We often read the words of God, we see the words of grace, and we read and repeat them often. But what is happening when we mouth the words of grace, but a gracious spirit is far from us? We read the words, but we fail to understand what kind of paper the words are printed on. We don’t understand that it is within the grace of God, which is God Himself, that we live and move and have our being.
Grace is not slack, and grace is not rigid. Grace is something else entirely. The antinomian, the one who is against the law of God, is one who wants grace to be slack. When people talk about grace as though it were a breezy, let-to-go attitude, they misunderstand. But others, once informed that God’s law/word is grace, think this means that our legalistic machinations must be grace also. The rigidities of legalism are not grace.
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Your salvation is Jesus Christ Himself. Your salvation is made up of union with Him, and you cannot be united with Him (and His benefits) without simultaneously being united with what He is like. And being united to what He is like means that you have been united with life itself. Life isn’t slack and life isn’t rigid. Life lives. Grace lives. Grace is what grace does. One of the things it does not do is readily submit to carnal analysis. You cannot get it under a microscope, and you cannot possess the thing merely by possessing the name. Grace is the gospel, and God Himself is that same gospel. Grace is not showered from a distance. Grace closes the distance, and makes all things live.