Consequences of Grace
By Linda Rex
February 13, 2022, 6th Sunday of EPIPHANY—I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more I realize how many consequences there are to the little choices or simple decisions I make on a day-by-day basis. Things that I have in the past given little thought to, now I see as having a tremendous impact on my life and the lives of others now and in the life to come. As I go through the day, what I think, say and do, or don’t think, don’t say and don’t do, has a profound effect upon my own being as well as touching the lives and souls of those around me.
Isn’t it amazing how God enables every human being to share in his ability to make choices and decisions—to affect the universe in which we live by our freedom to choose? The danger is that we begin at times to believe that it is all up to us, rather than realizing that in every case, it is all up to God. He often submits to our decisions, allowing us to experience the consequences of our choices, not to harm us, but to enable us to grow up in Christlikeness. He wants us to learn that every choice and decision needs to be made “in Christ” and not as though we live independently from God, under our own power and by our own authority.
Many times, our approach to our spiritual life in Christ is from the point of view that it is all up to us. We believe that if we don’t say the sinner’s prayer or live a sin-free life, we can’t be saved or given eternal life. We forget that our ability to come to the place of even wanting to pray a prayer or wanting to be saved comes from God through Jesus by the Spirit. It is God who initiates our relationship with himself, Jesus who has included us in his relationship with the Father, and is working this into our human existence by the Spirit. Our decisions are a gracious participation in God’s life—though we often live and make decisions as though this is not the case.
We live in a world today which bears the consequences of thousands of years of human decision-making done in a misguided belief that it is all up to us, and that we can and do live independently of the God who made us and who sustains our existence. Indeed, over the millennia, we have experienced wars, rumors of wars, famine, disease, societal collapse and many other consequences of our stubborn willfulness and refusal to submit to the reality of who we are as creatures who are meant to be image-bearers of God. As creatures, we are dependent upon a higher power, and were created to love God with all our being and to love each other as ourselves, and when we don’t live in that way, we pay a hefty price both individually and collectively.
As human beings, we also are tempted to live as though this life is all there is. I saw a billboard recently here in Nashville that declares in great big letters this very thing, that we need to experience all we can in this life because there is nothing after death. My thought is—how sad. To live, believing that if you don’t experience it now, you never will experience it; or that one day your life will end so you might as well live self-indulgently and selfishly because there really is no purpose to life—this, to me, is tragic.
What if there is so much more to life than just today? What if God meant for us as his image-bearers to live in joy, peace, harmony, unity, and warm fellowship with one another? And what if, by our participation in a personal relationship with him, we might actually begin to experience those things right now, in this life, and have a strong assurance and hope that this will continue on into eternity?
In Luke 6:17–26, Jesus met with a large crowd of people and enabled many of them to be healed and cured from demonic harassment. The Spirit was flowing through Jesus from the Father and many people experienced the result of God’s power at work. It was in the middle of this dramatic circumstance that Jesus began to teach the people the difference between living in the kingdom of God and living as though it is all up to us, believing this life is all there is. Addressing his followers, “He began to say, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. Be glad in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way’” (Luke 6:20–26 NASB).
In this short sermon, an abbreviated form of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus draws upon the Deuteronomy 28 motif of blessings and cursings to talk about the difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. The realization we each need to come to is that the kingdom of God was inaugurated in Jesus Christ and it is the reign of God in human hearts through Jesus in the Spirit. The kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom, but it affects every part of life because all of our existence as human beings is dependent upon and is to be directed toward the Creator and Sustainer of our existence.
God validated our human experience in Jesus Christ, who as God in human flesh, took this existence we experience day by day upon himself and brought it into a new place in his life, death, and resurrection. The apostle Paul says we don’t see ourselves, each other, or Christ through the lens of this broken human existence any longer—we now see them through the lens of the resurrection. Our human existence has been taken to a new level—into the place it was always meant to be a part of—a participation in Jesus’ intimate relationship with the Father in the Spirit. This is the kingdom of God at work in us and in our world through Jesus in the Spirit.
We can make great decisions from a human point of view and experience the benefits in this life—being well-fed, wealthy, and famous. But our blessings and abundance will quickly fade away in the presence of death and the transience of the things of this life. What may at first be experienced as a blessing will instead reap us tragic eternal consequences.
On the other hand, we may find ourselves in the midst of difficulty, sickness, suffering, and even being persecuted for Christ’s sake. And as we struggle, we will grow deeper in our relationship with God in Christ and discover that we are actively participating day by day, right now, in the kingdom of God. In the middle of our hardship, pain, and grief, we are actually experiencing joy, peace, and all the spiritual blessings of life in Christ Jesus. We may also experience many of the blessings of this life, but as we surrender to the will and purposes of God through Christ in the Spirit, we discover that our blessings have an eternal shape, as the image of Christ is being forged into our spirit, and our lives are beginning to reflect the nature and being of the Son of God, who came to do for us and in us what we could not do on our own.
Christ came to write God’s law on our minds and hearts. He sent the Spirit so we could participate right now in that life in relationship with God that he forged into our humanity. He has done all that is needed for our full participation right now and on into eternity in the kingdom of God, and invites us to actively participate through our decisions and choices in all he has done. We are given an invitation—will we toss it in the trashcan and go on our way, or will we excitedly don the robes of righteousness he has sent and join him at the party?
Thank you, Father, for sending us your Son to do what we would not and could not do. Thank you for giving us your Spirit so we could share in your life and love even now. Grant us the grace to say yes to all that is ours in Christ, and to turn a deaf ear to all in this world that would seduce us away, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
“How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers! But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but they are like chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” Psalm 1 NASB
“Thus says the LORD, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the LORD. … Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD and whose trust is the LORD. … I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.’” Jeremiah 17:5–10 NASB
Our Life in the Trinity 