The Grace of a Take-Charge Life

It is easy to be a rule keeper. It is easy to be proud about the issues we believe are important. It is easy to look down upon others who see these issues from a different perspective than we see them. The problem is that we let our devotion to certain issues and principles define us. The problem is that our adherence to these issues and principles can easily become rigid rules and regulations keeping. In the process, the beauty and simplicity of Jesus is lost.

I want us to understand that grace has to be a living reality, not simply a doctrine to which we give assent. The grace of God is so magnificent that the more we see and experience it, the more we realize that we can never say, “I have fully grasped it,” any more than we can ever say, “I have grasped a sunrise or a sunset.” It is a huge underestimation to think we can grasp grace by quoting a theological definition: “God’s grace is undeserved favor.” This can never explain grace. It would be like thinking we understand love when we say, “Love is when two people get married.”

New Life Is Really New

When Jesus came, He brought a new covenant. It was really new. It was so new that it was just about impossible for His earliest disciples to understand. In fact, what He did is unimaginable. What He did is irrational to every category of thought that we possess. That is why His disciples could not get it. What He was doing in His love for them, what He was doing in His grace for them, was contrary to every idea they had about the nature of true religion.

We look back at the disciples, and we wonder, “What in the world was wrong with them? How could they not get it?” The reality is quite the opposite. We should ask instead, “How could they get it?” It is impossible. It is beyond comprehension. The old covenant sacrifices, as powerful a pointer as they were, had a limited purpose. Their purpose was simply to show us how even the most rational and beautiful picture of grace—a blood sacrifice for sin—falls flat in front of what Jesus actually did.

Jesus trained men who, because of their background, should have been ready for the great blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. They weren’t. They were still utterly incapable of “getting it” just from the facts. This is understandable. The ultimate fact is that it is absolutely impossible to come to an understanding of God’s grace just from the assessment of all the facts.

There is nothing in human experience alone that can awaken a person to the full reality of God’s grace. What Jesus did for us, the grace that His life and death is for us, is eternally impossible to fully comprehend. The fact that people like us will live with God forever is purely His gracious gift to us. Sadly, even though we know so much about grace, we continue to make obeying rules the high watermark of our lives, rather than grace.

An Early Experience of Grace

I remember the first experience of what I would now call grace in my life. It happened over half a century ago. I was a little kid, and I had just been given a gift that I had wanted for a long time. It was a cowboy suit. It had everything. It had the pants, the vest, the cowboy hat, the boots, and spurs on the boots. It had a holster and two guns.

Gunsmoke was my favorite TV show. The bad guys would often get their heads hit with the butt of Marshall Dillon’s gun. To me, my brother was the “bad guy.” I remember taking out my toy gun and doing what Marshall Dillon always did. It was just a quick crack on my brother’s head. I was stunned when my mom was furious, but I shouldn’t have been. She told my dad to give me a spanking. I was terrified. I was also distraught, because she said she was taking away my cowboy suit.

My dad took me into my bedroom, where I was to be spanked. I was five or six years old, and I waited in pure fear as he took off his belt and told me to bend over the bed. Then he did something I still weep about even as I write these words. He proceeded to hit the bed instead of me. I was flooded by a sense that because of what he did, I had escaped a terrible punishment. It had a powerful impact on me, and remains for me my first experience of grace. In the encounter with my father, the punishment I deserved was received by my bed instead of me.

God, though, looks upon us all; every one of us who would ever belong to Him. He sees the punishment we justly deserve, but He does not punish us. He also does not take it out on the cross. He punishes His Son instead, and He does it with an anger that could have justly been poured out upon us. In my situation, I understood something about grace as a son who had just escaped punishment. With God, His justice and His holiness demand that the punishment be paid in full. There are only two payment options: Either we pay it, or He pays it for us.

The Fullness of Grace

God’s grace-filled love involves, as the Bible says, a height and depth and length and breadth that is beyond comprehending. He therefore chose to punish His Son instead of punishing us. He chose to hurl His white hot, legitimate fury upon His Son, so that we would go free, even though we deserve every stroke that fell upon His own Son, who deserved only love.

When we come to Him, we come believing that He is truly God our Savior. We know that He is a good and loving God. We see, perhaps slowly, His unconditional forgiveness. With that forgiveness, we see that we are to live, but not by rules. We live instead out of the new heart that we are given.

We are meant to live a brand new life. This is a glorious life; not a life of rules and regulations, but a life of love. This is why He says, “In this is love…” In what? In this: “…not that we loved God.” That is the starting point of a Take-Charge life. We had no love—none for the people around us, but even less for God. We were loveless, and lost in our selfishness.

God came after us. God came for us. God came and found us. Not that we loved God. He wants us to know that. It is the first principle of a truly Take-Charge life. We had nothing of love in us.“But…” Here is where our lives really begin to change. It is like the criminal who is standing before a judge. He is told he is guilty. Yet if the judge says, “But,…” the prisoner knows immediately that mercy is coming.If judgment is coming, the judge will say, “You are guilty, and I’m throwing the book at you.” If there is to be mercy, the judge will say, “You are guilty, but I’m going to give you a break.”

Here is the place where the break comes for us. God has just declared us guilty—guilty of pridefulness, guilty of selfishness, guilty of lovelessness. He has made it clear: “The wages of sin is death.”’ That means ALL sin, even the sins we think are insignificant and foolish. These, before God, are all capital offenses worthy of death. “You are woefully, sinfully, selfishly prideful and loveless, but I love you nonetheless.” Not that we love God, but that He loves us.

“So what?” you say, “Talk is cheap; love is cheap.” How many women reading this book, have heard “I love you,” and all it meant was “I want you”? “So He loves us,” you say, “So what?” Well here’s what: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loves us and gave His Son to die on the cross in order to make the just payment for our sins.” This is love. The One who loves, dies for His beloved. We are His beloved. He loves us. We hated Him, but He loves us anyway. Humanly speaking, it makes no sense to die for people who hate you, but that is what He did. When we come to love Him, we should see our ability to love Him as a miracle.

This is grace, pure and simple. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loves us and gave His Son to die on the cross in order to make the just payment for our sins.” It does not stop here. Grace is freely given, but it can only be grace for us as we see how powerfully it transforms us, and enables us to live a truly Take-Charge life.

Take-Charge Possibilities

When we ask, “Is it really possible for us to live this Take-Charge life?” the answer is Yes! “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loves us, and gave His Son to die on the cross in order to make the just payment for our sins. “Beloved, if God so loved us, so also ought we to love one another.”

This is what a Take-Charge life is all about. It is a life of love. It is not a self-empowered excuse for selfishness. It is a God-breathed vision in which we see ourselves as an offering poured out on the altar of His grace. We see ourselves extending His love across the earth. Amazingly, we are the means, the hands and feet so to speak, by which God accomplishes His glorious purpose. This purpose is to extend His invitation to lost and broken people. Through us, they receive the message of love, healing, and restoration that comes from heaven.

How have we so messed it up? How have we so missed the mark? God calls us to simply “be like Jesus.” Let us give ourselves to that life. Let us determine in our hearts to take hold of the Take-Charge power that is waiting to be ignited in us. This power is, remarkably, all of God’s grace. It leads us so that as we live our lives, we come to see that all that we are, and all that we have, is to be used for Him. God delights in us living just such lives, lives of love. Lives that really know grace will become gracious lives. Lives that are truly touched by God’s love will truly love as well.

We do not have to be afraid of grace. We must not let anyone set up a barricade between us and grace, not even a barricade of good things. Grace, pure, free, unmerited grace, is to be the heart of everything. As we let the grace of God Take-Charge of our lives, it will kindle a fire of love and devotion that will reveal through us the Savior who graciously “loves us and gave Himself for us.”

With this in view, you are ready, dear reader, to Take-Charge of your life, knowing that if you do so by His power, then your life will never Take-Charge of you!