One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World

To my son Nate

Your confidence, generosity, humor, tenderness, humility, bravery, teachability, and selflessness are a great testimony to what happens when someone understands how God’s one-way love secures them.

Contents

Cover

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1: AN EXHAUSTED WORLD

CHAPTER 2: HOW I ALMOST KILLED MY MOTHER

CHAPTER 3: CONFESSIONS OF A PERFORMANCIST

CHAPTER 4: I FOUGHT THE LAW (AND THE LAW WON)

CHAPTER 5: EX-CONVICTS, FAILED DISCIPLES, AND ONE-WAY LOVE

CHAPTER 6: THE UNEXPECTED BENEFITS OF HUGGING A CACTUS

CHAPTER 7: GRACE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

CHAPTER 8: AN OFFENSIVE GIFT

CHAPTER 9: OBJECTIONS TO ONE-WAY LOVE

CHAPTER 10: THE END OF TO-DO LISTS

Extras

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book started out as a series of sermons I preached a couple of years ago entitled “Pictures of Grace.” It was my attempt to explore the crazy, counterintuitive nature of God’s grace as seen through various episodes in the life and ministry of Jesus. Convinced that grace is
way
more drastic,
way
more gratuitous,
way
more liberating, and
way
more scandalous than any of us realize, I sought to help our church get a better grip on grace, realizing that what we need most is to be startled, surprised, even shocked by it.

But this book is not the sermons. Well, it would be more accurate to say that this book is much, much more than the sermons. And for that, I have a few people I really want to thank.

My good friend Elyse Fitzpatrick took the transcriptions and provided a working draft. It’s not an easy thing to go through pages and pages of transcribed sermons and “clean things up.” Elyse is the best of the best. Thank you, friend!

Once Elyse was done, my good friend David Zahl and I went to work. David’s skill with words, existential “in-touch-ness,” and theological insightfulness is a rare combination. He filled in the gaps, provided the polish, and made this book what it is from beginning to end. As I’ve said before, he is a writer/editor/thinker of the highest rank. Thanks, David! You and I both know this book would not exist without you!

I also want to thank my agent, Sealy Yates, who believes in what God has compelled me to say and wants to do everything he can to help me say it.

And finally, I want to thank my Coral Ridge church family. It’s a privilege to be your pastor. I’m grateful beyond words for your willingness to wrestle with the scandalous nature of God’s amazing grace week in and week out.

INTRODUCTION

A few years ago, I read something astonishing. Dr. Richard Leahy, a prominent psychologist and anxiety specialist, was quoted as saying, “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.”
1
It turns out the problem wasn’t limited to an age group. In 2007,
The New York Times
reported that three in ten American women confess to taking sleeping pills before bed most nights.
2
The numbers are so high and unprecedented that some are calling it an epidemic.

This came across my screen about the same time that the news broke about the meteoric rise of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, shooting up from 7 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2010.
3
When those under the age of thirty were polled, that percentage more than doubled again, to nearly 35 percent.
4
While the numbers themselves were a bit of a shock, I wish I had been more surprised by the findings. From my vantage point as a pastor, I can tell you, it is truly heartbreaking out there. The Good News of God’s inexhaustible grace for an exhausted world has never been more urgent.

What I see more than anything else is an unquestioning embrace of performancism in all sectors of life. Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly to our performance and accomplishments. Performancism casts achievement not as something we do or don’t do but as something we are or aren’t. The colleges those teenagers eventually attend will be more than the place where they are educated—they will be the labels that define the students’ values as human beings in the eyes of their peers, their parents, and themselves. The money we earn, the cars we drive aren’t merely reflective of our occupation; they are reflective of us, period. How we look, how intelligent we are, and what people think of us are more than descriptive; they are synonymous with our worth. In the world of performancism, success equals life, and failure is tantamount to death. This is the reason why people would rather end their lives than confess that they’ve lost their jobs or made a bad investment.

This is not to say that accomplishments are somehow bad, or even that they aren’t incredibly important. It is simply to say that there is a difference between taking pride in what we do and worshipping it. When we worship at the altar of performance—and make no mistake, performancism is a form of worship—we spend our lives frantically propping up our images or reputations, trying to do it all—and do it all well—often at a cost to ourselves and those we love. Life becomes a hamster wheel of endless earning and proving and maintenance and management and controlling, where all we can see is our own feet. Performancism causes us to live in a constant state of anxiety, fear, and resentment until we end up heavily medicated, in the hospital, or just really, really unhappy.

Sadly, the Christian church has not proven to be immune to performancism. Far from it, in fact. In recent years, a handful of books have been published urging a more robust, radical, and sacrificial expression of the Christian faith. I even wrote one of them—
Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different
. I heartily amen the desire to take one’s faith seriously and demonstrate before the watching world a willingness to be more than just Sunday churchgoers. That Christians would want to engage the wider community with God’s sacrificial love—living for their neighbors instead of for themselves—is a wonderful thing and should be applauded. The unintended consequence of this push, however, is that if we’re not careful, we can give people the impression that Christianity is first and foremost about the sacrifice we make for Jesus rather than the sacrifice Jesus made for us; our performance for him rather than his performance for us; our obedience for him rather than his obedience for us. The hub of Christianity is
not
“do something for Jesus.” The hub of Christianity is “Jesus has done everything for you.” And my fear is that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of Christian faith is our love for God instead of God’s love for us. Don’t get me wrong—what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

Furthermore, it often seems that the Good News of God’s grace has been tragically hijacked by an oppressive religious moralism that is all about rules, rules, and more rules. Doing more, trying harder, self-help, getting better, and fixing, fixing, fixing—ourselves, our kids, our spouses, our friends, our enemies, our culture, our world. Christianity is perceived as being a vehicle for good behavior and clean living—and the judgments that result from them—rather than the only recourse for those who have failed over and over and over again.

Sadly, too many churches have helped to perpetuate the impression that Christianity is primarily concerned with legislating morality. Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good. The heart of the Christian faith is Good News, not good advice, good technique, or good behavior. Too many people have walked away from the church, not because they’re walking away from Jesus, but because the church has walked away from Jesus. Ask any of the “religious nones” who answered their census questions differently in past years, and I guarantee you will hear a story about either spiritual burnout or heavy-handed condemnation from fellow believers, or both. Author Jerry Bridges puts it perfectly when he writes:

My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we’ve performed well—whatever “well” is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works, rather than by grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the “sweat” of our own performance.

Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to “try harder.” We seem to believe success in the Christian life (however we define success) is basically up to us: our commitment, our discipline, and our zeal, with some help from God along the way. We give lip service to the attitude of the Apostle Paul, “But by the grace of God I am what I am (1 Cor. 15:10), but our unspoken motto is, “God helps those who help themselves.”
5

What Bridges describes is nothing less than the human compulsion for taking the reins of our lives and our salvation back from God, the only One remotely qualified for the job.
Works righteousness
is the term the Protestant Reformation used to describe spiritual performancism, and it has plagued the church—and the world—since the Garden of Eden. It might not be too much of an overstatement to say that if Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives, to restore sight to the blind and give freedom for the oppressed, then Christianity has come to stand for—and in practice promulgate—the exact opposite of what its founder intended (Luke 4:18–19).

To be clear, I do not mean to imply that Christians don’t believe in grace. It is just that we have a hard time with grace alone. As Max Lucado recently observed, “It wasn’t that [certain Christians in the book of Acts] didn’t believe in grace at all. They did. They believed in grace a lot. They just didn’t believe in grace alone.”
6
This book is a clarion call away from “grace a lot” and toward “grace alone.” In other words, it’s a passionate plea backward—back to the time when brave men like Martin Luther staked their lives on the sola of grace. As Robert Capon writes:

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace—bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel—after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started.
7

It has been roughly five hundred years since the Reformation. And looking at the church today, it is obvious that we are overdue for another one. Indeed, what a terrible irony it is that the very pack of people who claim that God has unconditionally saved and continues to sustain them by His free grace are the same ones who push back most violently against it. Far too many professing Christians sound like ungrateful children who can’t stop biting the hand that feeds them. It amazes me that you will hear great concern from inside the church about too much grace, but rarely will you ever hear great concern from inside the church about too many rules. Indeed, the absurdity of God’s indiscriminate compassion always gets “religious” people up in arms. Why? Because we are, by nature, glory-hoarding, self-centered control freaks—God wannabes. That’s why.

But the situation is more than ironic; it is tragic. It is tragic, because this kind of moralism can be relied upon to create anxiety, resentment, rebellion, and exhaustion. It can be counted upon to ensure that the church hemorrhages the precise people whom Jesus was most concerned with: sinners.

Are you exhausted? Angry? Anxious? Fearful? Guilty? Lonely? In need of some comfort and
genuinely
good news? In other words, are you at all like me? Then this book is for you. I can’t promise it will answer all your questions or cover every theological base. But I can promise that you won’t hear any buts, you won’t feel the tapping of the brakes, and you won’t read a list of qualifications. What you will encounter is “grace unmeasured, vast and free”—the kind that will frighten and free you at the same time. That’s what grace does, after all.

It is high time for the church to honor its Founder by embracing
sola gratia
anew, to reignite the beacon of hope for the hopeless and point all of us bedraggled performancists back to the freedom and rest of the Cross. To leave our ifs, ands, or buts behind and get back to proclaiming the only message that matters—and the only message we
have
—the Word about God’s one-way love for sinners. It is time for us to abandon, once and for all, our play-it-safe religion and get drunk on grace. Two-hundred-proof, unflinching grace. It’s shocking and scary, unnatural and undomesticated, but it is also the only thing that can set us free and light the church—and the world—on fire.

NOTES