as they were and did not call them to change. No, Jesus announced the good news of the Kingdom of God over all nations through him, and insisted that the appropriate response was to repent (Mark 1.15). And we reject the divorce between love and obedience, because Jesus said that if we love him we will obey him, and if we don’t we won’t (John 14.23-24). Cheap graceThirdly, we must be careful not to oversimplify grace. The gospel is a single garment that cannot be torn in one place without ripping the whole. So we need to point out the dangers of misinterpreting grace as a simple ’Jesus loves you as you are’. True, the good news does come to people as they are, and Jesus forgives as we are, but that is not a broad enough statement of the gospel to stand alone. The account of the Corinthians being won for Christ includes the magnificent description ‘and that is what some of you were’ not ‘that is what some of you are’ (1 Corinthians 6.11). Jesus was not born to affirm us in our rebellious lifestyles as we are, but so save us from them, by his grace. So true grace will always include the notes of repentance and faith. And these inevitably involve rebuke, challenge and change. Unapplied graceLastly, we must therefore rid ourselves of the notion that applying the gospel of grace to people’s lifestyle is somehow illegitimate. When we call on people to repent, what are they to repent of? How are they, as Paul says, to ‘prove their repentance by their deeds’ (Acts 26.20)? If we don’t show how grace should impact our lifestyle, then we shall be as bad as the false teachers who ‘change the grace of God into a licence for immorality’ (Jude 1.4), or who ask, ‘shall we then sin, because we are not under law but under grace?’ (Romans 6.15). So here’s the good news — we do have a gospel of grace, and we are supposed to live it out and hold it out. We must model in ourselves and our churches that repentance is lifelong, and that our own need of grace does not stop when we have become Christians, or achieved some level of maturity. And if we do this, then we too will have churches full of testimonies from people who can say, ‘And that is what we were too, but God’s grace has even forgiven and transformed us — and if he can do that for me, I’m sure he can do it for you’. ‘Preaching Grace’ is the subject of the next Evangelists Conference. It is a day of clear thinking and teaching, testimonies from people transformed by God’s grace, and applied seminars to help us think more biblically and creatively about our outreach to others. The conference is for anyone engaged in the work of evangelism, whether as church leaders, member of the ministry team or involved in a part-time or voluntary capacity. ¥ Southern conference: All Souls Church, Langham Place, London. Tuesday October 7 2008. Chris Green,
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