Here's some words to challenge and enthral from Dane Ortland's new book. I love the way he expresses the power of Jesus and our need to be apprehended by this kind of grace.
"The real question is not how to avoid becoming a Pharisee; the question is how to recover from being the Pharisees that we already are, right from the womb. Law feels safe; grace feels risky. Rule-keeping breeds a sense of manageability; grace feels like moral vertigo. After all, if all that we are is by grace, then there is no limit to what God can ask of us. But if some corner of our virtue is due to personal contribution, there is a ceiling to what God can ask of us. He can bring us only so far. He can only ask so much.
Such is not the call of Christ. The Jesus of the Gospel defies our domesticated. play-by-the-rules morality. It was the most extravagant sinner of Jesus' day who received his most compassionate welcome; it was the most scrupulously law-abiding people who were the objects of his most searing denunciation. The point is not that we should therefore take up sin. It is that we should lay down silly insistence on leveraging our sense of self-worth with an ongoing moral record. Better a life of sin with penitence that a life of obedience without it.
It's time to enjoy grace anew - not the decaffeinated grace that pats us on the hand, ignores our deepest rebellions and doesn't change us, but the high-octane grace that takes our conscience by the scrub of the neck and breathes new life into us with a pardon so scandalous that we cannot help but be changed. It's time to blow aside the hazy cloud of condemnation that hangs over us throughout the day with the strong wind of gospel grace. You 'are not under law but under grace' (Rom.6:14). Jesus is real; grace is defiant; life is short; risk is good. For many of us the time has come to abandon once and for all our play-it-safe, toe-dabbling Christianity dive in. It's time....to get drunk on grace - 200-hundred-prrof, defiant grace."
