“Nothing in this world is FREE!”
Have you ever heard this phrase before? I have been thinking about this idea a lot lately. Specifically in regard to God’s gift of grace for us. Now I know that the price that was paid on the cross for our sin was huge. Yet I want to talk about the personal thoughts we have about this grace that we have been extended. I think that it is really a hard thing for us to wrap our heads around the fact that God’s grace is free. In fact, the while underlying motivation for this free grace is that we might be set free from the bondage of the world.
I have been reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians and I can’t help but think it is a message that we really need to hear. Paul is writing this group of Christians because a group of false teacher or what I have called “super Christians” came into the churches and told them that they need to do all of there extra things to get God’s grace. They need to do this and that so that they are worthy of the grace. But Paul reminds them that:
God has no favorites—Gal. 2:6
We are all loved and we are all given grace. Now we all respond to this grace differently. I would even say that if we say we accept this grace but it doesn’t change the very core of who we are then i would say that we don’t really get what a gift this is.
There is nothing that we can do and there is nothing that we can say to earn this freedom through God’s grace. I think that too many times this is hard for us to hear because all we have to do is really and truly accept this love.
This past week I was at summer camp and we swam and climbed and rafted and played Frisbee and did a ton of stuff that I am really great at. I am not good at a lot of things. I am not good at the working in the office part of my job. I am good at the hands on part though, and summer camp was a whole week of 24/7 hands on ministry. I easily got into the mentality of doing one more good thing. I think that this is the cycle that we are taught early on, that doing the best makes you better or makes you entitled or earns you things. Personally, at times i think that it would be easier to wrap my head around the works righteousness idea that if I do so many good things and get so many “Jesus Points” I would get to the next level of deeper faith and finally when the game was over I would experiance God’s grace if i have a hight enough score.
But that is not the way it is. The gift is free for all. Paul writes about the law and it is to convict us and show that we can’t do it on our own in Galatians 3:19-22. Living out this free freedom is a hard thing because we always want to try and earn something that is already within our reach. We just have a hard time understanding why someone (God) would give it away. The only things that are given away anymore are old couches and sweaters knit by your aunt Gertrude.
God’s grace is free and there for all. This is what Paul is writing to the churches in Galatia about. It isn’t about the extra hoops but about truly accepting it in your heart and living out your live in response to that free gift.
