Finding that grace sets us free from religious perfection and neurotic striving

Even though I’ve been preaching 40 years, my only message is the grace of God.

I believe in a radical grace, not some dusty old doctrine from a textbook, but a living, all-encompassing, shimmering truth. It says the God of the cosmos loves us beyond anything we can comprehend, given the sorry limitations of our wee brains and souls. God guides and nurtures us minutely. God forgives—barely notices—our sins, and searches to and fro for opportunities to bless us.

God has thrown away the cosmic scorecard, you might say. He’s tossed the laws that used to condemn us into the trash bin. Whatever good or bad we’ve done, he welcomes us joyfully, arms spread wide.

If I thought I could get away with it, I’d preach on grace every Sunday. Seriously. I can’t do that without wearing my parishioners out, so I gussy up grace in other clothes—I talk about faith or perseverance or stewardship or whatever the topic of the week might be. Nonetheless, grace underpins everything I say. Even when grace isn’t mentioned, it’s unfailingly the subtext, the foundation.

What I know about grace I received as a revelation — a visitation from the Spirit on a sunny afternoon on a rural hillside in 1980. I would have been all of 24 then and green as a gourd. This visitation changed my life more than anything else that’s ever happened to me, before or since. It revolutionized my understanding of God, myself and others. It’s as alive in me today as four decades ago.

I bring grace up (again) because I don’t find many kindred spirits on the subject. Other Christians believe in the idea of grace, but I almost never encounter one whose existence was turned upside down by it, for whom it is the apex of their journey.

But this past Monday, I was reading Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr’s daily meditation, titled “Absolute Grace and Acceptance.” I nearly came out of my chair.

Rohr’s denominational heritage is very different from mine. Still, I read him often and cite him here regularly. I hadn’t heard this, though.

He talked about having received a life-changing, ministry-altering vision of grace. His experience sounded eerily familiar.

At the time, he was a young novice in Cincinnati, working toward becoming a Franciscan.

“This was a medieval novitiate,” he wrote, “still based on asceticism. Before Vatican II, the Catholic Church was still law-based, disconnected from experience, and not incarnational. ... I was nineteen years old and trying to be the most fervent student possible: on time, clean, reverent, and respectful, like a Boy Scout.”

He was, he said, “going crazy with trying to be perfect.”

About midway through that year, he was kneeling one day in the choir when a divine revelation gobsmacked him.

“Suddenly, I felt chains fly in all directions. … Suddenly, I knew that God’s love did not depend on me following all these laws and mandates or being worthy. I knew I wasn’t worthy, and yet here I was experiencing absolute grace and absolute acceptance. The whole system I’d grown up with had implied that God will love us if we change. That day I realized God’s love enables and energizes us to change.”

He saw into a startling dimension of God he’d never imagined.

“I somehow knew that I was good, God is good, life is good. And I didn’t have to achieve that goodness by any performance whatsoever. At that point, I was—like a good Lutheran—saved by grace. Grace was everything! In one moment, I got the Gospel! And I knew it had nothing to do with legalism, priestcraft, or punitiveness.”

He hadn’t yet studied theology. He possessed no other academic foundation that might have helped him explain or defend what he was seeing.

“But I just knew that everything was grace. I was very free—inside—after that.”

Yes, that’s it exactly. Everything is grace. Everything. And when we see that, it sets us free, even as we muddle and careen through the myriad turmoils that beset us on Earth.

It frees us from striving and empty, desperate works to please God and other people. We find our spiritual life is mainly about God, not about us. God loves us right here, right now, just as we are. We’re not working to please God, because God’s already pleased. We’re his children, made in his image. We’re accepted—now. We’re cherished—now.

Certainly there are things about us that need to be changed. Just for starters, we’re all selfish and frail and silly.

But as we turn toward God rather than away from God, as we throw ourselves into those wide-open arms, God handles any needed transformations himself, in his patient and gentle way. And God delights in us all the while, like the prodigal father he’s long proclaimed himself to be.

That’s the grace I believe in.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.