A few years ago I heard a sermon explaining and defending and promoting the theological doctrine of grace, salvation by grace alone.  That sermon was anything but gracious.  The preacher’s point was that unless you believe that a person can only be saved by grace you are damned. Your intellectual stance on this particular doctrine determines how God will judge you, whether or not, in the end, God will extend his grace to you. There was a fundamental disconnect between the preacher’s belief in grace and his exposition of the doctrine.

This sort of disconnect happens, probably more often that we are aware. When we finally notice it, it is jarring.  How is it possible that a sermon about grace could become so ungracious?  How is it possible that our thinking about grace can drain it of its gracefulness?

It can happen when grace is treated as a theological doctrine and not as an attribute of the activity of God.  As a doctrine, grace becomes part of a system which includes other doctrines such as salvation, atonement and judgment.  Grace, then, must be redefined to become internally consistent within that system.  So, often, when preachers get a hold of grace we seek scriptural consistency and internal theological consistency and feel the need to explain grace and defend it as an essential Christian doctrine.

But if grace is an attribute of the activity of God, then grace must be lived. Grace seeks to be incorporated into the lives of those who want to believe in it—even into the lives of preachers. Those who believe in the grace of God become more like God, more gracious and more graceful.  Those who are neither gracious nor graceful do not yet have a comprehensive understanding of the ways of God.

Gerald Manley Hopkins says this better than anyone I know in “As kingfishers catch fire …”:

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

May we seek a living consistency between our beliefs and our lives in this world.  May God give us the grace to become gracious as God is gracious. May our lives be full of grace as we bathe in the wonder of the grace of God.