The knowledge and apprehension of God's love for us is beyond the capacity our minds and hearts to measure. It is, as St. Paul wrote, peace that passes understanding...a wisdom that is unfathomable. God's forgiveness is in some real way "an offense" to the iron-forged pride of the human heart. It is an offense to our torqued sense of justice.

 

It is shocking...some call a scandal...that God has done for humanity what it could never deserve nor ever ever achieve.

 

In talking to a young woman about this grace Tim Keller writes, “I was intrigued. I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: “If I was saved by my good works—then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace—at God’s infinite cost—then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.”

 

Keller states, “Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.”

 

From God's point of view, there is nothing hindering all humanity from returning "Home" to His heart. What holds people back is the fact that they must turn from going their own way and return to God by means of receiving what He has done for us in Jesus Christ. He has provided the grace and even empowers the faith to receive what is a singular and unique Gift of forgiveness, a whole new heart and a new life for the moralist and the immoralist. Both need salvation by grace!

 

Last Sunday morning in the adult study time, Tim Keller spoke about the two sons in the story we know as "The Parable of the Prodigal Son". One son was into "self-discovery" throwing off all restrains, diving headlong into hedonism and the other was a "moral conformist"doing everything right. Neither son had a relationship with their father. They both wanted what their father could provide, but didn't want him.

 

He writes in The Prodigal God, “Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches to life (moralism, self-discovery) that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: "the immoral people -- the people who 'do their own thing' -- are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution." The advocates of self-discovery say: "The bigoted people -- the people who say, 'We have the Truth' -- are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.”

 

Neither way brings one into a relationship with God. Both methods of laying hold on "life" fail. There must be someone who does for us what we could never do. Tim Keller states, “Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn't mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.”

 

God has forgiven us of ALL our sin...not in "part" but the "whole" of it...from our first breath till our last...for all time and human history. The Cross of Jesus Christ has, by death, destroyed death. The veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The way to approach God has been opened through the torn Body of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as He hung on that Roman cross as the Lamb of God. He has taken away the sin of the world.

 

That is why in his second letter to the Corinthian church St. Pauls calls followers of Jesus Christ "ambassadors for Christ"...God making His appeal through us for people to be reconciled to Him. The forgiveness of God came at infinite cost paid for by an infinite love demonstrated through the Eternal, Infinite, God the Son, the Word Who became flesh, taking on our humanity to rescue us.

 

In Psalm 103, King David sings, "He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west." You know that you can only travel so far north before you begin to travel south again. However once you start traveling east, you will always travel east. Then, if you turn around and travel west and keep traveling, you will always be going west. God has thoroughly removed our sin by His singular act of redemption in Jesus Christ!

 

Think about how God has forgiven you. There is no ground left for us to refuse to forgive as we have been forgiven. The one who "merits forgiveness" doesn't NEED it. 

 

One more thought from Tim Keller relating to forgiveness and grace: “Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”

 

That is real cause for repentance and grace from the Lord to do as He did and to say what He said.