What’s So Amazing About Grace?

To this point, I freely admit, I have presented a one-sided picture of grace. I have portrayed God as a love sick father eager to forgive, and grace as a force potent enough to break the chains that bind us, and merciful enough to overcome deep differences between us. Depicting grace in such sweeping terms makes people nervous, and I concede that I have skated to the very edge of danger. I have done so because I believe the New Testament does too. Page 178

Yancey, Phil. What’s So Amazing About Grace. Zondervan, 2002. 304 pages. ISBN:
978-0310245650

Yancey first strums the sweet sound of grace through the retelling of a story called Babette’s Feast. Through this story, you’ll be deeply impressed with the power of grace to heal and turn around a calcified religious community. Then, having grounded us in the concept that the world can do all things that the church can do except dispense grace, he treats us to two sides of Jesus’ teaching on the subject: His parables (he modernizes them) and His life and teaching (he satirizes them), making the case throughout that justice is worldly and fair, but grace, though unfair, is other-worldly.

This sweet sound can break steel chains. So in Part Two, we meet with the first of grace’s foes: unforgiveness. This form of ungrace imprisons families and predestines future generations to bondage. So Yancey exhorts us to forgive like our Father in heaven and because it is good for our own soul. Then he deepens his commitment to us by sharing with us his own racist past and the ways forgiveness has healed the racial divide.

In Part Three we meet with the second withholder of grace: the one who fears its abuse. This section begins with a story of an agnostic newspaper reporter asking a Christian to define the gospel in ten words or less, who answers, “we’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.” This definition touches both the reporter who was orphaned as a child, and the Christian himself who had to come to terms with the fact that the victim of a racist murder was not more worthy of God’s grace than its perpetrator. Though there was a time when only holy food could be eaten and only holy people could worship God, in the gospel, all were unclean and all are offered God’s grace. Thus, only through receiving this offer of God’s grace a person can love the unlovely and see him as God intended him to be. However, some fear that to give grace to wretches only encourages them to more despicable behavior. But the one upon whom God’s grace has really descended will not exploit it, rather will he be lost in the wonder of it.

The third thing that gets in the way of the grace-giving church is this: the too political church. Such is the burden of the fourth and final part of the book. One who refuses God’s grace can and will still dispense morality. So, if a church will be an effective moral conscience of a nation she must first dispense grace, must consistently defend the various causes of grace (instead of merely political causes), and must never get too cozy with the state. In this way, the church will do the best work for this world while focusing on the coming one and will better fulfill her calling not to grasp like gravity, but to give with grace.