Tag Archives: Grace

Robbed by tradition

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I’m going to say at the outset that not all traditions are bad – some traditions are enriching, valuable parts of what it is to be human and live in fellowship with other humans. As a fairly new Father, one of the things I can’t wait to do is establish family traditions that will give my family a sense of unity and history as we go through life together. So this is by no means an anti-Tradition rant for the sake of it.

However, there are other traditions that aren’t so good. For example, there’s an old story about a newly married couple and their first roast dinner.

Watching his wife prepare the joint of meat, the husband bemusedly watched her cut two inches from either end of the meat and threw it in the bin. Thinking it an awful waste, he asked her “Why have you just cut those ends off?”

“That’s just how my Mum taught me to prepare a roast. She’s done it all her life, and I never thought to ask her why,” she replied as she carried on seasoning the meat.

“Fair enough,” the husband said. “I don’t want to cut across family traditions. After all, Mum knows best!”
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The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley

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Grace is one of those things that can be very difficult for our religion-addicted brains to grasp. From the cradle to the grave, we’re told by the world that we get what we work for, and that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and in all honesty we’re not generally communicating a better message in the church! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that taking hold of and believing the gospel of pure grace has been the biggest challenge I’ve had in my walk with God. There’s just so much confusion and effort-based preaching that I’ve taken in, and even delivered, over the years that it can all seem a bit too good to be true.

If this sounds a bit like you, I’d love to commend The Naked Gospel to you. I have had this book for a really long time, but finally got around to reading it while I was on holiday recently. Within the pages of this brief and easy-to-read book, Andrew Farley takes aim at the very foundations of law-based religion and the compromised mixtures of law and grace that are so prevalent in the church today. Having shown the impotence of the law to lead us into the life God desires for us, he then shows us how the New Covenant founded on Christ’s blood is infinitely better than what was given to Israel on Mount Sinai.

Using modern-day illustrations and Scripture to challenge widely-held beliefs that fall short of the New Covenant, Farley has written a fantastic guide to the true gospel that is all of grace. Along the way, he presents clearly and persuasively the truth of our identity in Christ, the futility of human effort in serving God, the true purpose of the Law, why it is no longer binding on believers in Christ today, and how we go on living in grace day-by-day.

I read The Naked Gospel in three or four days, and I found it an incredibly encouraging and faith-building read. At the end of the book, I was much less impressed with myself and much more impressed with Jesus, which can only be a good thing! I intend to read it again, going through much slower, so that I can get my mind renewed and be even more amazed at what Christ has done and continues to do in my life by grace.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering “What is so amazing about grace?”, get this book and find out for yourself. Your religious pre-conceptions will be challenged, but bear with it and you may well see the way to freedom in Christ more clearly than you have before.

The funny thing with being raised in a Christian family

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I’ve just been listening to some of Steve McVey’s 101 lies taught in church every Sunday, in particular the lie “When you became a Christian, God changed your life”. The lie is that our life only needed a bit of renovation, whereas Jesus looks at our life outside of Him and says “There’s nothing I can do with that – that life needs to die, and I’ll give you My life”. It’s pretty much the same truth I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.

In the process of listening to it, I realised one of the funny things about being raised in a Christian family. I don’t know when I can say “I was crucified with Christ” or “I died with Christ”. Let me explain. My parents, and my wife, can each point to a date that they became a Christian. “I heard the gospel on this date, believed in Jesus and committed myself to Him.” They can point to this date and say – that was the day I was crucified with Christ, whether I realised that’s what was going on or not.

I don’t know if I can give a date like that. I can give loads of potential dates. It could be when I was a child and asked my Dad to pray with me to become a Christian for the first time (I reckon I was about 5 or 6). It could be when I was 12 and went to a Crusader’s event in Southampton and felt the tug of the Holy Spirit consciously for the first time to respond to the gospel being presented. This was certainly the point that I got a whole lot more serious about God, but then knowing what I know now about self-effort and the Christian life, that might not have been such a good thing! Maybe it was 1995 when I got Toronto’d on a youth camp and encountered all kinds of miraculous stuff I’d never previously accepted. It could have been 8th December 1996 when I was baptised in my local Anglican church.

The funny thing with being raised in a Christian family is that it can be difficult to point to a definite turning point because you take so much for granted. And boy does the devil play on this one!!

As you’ll know, I’ve been on a God-directed quest to understand better my identity in Christ and live out of the good of that. It’s been good, and I know I’m only just starting out – there’s loads more truth and revelation to come that is going to unlock dynamite in my life, I just know it in my “knower”. But at every step, the enemy has been able to use this lack of definite conversion point to cause doubts to rise up about whether it’s really true of *me*. After all, if I can’t even point to when it happened for me, can I be sure it happened?

Well, no more! Devil, I’m letting you know that I resist you and this means you’ve got to flee!! Whenever it happened, I ceased trusting in myself for salvation a long time ago, and now put all my hope in what Jesus has done for me. And whatever day that occurred, at whichever minute or hour, God alone knows. But it happened and I can rest in the finished work that occurred.

So I can know that I am justified. I can know that I am dead and that the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God. That I died and received His life. And in knowing this, I give up my striving and rest in the truth of my fellowship with Christ – confident that I am living by His life and will uncover more and more of what this means as we go on together.

As Steve McVey would put it, my Grace Walk has started and God will be faithful to complete it as I rest in His strength and receive all that He loves to give.

Here’s to the rest of the journey!