I’ll post more later, but if anyone has any thoughts I’ll be checking back in before I preach tomorrow night, so you have a prime opportunity to influence what is preached from a pulpit.

Any takers?

My understanding of Prevenient Grace is that it is what gives all men the ability to exercise their free will to choose or reject God. Here is my primary question: If God has given all men the power to choose him, then what is it that makes one man choose God and another reject Him? Is it their upbringing? Their environment that shaped them? And what role does Wesleyan Theology ascribe to God in making those choices? What I am getting at is this: if God makes the man and determines all the little things about him, and if God chooses the man’s parents and so on and so forth, then how is Wesley’s concept of free will any different than Calvin’s? What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

All of that will change very soon though. Today, they are taking him from the Johnson City hospital he was life-flighted to, and they are moving him to Winston-Salem for physical therapy. He’ll have two fairly intense weeks there, with visitation limited to three hours in the evening (that includes his wife) and then it will be time to go home. And I imagine that is when he will need our prayers the most.

So if you have time in the next few weeks, say a quick word of prayer for Mike and Ginger Martin. Pray that Mike will continue to grow in the Lord and that he will lead his family spiritually. Pray that Ginger will love and submit to her husbands leadership and that she will cast all her cares upon God. Pray for them as you would pray for any other couple that you know, because the truth is, the challenges that they will face haven’t changed in their nature, just in their appearances.

I’ve titled this post analogous grace, because I want to deal with how God uses things He has created to reveal aspects of himself and how he works through these roles in the world around us. To give an example of what I mean, think about the following words/titles/roles: Father, Wife, Husband, Lord, Church, Shepherd, Bride, Son, King, Priest, etc. Each of these words are well known to us and have strong and definite meanings. Each of these words are also used by God to describe either Himself or something that He relates to in an important way.

As before, in this post, my goal is not to convince you of a Sovereign God, but to bring together separate ideas. If you believe in a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, outside of time, and who sustains the world, and this God refers to Himself as our Father and us His Sons and then institutes a human role of father and son, then it is hard to avoid the idea that the role of a Father is representative of certain aspects of God.

Let me take this idea one step further and say this as well, a father is different from a king,which is different from a church elder, which is different from a father, and so on. What I mean to say by this, is that while each of these roles may have some overlap between them in what they do, they are each different from one another specifically because they represent different aspects of God. This also means that what is good for a father to do, may not necessarily be good for a government to do, may not necessarily be good for a church to do, may not necessarily be good for a son to do, and so on. Because God has invested some aspect of Himself in each of these roles, it is reasonable to believe that He would tend to bless when someone in one of these roles is acting in a way that represents Him correctly.

This is why churches must be very careful to not supplant the role of family and or government, why government must be careful to not supplant the role of church or family, and why family must not supplant church or government. It is why a husband must not become the wife, and why the wife must not become a husband, why bride and bridegroom are important distinctions, and so on. Each of these specific things bears witness to God and the relationships that He has established to teach us more of him. And because grace is tied up in the specific work that God is accomplishing, we should not be surprised that he would bless certain actions if performed by a father and curse them if performed by a church. And that is the heart of what I mean by analogous grace, that God has drawn analogies for us to better know Him, and we had best be mindful of them.

What do you say? Is this off the mark or does it have the ring of truth? Let me know.

God’s
Riches
At
Christ’s
Expense

(This one is the best because it both defines and spells Grace at the same time!!!)

And while I don’t really want to knock those definitions (except maybe the acrostic), I wonder if you’ve ever felt like me that such simplistic definitions do not do grace justice?

I should point out that I’m not saying that we can completely understand grace. In fact, as we discuss grace a little bit, I’d like to try to show that to understand grace completely, we would have to understand God completely.

The seed thought that I have for thinking about grace is this:

Grace is associated with the specific work that God is performing in any situation. What we identify as grace is the interaction of God with us as His creation to accomplish His purposes. Grace is tied up in the specific actions of God and in our perception of those actions (think revelation).

In this post, I want to focus on the specificity of grace in any given situation.
As I was growing up, I tended to think of the world as a complex system that God had put into place and that ran, machine-like with only occasional “intervention” needed by Him. And while this abstraction of the world serves quite well for some purposes, much like Newtonian physics, it is a severely flawed way of understanding both God and the world He has created. You see, Scripture defines God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and outside of time. It also says that he actively sustains the world. Because of this, any system that God has created is, by His very nature, constanly being intervened upon. Or to say it another way, God Himself IS the system (and therefore, is not a system at all.)

If we accept this, that a Sovereign God as described in Scripture demands a completely involved God, and that God’s involvement in our lives is of a personal nature, we begin to see how specific grace must be.

I should also state this: If you do not believe in a sovereign God, then it is not my intent with this post to convince you of it. The goal of this post is to bring previously separate concepts about God and His grace together into something of a cohesive whole (and, as with all my posts, to perpetrate excessive comma usage upon the world)

Let me give some examples that demonstrate my understanding of grace in action:

Example 1:
Let’s suppose for the purposes of this example that God’s ideal for a functioning home is some form of home school. This is for example purposes only. Let’s also say we have FamilyA and FamilyB. The Mom and Dad of FamilyA have been saved for about 6 years and are in a small Bible preaching church in a small town with no Christian schools. Several church members teach at the local public school and DaughterA and SonA both attend there. FamilyB attend a different church in the same town and the Mom and Dad of FamilyB have been saved for approximately the same amount of time. The elders at the church that FamilyB attends all home school their children and they have recommended home school to the members of the church. FamilyB decides to home school their children and do so for several years. At some point, the Dad of FamilyB decides that home school is costing them too much in terms of time and energy. He talks to his wife and they decide to put their children in the local public school for the last four years of high school. This part is the key: in this example, FamilyB’s reasons for stopping home schooling are carnal and are based on their own selfishness.

Based on what I know of grace in Scripture, it would not be unreasonable to expect that God would treat these two families very different for their decisions. He may very well bless FamilyA and protect their children from certain dangers while FamilyB and their children may have a very different experience in the same school during the same time period.

Example 2:
Two young Christians get married and have a couple of children. Because of the way they were taught, and the church that they are attending, and the best advice that they can get, they do not begin disciplining their children in earnest until they are three or four years old and they rarely spank them. Nevertheless, their children are relatively well behaved and respectful of their parents, their rules, and the Word of God. Over the next 14 years, the parents do not have any more children, but they do change churches and they mature quite a bit in their faith and in their understanding of Scripture. At this point, they have two more children in short order. Initially, they treat these children much as they did the previous two, but these children are much more unruly and do not respond to the limited discipline that they get.

In this situation, though there is only one family, the passage of time and the greater revelation of God is what has changed. We have every reason to believe that God would not bless their current actions where they have greater knowledge of him in the same way that he would when they acted through ignorance, but through faith as well. We also have every reason to believe that if they begin applying what God has revealed to them over the past 14 years they will see results (not perfection, not all their problems going away, but God will bless their obedience)

What I am trying to get at with these examples is not that we can control the actions of God or that works produce righteousness, but instead the idea that we cannot always compare two separate actions and understand why God chooses to bless or curse as He does. (In fact, we cannot always tell what is a blessing and what is a curse. I am also not saying that life is inscrutable and that we shouldn’t try to understand God or His ways.) Because grace is not some magic pill that fixes things, but is instead exactly how God as a Father/Judge/Triune God is working in the world both through His actions and through His revelation to each and every man, it is not something that we can just wave our hands at and explain away. Grace is complex because God is complex and grace is the work of God. But Grace is also simple because all we have to do to receive it, is to obey.

There is, of course, more to be said about grace and what it teaches us about God, but I think this is enough for now. I realize that this is a rather long post for this blog, but if you’ve managed to fight your way through it, I’d love to know what you think.