Jonny Heart: Simply Grace

Monday, October 1, 2007

Simply Grace

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.
All have turned away; they have together become worthless;
There is no one who does good, not even one.”
(Romans 3:10b-12)

These verses scare me. Every time I read this section of Romans I get so depressed. I just can’t believe taking these words for their literal meaning, if I do then I am forced to impose it on myself and I love to think I am a good guy, a moral person, even a good Christian. I like to forget about this passage and go on living as if I fulfilled the meaning of perfection and have everyone look at me in aw. I am totally aware of the fact that I have fallen from God, and by doing so I deserve to die eternally. You know, this passage could even drive a person mad with anger and frustration because the resolution of it means that we could never come close to seeking God even when we believe otherwise. After countless hours of study, years of school, money, worship, and prayer I find that I still fail to seek God daily. Well let me go end my life now to finish my frustration. If any person opened the Bible to this page and read only these passages they would shut it thinking that Religion leads to a lost cause and therefore frivolous, I pray this never happens. In light of these harsh words, Paul points out that in my transgressions, because of my sins I disobeyed his law and deserve death in the gravest of meaning. Despite Paul’s tantalizing words I know he goes on to make a point of a deeper meaning and instead of depression my joy is made complete.

“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,… but because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.”
(Ephesians 2:1,4)

This passage reassures me. Instead of the guilt and anger I find joy when I read this passage. Grace can be hard to explain. The preacher today at my church gave this analogy.

A high school biology professor started of his class a little different one day seeing that it was exam day. All the students sat in their seats and opened their books to the chapters of the examination. The professor began a quick review over the chapters before handing out the exam. All the students did great at answering the questions, all participated and it was every teacher’s dream of the perfect class. Yet as the review began to wind down the material he came to no one knew. All the students began to panic and race through worry in their anxious thoughts. A student raised his hand and asked, “We didn’t cover this in class how did we know to study for it?” The professor responded, “You were responsible for everything covered in the chapters.” The review ended and the professor began to pass out the exam, face down. He told everyone not to start until everyone received it and he gave the go ahead. When the professor acknowledge to start, every student flipped over the exam worrying about how awful they would do. To every student’s surprise their names were written at the top of each exam in read and every correct answer already circled. They looked at him puzzled, and he responded with this, “I had mercy on you and gave you grace, I took the exam for you because unlike you I knew all the answers so because of me everyone of you passed with a 100 percent.” The class was dismissed.

Yes, I know I deserve the worst, but in light of God’s mercy he acted by taking the test himself and he passed with flying colors. In his death, all of your sins and my sins have been forgiven and in his resurrection bestowed life to all who accepted his gift of forgiveness. Do not find anguish in the guilt of your transgressions; instead find all happiness. Make your joy complete in God’s grace because it is the gift no one deserves, but in God’s love delivered it to us through the cross. Amen.

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."