Infinite Grace For When You're Done Trying

“Jesus does not primarily come as an example; his job is not to model for us the answers to the big questions.  He’s not even primarily a teacher, telling us the answers to those questions.  No, he comes as a savior – to be the answer to the big questions.  To do for us what we could not hope to do on our own.”

                                                            Tim Keller, Encounters With Jesus, 103

Our God-given need to work, investing our time and energy working toward something is one proof that God exists.  The desire to work, the orderly nature of working toward something, the enjoyment of sitting back at the end of a job and saying, “It’s good,” all have their place in the opening pages of Genesis.  It is of God, the work itself and the enjoyment of the work (Ecclesiastes 3:13).

The problem comes in when we see the radical disparity between how the world is and how it is supposed to be, and assume that we can fix the disparity, too.  Our fallen hands might be made for working, but the fallen hands can’t fix the problem of the Fall, and the harder and harder we work on it, the worse and worse it gets.  Perhaps my point is helped on this 500-year anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses by a quote by him regarding his guilty conscience before he learned the doctrine of justification by faith:

“My conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, ‘You didn’t do that right.  You weren’t contrite enough.  You left that out of your confession.’  The more I tried to remedy an uncertain, weak and troubled conscience with human traditions, the more daily I found it more uncertain, weaker and more troubled” (quoted in Alistair McGrath, Reformation Thought, 72).

Most of us have taken our (God-given) ingenuity into our Christianity, and have assumed that to be a Christian is to try and live a good life so that in the end we’ll receive a pat on the back from God and be welcomed in for a job well done.  But the truth is that the Fall goes deeper than we think, and it is in fact in our hearts and on our hands.  So what I’m describing is like trying to clean a dirty hand with another dirty hand.

To be a Christian isn’t only to have a listening ear to what Jesus said, although it is that (Matthew 11:15; John 8:51, 18:37).  But to be a Christian means to give proper respect to what Jesus accomplished with His hands; that is, His life, death, resurrection, and continual sovereign working as the High Priest who brings dirty and lost people into His Father’s presence by grace through faith.  One doesn’t become a Christian by saying, “I’m done trying to live for me, so now I’m going to try to live for Jesus.”  They become a Christina when they say, “I’m done trying at all, because now I believe and know that Jesus lived, died, and rose for me, and now I belong to Him.”  The emphasis is off what they can do for Him, and on what He did for them.

And boy, do your hands find work to do once that grace pin drops in place!  But it isn’t the labor that you thought it would be.  These are good works prepared for you beforehand by your Father (Ephesians 2:10), and the overflow of thanksgiving put together with the very presence of the Spirit of Jesus inside of you compels you to live for Him who lives for you.

It is too obvious to say that the reason we can’t fix our problems today is the failure of the modern mind (all generations included) to look in faith on Jesus.  Everyone knows that already.  What is less obvious is why we can’t even look to Jesus in the first place.  It is because of our proud perceived abilities blinding us to our great need for reform from the inside out, which only the Son of Man can give.  Because there is so much we’re capable of, as God’s image-bearers, surely we can fix our core problems as humans.  But we can’t.  Only Jesus can. 

And though we can’t see this reality without the Spirit of truth, the Jesus of the Bible can bring us all the way there.  As Keller said above, Jesus didn’t come to give us the answers, but to be the answer.  And if you have doubts, consider the cross:  How capable are our hands if the piercing of His hands is the only hope that God saw for redeeming the fallen creation?

Let the church believe that we have a risen Lord who rules today, and has the power to build His church and advance His Kingdom beyond the schemes of the devil and rebellious man.  And let the church say so.