There’s nothing more difficult for us to get our minds around than the unconditional grace of God; it offends our deepest sensibilities. A conditional world is much safer than an unconditional world because a conditional world keeps us in control, it’s formulaic – do certain things and certain things are guaranteed to happen. We understand conditions. Conditionality makes sense. Unconditionality on the other hand is incomprehensible to us. We are so conditioned against unconditionality – we are told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment precedes acceptance; that achievement precedes approval.

Society demands two way love. Everything’s conditional: if you achieve only then will you receive meaning, security, respect, love and so on. But grace, as Paul Zahl points out, is one way love: “Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable.”

Like Job’s friends, we naturally conclude that good people get good stuff and bad people get bad stuff. The idea that bad people get good stuff is thickly counter-intuitive. It seems terribly unfair. It offends our sense of justice. Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace– “don’t take it too far; keep it balanced.” The truth is, however, that a “yes grace but” posture is the kind of posture that perpetuates slavery in our lives and in the church. Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no “but”: it’s unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. As Doug Wilson put it recently, “Grace is wild. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows the banks. Grace messes up your hair. Grace is not tame. In fact, unless we are making the devout nervous, we are not preaching grace as we ought.”

In Luke 7:36-50 we find the famous account of the sinful woman (most likely a prostitute) barging into a party of religious leaders and washing the feet of Jesus with her tears of repentance. There are two rescues happening in this passage: the obvious rescue of the immoral person but also the rescue of the moral person.

Normally when we think of people in need of God’s rescuing grace, we think of the unrighteous and the immoral. But what’s fascinating to me is that throughout the Bible, it’s the immoral person that gets the Gospel before the moral person; it’s the prostitute who gets grace; it’s the Pharisee who doesn’t. What we see in this story is that God’s grace wrecks and then rescues, not only the promiscuous but the pious.

The Pharisee in this story can’t understand what Jesus is doing by allowing this woman to touch him because he assumes that God is for the clean and competent. But Jesus here shows him that God is for the unclean and incompetent and that when measured against God’s perfect holiness we’re all unclean and incompetent. Jesus shows him that the gospel isn’t for winners, but losers: it’s for the weak and messed up person, not the strong and mighty person. It’s not for the well-behaved, but the dead.

Remember: Jesus came not to effect a moral reformation but a mortal resurrection (moral reformations can, and have, taken place throughout history without Jesus. But only Jesus can raise the dead, over and over and over again). As Gerhard Forde put it, “Christianity is not the move from vice to virtue, but rather the move from virtue to grace.”

Wrecking every religious category he had, Jesus tells the Pharisee that he has a lot to learn from the prostitute, not the other way around.

The prostitute on the other hand walks into a party of religious people and falls at the feet of Jesus without any care as to what others are thinking and saying. She’s at the end of herself. More than wanting to avoid an uncomfortable situation, she wanted to be clean–she needed to be forgiven. She was acutely aware of her guilt and shame. She knew she needed help. She understood at a profound level that God’s grace doesn’t demand that you get clean before you come to Jesus. Rather, our only hope for getting clean is to come to Jesus. Only in the Gospel does love precede loveliness. Everywhere else loveliness precedes love.

I recall a story that Rod Rosenbladt told me when we were together at the recent Gospel Coalition conference in Chicago. It’s a story about a middle-aged woman who needed help from her pastor.

She went to her pastor and said, “Pastor, you know that I had an abortion a number of years ago?”  “Yes,” the Pastor replied.  “Well, I need to talk to you about the man I’ve since met.”  “Alright,” replied the Pastor.

“Well, we met a while back, and started dating and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. Then things got more serious between us and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. A while later we got engaged and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. Then we got married and I thought, I really need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. So I needed to talk to someone, Pastor, and you’re it.”

The Pastor replied, “You know, we have a service for this. Let’s go through that together.” So they did – a service of confession and absolution.

When they were finished, she said to him, “Now I think I have the courage to tell my new husband about my abortion.  Thanks, Pastor.”

And the Pastor replied to her, “What abortion?”

What the Pharisee, the prostitute, and everyone in between, need to remember every day is that Christ offers forgiveness full and free from both our self-righteous goodness and our unrighteous badness. This is the hardest thing for us to believe as Christians. We think it’s a mark of spiritual maturity to hang onto our guilt and shame. We’ve sickly concluded that the worse we feel, the better we actually are. The declaration of Psalm 103:12 is the most difficult for us to grasp and embrace: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” Or, as Corrie ten Boom once said, “God takes our sins—the past, present, and future—and dumps them in the sea and puts up a sign that says ‘No Fishing allowed.’” This seems too good to be true…it can’t be that simple, that easy, that real!

It is true! No strings attached. No but’s. No conditions. No need for balance. If you are a Christian, you are right now under the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ. Your pardon is full and final. In Christ, you’re forgiven. You’re clean. It is finished.

What abortion?

When a lot of Christian’s think about “spirituality” they tend to think of it monastically, individualistically. In fact, in his book on sanctification, Harold Senkbeil writes, “What has developed under the guise of the practice of the Christian faith borders on a new monasticism.” Many of us, in other words, think about spirituality exclusively in terms of personal piety, internal devotion, and spiritual formation.

We focus almost entirely on ourselves and our private disciplines: praying, reading the Bible, and so on. That, we conclude, is what spirituality is first and foremost. And while personal disciplines are indispensable aspects of staying tethered to the truth of gospel (you’ll shrink without them), it’s interesting that when James makes his strong point in 2:14-26 about faith without works being dead, what he describes are not works of private spirituality but public service:  “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?”  (James 2:15)

As one of my friends wrote recently, “True Christianity may be personal, but it’s not private. It is wildly, unashamedly, thoroughly public.”

Similarly, in James 1:27 he writes (the only place in the Bible where the word “religion” is used positively):

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Even in that last phrase “keep oneself unstained from the world”, he’s not talking about monastic retreat, private meditation, or even personal piety. The contextual implication there  involves the need to “wash our hands of worldliness” which, throughout the book of James, is defined as self-absorption–a “my life for me” approach to life in contrast from a “my life for you” approach to life. Worldliness then, according to James, is me thinking always about me (see James 4:1-3).

Therefore, in both James 1:27 and 2:15, he’s making it clear that true spirituality actually take us away from ourselves and into the messy lives of other people. It is, in other words, not introverted, but extroverted—it doesn’t take me deeper into me; it sends me away from me. Real spirituality is forgetting about yourself, washing your hands of you.

That’s quite different from the current way our individualistic and subjectivistic culture thinks about spirituality. Almost everything that is considered “spirituality” today is private and focuses on the inner life and personal betterment of the individual. This subjectivistic spirit of our age has seeped into the Evangelical church. “The evangelical orientation”, writes Sinclair Ferguson, “is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward.” One serious consequence of engaging in this type of morbid introspection, this propensity to “spiritualized navel-gazing”, is that when we do we fail to see the needs of our neighbor and serve them–which is James’ definition of “good works.” After all, as Martin Luther said, “God doesn’t need our good works, but our neighbor does.”

The biggest difference between the practical effect of sin and the practical effect of the gospel is that sin turns us inward and the gospel turns us upward and outward.  Martin Luther picked up this imagery in the Reformation, arguing that sin actually bends or curves us upon ourselves (homo incurvatus in se).
We were designed to embrace God and others, but instead we are now consumed with ourselves. The gospel causes us to look up to Christ and what he did, out to our neighbor and what they need, not in to ourselves and how we’re doing. There’s nothing about the gospel that fixes my eyes on me. Any version of Christianity, therefore, that encourages you to think mostly about you is detrimental to your faith–whether it’s your failures or your successes; your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience.

The irony, of course, is that you and I are renewed inwardly to the degree that we focus not on inward renewal but upward worship and outward service. The more you see that the gospel isn’t about you, the more spiritual you will become.