Personal discipline and commitment seem to be replacing grace and mercy as the start points for Christianity.

The results are predictable; just read about the Middle Ages.

Unless we admit our own powerlessness to change ourselves, we’re going to continue churning out failing, hidden, and frustrated church-goers.

We need another reformation, from Protestant works-righteousness!

“The reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof grace–of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly.” (Robert Capon, Between Noon and Three)

Cheap Grace!

A new reader of this blog is really getting beat up. Like me, this person emphasizes the grace that is ours through Jesus Christ our Lord as the defining and sustaining dynamic of the Christian faith.

The response to his writings? “When are you going to say something about obedience, commitment, and morality?”

The unspoken charge? “You just want the Christian life to be easy and cheap!”

I assure you that is not what grace-teachers believe. There’s nothing cheap about grace, nothing soft about grace, nothing easy about grace.

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