Sunday looming... on grace & forgiveness

Here's the first bit of this coming week's sermon (draft)...

At the Wednesday night study group we’ve been wrestling with ways to describe God’s grace. It is not an easy thing for Jesus didn’t seek to describe grace theologically but rather live it and tell stories that illumined it. Thus we get an idea of grace through what a collection of stories points to rather than through a simple proposition. One of the definitions offered to the group last Wednesday was this one: ‘Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.’ [Philip Yancey in What’s so amazing about grace p71]. One of the hardest things to grasp is the order of things – with God it is grace first and our bit later. Grace is unconditional; there is nothing we have to do in order to make God love us for that is simply how it is with God. But we want to reverse the order – we want to have to prove our worthiness. Take the notion of forgiveness for example – our logic is to forgive someone after they have confessed their wrong – if you acknowledge that you have hurt me then I can be in a position to forgive you. Our logic is ‘if-then’ – if you confess your sins, then I will forgive you. And we apply this logic to how the faith thing works – and get to what all the big evangelists seem to say “If you repent, turn from your ways and confess your sins then God will forgive you.”
However, in the logic of grace, this is all reversed. With Jesus, forgiveness comes first and forgiveness is what enables us to begin living lives accordingly to the ways of God. This is not an ‘if-then’ logic but a ‘because-therefore’ logic – ‘because you have already been forgiven, therefore you are freed to respond with a changed life, a heart that turns to God.’ [Paul J. Nuechterlein, Something to sing about].