Accepting Our Need For Grace

In the Timothy Keller book I’m reading he writes, “To the degree you understand your need for grace, to that degree faith explodes in your life in the form of love.”* The problem comes in our ability to see our need for grace.

I’ve written before about Jesus coming to Simon the Pharisee’s house for dinner. (Luke 7:26-50) While at the table, a woman comes in and kneels at Jesus feet. She’s crying and wiping her tears from his feet with her hair and anointing his feet with perfume. She is described as living “a sinful life”.  Simon thinks, “if only he knew what type of woman she is, he wouldn’t let her near him. If he really were a prophet, he’d know she was a sinner.” We know what Simon was thinking because Jesus knew. He is God, remember. But Simon couldn’t see that.

 Jesus tells Simon a story about two men who owed another money, one significantly more than the other. The man who held the debt forgave the debt of the man who owed the most. Amazing. The other man owed considerably less, but his debt was also paid. “Who loves the debt reliever more?” Jesus asked.  Simon responded, “well, of course, the one who’d been forgiven the most debt.” Ah, so it is with this woman. 

Simon had no idea who Jesus really was. And Simon also saw himself as superior to this woman, and probably to Jesus too, since he hadn’t been a very gracious host to Jesus. But the woman, she knew her sin, and she recognized her Savior. She loved more because she knew her sin was great and His forgiveness amazing. Simon, probably not believing he had much to be forgiven at all, didn’t see what was right in front of him. Jesus tells the woman, “your sins are forgiven…your faith has saved you.”

We could look right at Jesus and not see Him. Like Simon, our sin blocks our view. “No human being seeks the true God. We seek spirituality, but the human heart wants a God who fits our desires, a God we can control, who doesn’t challenge our self-assessments and narratives.”*

Interesting that we will seek all manner of ways to fix ourselves. Self-help books fly off the shelves. We know we need some fixing; some of us might even believe we need a lot of fixing. But self-help books and therapy can only take us so far. They can’t forgive us our sins. They can’t heal our guilt. But they also don’t require much of us. If we admit we need Jesus and respond to his moves, we might have to give up something – ourselves – and we find that quite hard to do. Self-help only asks as much as we are willing to give, with very little success as result. Jesus asks for our entire self, and to those who accept His offer, His free gift, we find the healing we seek.

This is why God doesn’t wait for us to make the first move. The woman in the story had seen Jesus’ response to others, and seeing Him in action brought her to Him. He was immediately accepting of her when she came in. It was probably as odd then as it would be today to have someone crying at our feet. But Jesus was available and accepting. The gospel writings show us how available Jesus was too anyone who came to Him.

Romans 3:23 teaches that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. None are righteous, sinless, meeting God’s standard. None. (see also Romans 3:10-20) We, like Simon, think our sins are not so bad, if indeed we have any. It’s always easier to see the sin in others. In fact, it usually makes us feel better to do so. But in God’s sight all are declared sinners, regardless of where we stand on the human measure of “sin”.  And, Romans also declares that the wages of sin is death (6:23).  All of our trying to work out our issues only ends in the same place – death. But the free gift of God is salvation and eternal life. Nothing to work for, nothing to work out, Christ did all the work for us, and all we have to do is, like the woman, come confessing our need. He meets us there.

What we couldn’t do, to save ourselves, Jesus did for us. He took our punishment for sin. The issue today isn’t whether we’ve sinned or not. The issue is whether we are trying to take care of our brokenness some other way (self-help) rather than accepting God’s free gift of forgiveness, and healing of our brokenness.

People in Jesus’ day walked right past Him and didn’t realize they had God in the midst. Even His own disciples often missed his presence in a real way.  I’ve wondered if it would have been easier to accept Jesus’ claims of being God and dying for our sins if we’d lived during His time on earth. But I don’t think so, because only a few who walked with Him truly believed. Most were threatened by Him, or only looking for some immediate payoff.  Regardless, He was available to all. He’d come for all, even Simon the Pharisee.

And even better, we are told that we can have God’s Spirit living in us. “We can have a view of his glory and an intimacy with him better than any of his followers had when he was on earth, greater than if Jesus had actually held us in his arms and kissed us.”* With the Holy Spirit living in us, we have the opportunity to live in very close intimacy with God, freed from the burden of sin.

Not that we don’t still sin. I John says “if we say we have no sin, we lie.”  And we all know we still sin – anger, jealousy, judgmentalism, greed (to mention a few). But the real power and chains sin held over us are gone, we only need to accept the gift.

Perhaps we can’t really feel a lot of love toward Jesus and God because we don’t appreciate all that has been done for us. Like Simon, we think we are OK and it’s others that need saving, just look at their sins. Maybe we need to accept the fact that no one is immune from sin, and even if we’d been the only human alive – we still would have needed to pay the impossible wage for our sin. Yet, Jesus did that for us, and when we accept that we are just like the woman, we will find our way to a relationship with Him.

“To the degree you understand your need for grace, to that degree faith explodes in your life in the form of love."*

 

*Quotes from Timothy Keller, The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter, Penguine Books 2021. Chapter 6. “Personal Hope”.