by David Zahl
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10 NIV

No number of gospel-centered books or conferences or blogs will render grace any less urgent. The climb may be even steeper for those of us who’ve been brought up on American religious bootstrapping. And so we have to be careful. We have to be careful that we don’t turn the important idea of one-way love into a law. We could turn it into a way to measure and control others and ourselves.
A marketing strategy may be able to reference the gospel, but it cannot contain it. The forgiveness of sins is by definition immune to co-option or positioning. Thank God! You can paint grace as the hot new stop on the Christian train all you want, but its reality is another matter. We are saved not by knowledge or theology, but by the Savior. And as much as I wish it weren’t so, the stakes are not imaginary—they are real. Suicide is not just a secular phenomenon. The need for forgiveness and grace is universal—people are desperate for it everywhere. And no amount of slick packaging will save them. No amount of “gospel as concept” will help them. They don’t need big ideas. They need a big Savior! The good news is the gospel has intervened; God has intervened. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10 NIV).
Grace says you are loved right now. Christian freedom is the freedom to be rather than to grow. I have a certain antipathy to the notion that we’re getting better and better all the time. And it’s so clearly belied by our experience.

Thought to Remember for Today

Saul Bellow wrote, “The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required.” That is the message of the gospel, not that you must love to get love, but that we have been loved, even in our inability to love, in our unlovableness. And there’s something in the message of the forgiveness of sins to offend everybody, except for the person who needs it at the time, which is you, which is me.

Fitzpatrick, E. (2016). Grace untamed: a 60-day devotional. Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook.