We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Generous Grace

Out There

Michelle Brea via Compfight

Mark McIntyre wrote a piece on his blog called Selective Grace that highlights the ways in which the church tends to more easily demonstrate grace with some than with others. It’s a call to a more generous grace that does not distinguish between particular sins or particular differences in belief. How have we been withholding grace from those who might most be in need of it? How can we offer grace in ways that acknowledge the generous grace we have received from God?

From the blog:

In a denomination that I formerly attended many of the pastors would often refer to their drug abuse in their “B.C.” days. They would use their former behavior as an illustration of God’s grace, and rightly so. They did indeed receive grace and despite their past failures God uses them in ministry.

The problem comes in when some other sins are less likely to receive grace. In some churches, those who have experienced divorce, those who struggle with same sex attraction, those with mental illness and those who might disagree on minor points of doctrine receive anything but grace. Even in that denomination with the formerly drug addled pastors, selective grace was a struggle and some people were treated in a manner inconsistent with grace.

Category:
Tags: , , , ,

Related Reading

Christ the Center

The center of the Christian faith is not anything we believe; it’s the person of Jesus Christ. The foundation of my faith is a person, not a book and a set of beliefs about that book. Rather than believing in Jesus because I believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, I came…

Are You a Church Misfit?

Romain Guy via Compfight Here’s a lovely reflection from Rachel Held Evans on the experience of finding that your questions are unwelcome in church. Evans is bumping up against this material as she reads Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. I suspect this kind of experience is much more common that we’d like to admit. Can you…

The Nature of Human Rebellion

God placed Adam in the Garden and instructed him to “protect” it (Gen. 2:15). The word is often translated “till” or “keep,” implying that Adam’s main responsibility was to protect the pristine Garden from weeds. This is certainly a possible interpretation of this word, but in light of the cunning serpent that shows up in…

Where Psychology and Theology Meet

Guest post by Ty Gibson The biblical narrative reveals that God bears our guilt—not merely in the penal sense that Reformed theology asserts—but in the sense that He bears our misconceptions of His character as we project our sins upon Him. To the degree that fallen human beings find it psychologically impossible to bear the…

Sermon: We The Church

The Anabaptists saw that the building is not the Church. God wants to dwell on this Earth, but it is not in a building. It is in his people. In this brief clip, Greg traces the origins to see how “church” became associated with buildings. Let’s recover our identity as the place where God dwells!…

Podcast: What’s the Difference Between MERCY and GRACE?

Is Mercy simply another word for Grace? Find out in this short taught thriller of an episode! http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0161.mp3

Tags: ,