Grace

Grace
Jack Radcliffe
6/3/2013
Like many who had the opportunity to read his books or hear him speak, I was brought to my knees by the recent death of Brennan Manning. Not because I was close to him or grieved for his loss personally. Rather, his passing brought me back to the place I had unfortunately drifted from long ago: accepting that God loves me as I am and not as I should be.

It's called grace—God's preference for us, his favor that we clearly do not deserve. It's a message that washes clean the deepest wounds of guilt- and shame-ridden souls. I've discovered that the longer one walks according to the prescriptions of the Christendom of this age, the harder it is to live in grace.

Ten years ago I preached, taught the grace of God, and witnessed his grace renewing more lives than I could count. I also woke up one day realizing that it was a hard thing to accept. Everything I did told the Lord, "Sit back, Jesus, and watch. I'll make you proud. I'll do better!" I kept Jesus at a distance with one hand while begging him to come closer with the other. Grace wasn't enough for me. Salvation belonged to God, but for some reason I believed that the responsibility was on me.

The truth is, we can't follow Jesus without grace. In 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, Paul, an incredibly intelligent, gifted, and spiritually insightful man chose to talk about his weakness. His life in Christ was marked not by what he did or didn't do but by God's grace, which Paul says is sufficient. For emphasis, he adds that God's power is made perfect in Paul's weakness.

God doesn't demand perfection. He is himself perfection, and he wants to be seen through our weakness. He has chosen weakness as the stage on which to demonstrate his power. And to our self-sufficient, self-improvement way of thinking, Paul says that God isn't interested in our becoming better but in our becoming new.

We struggle to believe this. After speaking to audiences all over the world, Manning said that most of us don't believe that God loves us as we are. We work hard to earn approval and improve ourselves. We resist grace.

The truth that I resisted grace eventually soaked my heart and mind. It was both convicting and freeing to be open and honest before my God. Rich Mullins, a friend of Manning's, wrote a lyric long ago that has become the cry of my heart: “If I can, let me fall on the grace that first brought me to you.”

To the other grace resisters out there: May you fall on that grace, too.