Identified By Grace Alone

Who you are is a product of grace.

You learn a lot about God through parenting. Before having a child (or children), you see God through the lens of what you experienced with your parents—a humanistic perspective. After having a child (or children), you see God through your experience with your kid(s)—a theological perspective. With this shift, you move from striving to please to constantly communicating that you are pleased with another. Most of us were taught about God from childhood philosophy. I’m starting to believe, more and more, that the most accurate way to know about God is from the philosophy of a parent.

The Trinitarian God identifies as Father, Son, and Spirit. We were made from family and union. The image and likeness attributed to us are family and union. Yet, through taking control of the narrative, we made a gospel rooted in a misguided need to please a God who is already pleased. We know half-grace—a grace that gives us the ability to strive harder rather than a grace that permits us to rest.

Let’s look at salvation.

The spiritual equation that we commonly use to determine salvation is grace+works+decision=salvation. We teach Jesus died to give you a choice of salvation. But is that not what the Old Testament/Covenant was? In Joshua 25:15, for example, Joshua compels Israel to “…choose this day whom you will serve…” The law gave God’s people a choice to follow or not. Depending on how you handled that choice, you went deeper into the covenant with God, or you fell away from the covenant with God. God gave Israel this to prove that effort and choice could not accomplish salvation. Why would God, in the Incarnate Son, give us better blood to continually fail at achieving our salvation?

Still, others may contend that we don’t accomplish our salvation by our works, but we cannot be identified as saved without our works or decisions. But this, again, is a misunderstanding of what salvation is. Salvation is a restoration of wholeness. In the Greek, the word for saved is σῴζω which means to protect, heal, preserve, rescue, make safe, etc. Salvation is not a future-aiming term; it is a present term. You have been saved. This is what Jesus came to do: to seek and save that which had been lost (Luke 19:10). As a Father, God was bent on restoring his sons and daughters to wholeness. We must, therefore, wrestle with whether or not Jesus accomplished what he said he was here to complete: restoration of all that had been lost.

I believe Jesus did accomplish what he set out to accomplish. Therefore, the salvation equation looks more like this: grace+salvation=works+decision.

What you do with salvation matters, but it matters because you have been saved by grace alone. What you do with salvation is a stewardship issue, not a salvation issue. We cannot save ourselves, but we can determine how much we live out the truth that we have been saved.

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Ephesians 2:8-10 NRSV

Looking at our lives in relation to God through this lens—the lens of a Father to his kids—we suddenly find ourselves in a miracle. We believed God needed to be pleased, so we worked our spiritual fingers to the bone to please our Father. Yet, our Father has always been radically delighted by us, not because we are perfect, but because we are his.

Grace alone as an identity is imperative to understanding scripture, God, and ourselves. We can let go of doctrines that force us into submission to particular leanings and live free and light—what Jesus calls us to in Matthew 11:28-30. And once our works are untethered from our eternal salvation, we can finally do the good works we were saved to do. I can enjoy my sonship because I cannot lose it. When sonship was an issue of performance, it was a stumbling block for me, and I consistently failed. Because of my failure, my sonship was always in question. However, now that my sonship is established permanently, I can live it out in good works.

We must believe (have faith in Jesus). Why? Because we have been redeemed! We can come home to where we belong: the Father’s house.

Right before Jesus reveals himself as the light of the world in John 8, we find the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery. This story has been the topic of many scholarly debates because it is missing from some original manuscripts and placed elsewhere in other manuscripts. Nevertheless, in the book we have today, it appears just before Jesus says he is the light of the world. The gospel of John uses light and dark in many places (my favorite is John’s prologue at the beginning of the book).

Darkness, in John, is used to describe obscurity and unknowing. Light, on the other hand, represents reason and knowledge. These were very familiar to an audience who had grown up with philosophical writings like Plato’s The Cave. When the woman is caught in the act of adultery, the religious leaders bring her out and are about to stone her. The fact that they were about to stone her alone makes the story sour. But when you realize that they were going to stone her because that’s what the Old Testament law said they were supposed to do in such a situation, it takes on a brand-new context. Add to this the fact that Jesus rebuked them for potentially stoning her because of their sin, which meant Jesus prescribed something that went against the law of Moses (Old Testament law), and you have a fascinating exchange.

The law of Moses accused this woman and sentenced her to death by stoning. Jesus (God) says, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”¹

Jesus first reveals a new revelation to this woman. God is not a God who condemns and murders; God is a God who restores, and because of that restoration, we are permitted to lay down the sin that once shackled us.

Jesus then reveals that he is the light of the world. As he had just done with the woman, Jesus was showing to the world both who God is and who the world is. Within that revelation, we are invited to stop living lost to live out salvation. It wasn’t the woman’s repentance that freed her; it was God’s choice, in Christ, that freed her. Likewise, it wasn’t our best effort that freed us; it was God’s choice, in Christ, that freed us.

Grace is your identity. Now, you can spend your life discovering the beauty of what that means.

1. John 8:10-11 NRSV