Grace is Not Passive
Grace teachers and preachers like me focus a lot on how Jesus came to give His life for us to put His life in us and live His life through us. I believe this is true. The struggle for many people who hear this though is to conclude that we don’t do anything.
It sounds like I can just go lay on the couch because I don’t have anything to do if He is living in me and through me.
It sounds like grace is a life of passivity.
That may be how it sounds, but that is not true! An overwhelming majority of the grace message is found through the writings of the apostle Paul in the New Testament, but listen to what he says in 1 Corinthians 15:10…
10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
Does that sound passive to you? It doesn’t to me either.
Paul says that he worked harder than all the other apostles. There was effort involved on his part. However, right after saying this, he qualifies it and says, “Well, it really wasn’t me, but the grace of God that was with me.”
In other words, he couldn’t do it in his own power and strength. As a human being, it was his body, mind, and actions that were involved, but it was God as His Source working in Him and through Him at the same time.
Paul says something similar to this in Colossians 1:28-29.
Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.
Again, Paul says “I toil.” “I am working hard, laboring exhaustively to proclaim Christ.” Again, that doesn’t sound very passive to me.
But once again, after Paul says this, he is quick to say that it is Christ’s energy that is working so powerfully within me.
In both passages, Paul talks about how he is working hard but also how Jesus is the One doing it in Him and through Him.
So, who is it? Is Paul doing the working or is Jesus doing the working? YES!
YOU ARE NOT A PUPPET ON A STRING
Jesus is not sitting up in heaven and pulling on strings that are attached to you controlling every move you make. That is not how the Christian life works.
You are not a puppet. You are a human being whom God has given a will. He has created you with the ability to make choices. He has given you a body that goes and does and acts in this world.
You are very much involved in the Christian life, yet so is Jesus.
This is how it was always supposed to work. In the garden, Adam and Eve were in union with God. He was their Source. He was meant to be our Source too.
But He gave Adam and Eve the ability to choose, and they chose to not continue living from the Tree of Life (God) and chose to live from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (life independently of God).
This resulted in all of humanity living independently from God because of sin. Therefore, when Jesus came to deal with this sin problem, He was doing so in order to be able to put His Life back in us so that we could operate again with Him as our Source.
Not to make us puppets, but to express His life in us and through us as we choose to participate in a love relationship with Him.
CHOOSE TO PARTICIPATE WITH JESUS IN YOUR LIFE
In the first 2 chapters of Colossians, Paul writes over and over again about things Jesus accomplished in us through His finished work on the cross and given to us by His grace, but when he gets to chapter 3, he begins to get really practical.
He says things like this…
“Put to death, therefore, whatever is earthly (of the flesh)” (Col. 3:5)
“As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. (Colossians 3:12)
“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts…” (Col. 3:15)
In each one of these verses, the emphasis is on us. In the first passage, we are to make a choice to stop doing certain things in our lives that no longer line up with who we are in Christ. But we don’t do that in our own power, we trust Him to be our Source as we say no to those things.
In the second passage, we are told to clothe ourselves with certain kinds of behavior because those things now line up with who we are in Christ. We choose to treat people with compassion and kindness, trusting that Jesus has made us compassionate and kind in our union with Him. As we take action to be kind and compassionate, we trust that it will be Jesus manifesting His life through us.
In the third passage, Paul tells us to let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts. We have the peace of Christ in our hearts. Jesus is Peace, and He has given Himself to us. Yet Paul still says that we must make the choice to let it rule in our hearts.
Again, Jesus is not going to overtake our bodies and do these things. He has made us as humans to participate with Him as He does these things in us and through us. So, choose to participate with Jesus as you live a life of grace.
Grace is not passive.
We know that Jesus desires for us to love others. This is all over the New Testament. So, we go out into this world, looking for opportunities to love other people in practical ways. Yet, as we do so, we trust that Jesus is expressing His love in us and through us toward those we engage with.
In other words, to use Paul’s language in Colossians 1:27 that I referenced earlier in this blog,
“For this, we toil. We work hard to love others and point them to Jesus in this world, but we do so with all of Jesus’ energy that He powerfully works within us.”