Grace Doesn't Make Sense

Many surveys have found that a majority of church-going Christians believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is a verse in the Bible. More importantly, most believe the principle of God helping those who help themselves defines who and what God is and the relationship He offers us. The truth is just the opposite. Those who realize that they cannot help themselves and cannot earn their own salvation accept Jesus Christ as sufficient to do what they can never do.
Every salvation comes from the grace of God. BUT GRACE DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. Grace doesn’t add up. Why would Jesus come to be one of us, to pay a debt He did not owe, because we owed a debt we could not pay? Why would He pay for our sins in advance, before we were even alive to commit them? Why would He do that? Free? No strings? What was in it for Him? What if we take advantage of His willingness to forgive us every time we sin? What if we take advantage of God’s unconditional love? Surely there is some point when God’s patience and grace ends, and when we become toast and chopped liver.
Remember the parable of the unforgiving debtor in Matthew 18:21-35? Jesus gave this parable to explain the magnitude of God’s grace, and that His grace has no limitations or conditions.
Act one of the parable paints the story of a financial manager who finds that he owes his employer a staggering amount of money, perhaps a much as the annual revenue of a small nation or city-state.
Jesus does not tell us why the manager had come to owe this prodigious sum of money. Perhaps Jesus didn’t want us to get lost in obsessing over the sleazy sins that resulted in the manager’s debt. How the debt added up is not the point of this parable. The point is that the manager’s debt is far beyond his resources or that of his family ever to repay. When he stood before his employer for an accounting, the manager heard the verdict that his entire family and all of his possessions would have to be sold to begin the repay the debt.
The financial manager threw himself on the mercy of his employer, begging for time so that he could repay his debt. His employer responded with something the indebted manager would never have dreamed of, and certainly would not have asked for. His debt was being canceled. All of it! No strings. No conditions.
*** The debt that we owe God is so enormous that there is no human way we can settle the account. Our situation is hopeless. We are powerless to repay our debt. There is no human act or combination of actions – deeds, virtues, efforts, good works – that can pay the bill. When the debtor throws himself upon the mercy of the employer, and not before, he is forgiven. Only when we accept our inability to save ourselves and express our complete faith and belief in Jesus Christ to do for us what neither we nor religion can ever do, then our debt is paid. However, as long as religion convinces us that we can stumble along somehow taking care of our own bills, our debt remains unpaid. And there are a lot of religions in the world that do this.
But now the parable gets ugly and personal – after grace, then what? After grace, how should we live? Act two of the parable depicts the manager who was forgiven, redeemed, and reconciled – the same man who was rescued, saved, and freed from his debt – going out and refusing to forgive one of his debtors.
Fresh from the riches of mercy and grace just given to him, he goes out and meets a peer. His contemporary owes him a meager amount compared to the staggering debt the manager had just been forgiven. According to the parable, the newly forgiven man grabs that person by the neck and screams at him, “Pay me what you owe me.” And as we read this part of the parable, we protest, “Oh no, that can’t be! How can this man act that way?”
And that’s one of the morals of this parable – if we realize we have been forgiven, we will be forgiving, even if it takes some painful experiences to help us understand that we cannot be anything but forgiving.
Who are we, the forgiven, to do anything but forgive? Our mission is to tell others about God’s amazing grace. Our calling is to share the unbelievably good news that God’s grace is good enough and sufficient for our salvation. We have the precious opportunity of telling others that God (the ultimate employer) is looking for them and that God will forgive them once they fall at His feet and ask for His grace.
God’s grace leads us to display and reflect (not produce, for we cannot produce enough to repay) grace to others so that others may see Jesus through what He is doing in our lives.

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