Read Grace Party: Escape to Reality Greatest Hits, Volume 3 for Free Online Page B

you on
Sunday morning to see if you’re singing or clapping louder than the person next
to you. Jesus is not going to vomit you out if you don’t get up and dance or
hand out a gazillion tracts. Religious zeal gets you nowhere with God.
    Genuine
enthusiasm comes not from what you have done for God, but from appreciating
what he has done for you. And what has he done? He has made you righteous and
acceptable through the blood of Jesus. There is no middle, lukewarm ground. You
are either “the people” of God or you’re not (1 Peter 2:10). We don’t declare
his praises to become a people belonging to God. We praise him because we are a
people belonging to God and he is praiseworthy!
     
    5.  You are conscious of your
debt to God
     
    On the cross, the righteous
demands of the law that stood against you were fully satisfied. If the debt had
not been paid in full, Jesus would not have risen from the dead (Romans 4:25).
    Perhaps
you think this act of grace obligates you to God, that since he paid your debt you
now owe him. Beware, for this perception of indebtedness will make you resistant
to grace.
    God
didn’t redeem you because he thought you might be a good investment. He did it
because he is a Giver and it’s his nature to love on us. He gave you his Son,
his Spirit, indeed, himself. Stop trying to repay him for his priceless gifts.
Just bow your grateful head and say, “Thank you, Jesus!”
     
    6.  You think your illness is
God punishing you for your sin
     
    A law mindset says you reap what
you sow: If you get bad (e.g., sickness), you must’ve done bad (e.g., sin). In
other words, your sickness is God’s punishment. But grace declares that God has
already judged all your sin at the cross and no punishment remains.
    Jesus
went around healing people. If God the Father is making people sick while God
the Son is healing them, they are a house divided. Jesus provided for your
salvation and healing at the cross. Someone under grace won’t take sickness
lying down but will proclaim the Lord’s death over their infirmities.
     
    7.  You think there is too much
emphasis on the goodness of God
     
    And let me guess — not enough
emphasis on the badness of God?! There is no variation, no shadow of turning
with God. He is good all the way through and he is good all the time. It’s no
more possible to overemphasize his goodness than it is to grasp the width,
depth, height and length of his love (Ephesians 3:18). But I encourage you to
try!
     
    A word after
     
    Those of us who preach grace
sometimes hear this objection. “You are opposed to the law.” Only we’re not.
We’re opposed to living under the law. Like Paul, we think the law is
good. It just has no power to make you good.
    “Yeah,
but you still have a pretty dim view of the law.” Actually, the opposite is
true. We have the highest regard for the law, for law reveals our need for
grace.
    I agree
with Tullian Tchividjian who, in his book One Way Love , says that one of
the biggest problems in the church today is not cheap grace but cheap law,
namely “the idea that God accepts anything less than the perfect righteousness
of Jesus.” Any message that says you can get away with less than 100 percent
perfect obedience diminishes the law, insults a holy God, and distracts you
from grace. As Tchividjian says, “A high view of the law produces a high view
of grace. A low view of the law produces a low view of grace.”
    So if
you must preach law then preach an exalted and lofty law, as Jesus did in the
Sermon on the Mount. Preach a law that inflames sin and silences the
self-righteous. Preach a law that reveals our need for Jesus who fulfilled all
the righteous requirements of the law so that we might be freed from its curse.
     
     

8. What is the
Unforgivable Sin?
     
    I have heard of people who lived
their entire lives thinking that they were cursed because they, or their parents,
had committed the unforgivable sin. It was partly this conviction that