“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance” (Bonhoeffer: Cost of Discipleship). It’s “cheap” because it is offered as salve for a guilty conscience, a “get out of hell free” card that makes no demand and costs you nothing to possess… “Cheap grace is the idea that ‘grace’ did it all for me so I do not need to change my lifestyle. The believer who accepts the idea of ‘cheap grace’ thinks he can continue to live like the rest of the world. Instead of following Christ in a radical way, the Christian lost in cheap grace thinks he can simply enjoy the consolations of his grace” (ibid). Because it denies the radical problem of our sin, however, “cheap grace” offers a correspondingly shallow solution to what brings utmost anxiety and despair to the human heart. Indeed, those who disregard the seriousness of sin correspondingly disregard the significance of grace, as Yeshua said: “To whom little is forgiven, the same loves little” (Luke 7:47).
There is a high cost for the grace of forgiveness, friends, first of all seen in the priceless sacrifice of Yeshua who died a harrowing and bloody death to make it “theologically possible” for us to be forgiven, and secondly, as seen in the wholesale demand to surrender our lives to God in response to his compassion toward us. Forgiveness is not just about our individual acts of sin – those various moral failures and perversities of heart we all have perpetrated – but is about our inner life and about who we ultimately are. Forgiveness is not accidental to our lives but is necessary and essential. We are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners. The root of our sinful condition is the lethal sickness called “spiritual death.”
On the other hand, “costly grace” redeems and transforms the sinner. It is costly because it required all of God’s heart, soul, mind and strength, and therefore it likewise requires all our heart, soul, mind, and strength in response… “Salvation is free (for you), but discipleship will cost you your life.” We do not receive God’s grace as license to coddle our lower nature but to enter into a new realm of existence as a child of God who desires righteousness to reign within our hearts. When Yeshua says to the trusting sinner, “Go and sin no more,” he meant “Go in the reality of my love; go in the awareness of my grace; go in the assurance of my acceptance… and you will then sin no more.” We best deny ourselves when we forget ourselves in the glory and beauty of our Lord….
Of course we can’t do any of this in our own strength. We are saved from ourselves only by the miracle of God. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit,” says the LORD of Hosts (Zech. 4:6). To those who “receive” him, God gives power (i.e., ἐξουσία, transcendent being) to become children of God. They are those “who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). This is the miracle that comes by faith, for faith “receives” the promise and trusts in God’s power to do the impossible for us.
Hebrew Lesson:
- Psalm 51:1 Hebrew page (pdf)
Shalom friends. Our Lord foretold that in the “end of days” there would be perilous times — moral, political, ethnic, and spiritual chaos throughout the world, “as it was in the days of Noah.” Of Noah’s generation the Torah says: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humanity was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, so that it grieved the LORD to his heart” (Gen. 6:5-6). Indeed, Paul’s description of the character of people before the time of the end is chillingly accurate of our present generation (see 2 Tim. 3:1-7).
Our hearts speak the language of “poetry,” using poetic expressions of truth, since declarative words are never enough to convey the heart of the matter. When God created the heavens and the earth, he “sang” them into being – the words he used composed a song – and its melody resounds with the emotional weight of his grace and his glory. Therefore we can speak of the “poetry of creation” – its meaning, form, sound, rhythm – expressing the artistry of God as the Creator (Psalm 19:1-4). The various psalms of the Bible are also musical and lyric (i.e., to be accompanied with a lyre), because prayer, meditation, and worship are expressed in the hue and color of emotional feelings, or the language of the heart… These include expressions of praise, cries of lament, sighs for deliverance, and so on. In fact, poetic language is found throughout the Scriptures. Consider the various metaphors, similes, hyperboles, symbols, allusions, equivocations, parables, allegories, prophetic signs and visions – all formed from words of the heart.
Many of us deal inner conflicts, self-reproach, and meagerness of faith… It is reported that on his deathbed Rev Zusya said, “I am not afraid that the Holy One will ask me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Moses?’ Rather, I fear the Holy One will say, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Zusya?'” This Hasidic story is interesting because, on the one hand, how could Zusya be anyone other than he is? and on the other, why is Zusya afraid that he is not who he should be? Zusya’s parable reveals that there is an inner conflict in his soul. He senses that has not lived as he ought, that he has failed himself (and God), and that he is lost in the rift between the ideal and the real… His struggle, then, is with himself. Who he is and who he thinks he should be are at odds within his heart.
Shalom friends. Soren Kierkegaard understood the “self” – that is, what is most essential to what you really are – to be a “dialectical relationship” you have with your own inner life, namely, with your thoughts, your feelings, and so on. He famously said: “The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself” (Sickness unto Death). This might seem like a nonsense statement, but what Kierkegaard meant was that you are always having a conversation with yourself, and there – in that dialog or “dialectic” – you are always deciding what matters most to you, what you really want, what you choose to believe, and so on. As strange as it may sound, “you” are always in relationship with yourself – both as speaker and hearer, and you are also the one who reasons and makes judgments about what to do in the midst of the ongoing conversation… Now what is most significant about this inner discourse, this “court of decision,” is both the reasons for or against something, as well as the moral competence and authority of the judge. How could the “divided self” be unified, after all, if it made decisions that were not based on reality and truth?
When the disciples asked Yeshua how they should pray, he began with the words: “Our Heavenly Father, sacred is your name; may your kingdom come, may your will be done…” (Matt. 6:9-10). You might overlook it, but these words imply that God’s kingdom is not naturally within us, and indeed, as Yeshua taught elsewhere, what is “naturally” within the heart is just the opposite: “For from within, out of the heart of a person, come evil reasonings (οἱ διαλογισμοὶ οἱ κακοι), adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a person” (Mark 7:21-23). So when Yeshua told the Pharisees that the kingdom of God is “within you,” he meant that the kingdom is a matter of a heart that has been reborn by the Spirit – not that people are naturally endowed with a divine “spark” (ניצוץ) within them. No, the default condition of the unregenerated heart is one of selfish autonomy that refuses to submit to God’s right to reign. Its creed is: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul” (Henley). The natural man is a rebel against God; a usurper of the prerogatives of God, and therefore he “eats from the apple” to define “good” and “evil” in his own self-serving terms….
All thinking is a form of believing, and therefore there is no truth apart from faith. The scientist who carefully observes phenomena, for instance, is a person of faith who believes that an external world exists, that it is knowable by the human mind, that the future “resembles” the past (i.e., the uniformity of nature), that causal relationships exist, that the scientific method is able to reliably use logical inference to reach tentative conclusions, and so on. Indeed, the entire scientific worldview relies on metaphysical assumptions no less than any other religious view.On a practical and existential level, then, we note that everyone trusts and makes decisions based on metaphysical presuppositions that they (sub)consciously assume to be trustworthy. Regarding such assumptions, (i.e., axioms of ultimate meaning and “consequential weight”), we are constrained to give account, though we cannot settle the truth of such assumptions using the science or a naturalistic worldview without begging questions…
“The fear of the LORD is the first principle of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and correction” (Prov. 1:7). In this “Daily Dvar” broadcast I discuss how reverence or respect is axiomatic for a genuinely good life. Fearing God expresses the confidence that life is a sacred trust and that each soul is answerable to the Creator. Such godly reverence infers that nothing is trivial or inconsequential, and that all things will be accounted before the bar of divine truth. I hope you will find it helpful, friends.
