Transforming Grace

I have noticed a tendency to become settled in life with a certain level of sin which I accept as unchangeable. The argument goes like this: I have been a Christian for 15 years. I’ve done lots of growing in that time. In the early days I was acutely aware of my moral failings and I grew in large spurts. But I seem to have reached a point where growth, if any, is in tiny incremental steps. A bad week will set me back further than I’ve grown in a year. In some way, I have grown to accept that my sinful nature creates a ceiling or a level which sanctification tends towards but cannot exceed. So I live with my short temper and impatience and presume that I have an excuse all worked out. It’s sin living in me (Romans 7) and I’ll never change. The presumption that I’ll never change is fatal. Here’s Thomas Watson on the subject of presumption:

5 Presumption of mercy. Who will take pains with his heart or mourn for sin that thinks he may be saved at a cheaper rate? How many, spider-like, suck damnation out of the sweet flower of God’s mercy? Jesus Christ, who came into the world to save sinners, is the occasion of many a man’s perishing. Oh, says one, Christ died for me. He has done all. What need I pray or mourn? Many a bold sinner plucks death from the tree of life, and through presumption, goes to hell by that ladder of Christ’s blood, by which others go to heaven. It is sad when the goodness of God, which should ‘lead to repentance’ (Romans 2: 4), leads to presumption.

I’ve learned recently that my ceiling is false. The more I grow in my heartfelt grasp of God’s grace to me in Christ, the higher my ceiling is raised. When I know the grace of God more I hate my sin more and am sensitive to what I do and say. Lord, let me know more of the wonders of your grace so I might loath my sin and live for Christ. Amen

In yesterday’s excerpt, Thomas Watson highlighted something of the promises of God. I need to be like him as minister of the word of God. If not, I am what John Bunyan called a promise clipper. Bunyan described promise clippers as enemies of the kingdom of Christ and worthy of public disgrace!

John Phillips explains where Bunyan’s analogy came from in his commentary on Genesis:

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I of England commissioned a colony of artists from Italy to coin currency for the English mint. The Florentine artists took sheet gold and silver, divided it up with shears, and hammered the pieces into the proper shapes. But, for all their skill, the workmen could not give each piece an absolutely equal weight. For one thing, the hammered coins had no carved rims around their edges. So it was not long before thieves discovered it was easier for them to clip a sliver or two off the rim of a shilling than it was for them to do an honest day’s work. Coin clipping became a profitable enterprise of crime.

To avert the crisis of confidence, coin clippers, who sadly included the Reverend Robinson of Huddersfield, were publicly executed. Public confidence was only really restored once “armies of statesmen and financiers and king’s counselors and Parliamentarians” had done all they could to ensure coins represented a true and constant value. Phillips again:

…The coin of the kingdom of God is the promises of God. John Bunyan saw that. In his famous allegory The Holy War he tells how Mansoul, having long been under the power of Diabolus, was at last emancipated by Prince Emmanuel. One of the first acts of the king was to arrest Clip-Promise, the traitor. He was a notorious villain, says Bunyan, “for by his doings much of the king’s coin was abused, therefore he was mode a public example.” Alexander Whyte, in commenting on that phase of the story, said:

“The grace of God is like a bullion mass of purest gold. Moses and David and Isaiah and Hosea and Paul and Peter and John are the inspired artists who have commissioned to take that bullion and out of it to cut and beat and smelt and shape and stamp and superscribe the promises and then to issue the promises as currency in the market of salvation. It is these royal coins, imaged and superscribed in the Royal likeness, that Clip-Promise so mutilated, debased and abused.” [Alexander Whyte, Bunyan's Characters, Third Series (London: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1895), pp. 95-105]

It is one of the hallmarks of contemporary evangelicalism, certainly in my experience and my own life and preaching, that many evangelicals clip the promises of God. We speak casually or use catchphrases or slip into jargon mode and so devalue the coin by clipping its edge. Armies of bishops, vicars, pastors, writers, intercessors, Christians must speak expansively and passionately on God’s promises before public confidence will be restored in their value.

I’m a preacher and teacher of the bible. Yet, even with the bible open in front of me, I’ve been guilty until recently of the following accusation made by Charles Spurgeon. This excerpt comes from Michael Horton’s article The Law and the Gospel at the White Horse Inn:

As he watched the Baptist Church in England give way to moralism in the so-called “Down-grade Controversy,” Charles Spurgeon declared, “There is no point on which men make greater mistakes than on the relation which exists between the law and the gospel. Some men put the law instead of the gospel; others put gospel instead of the law. A certain class maintains that the law and the gospel are mixed…These men understand not the truth and are false teachers.”

In our day, these categories are once again confused in even the most conservative churches…much of evangelical preaching today softens the Law and confuses the Gospel with exhortations…obedience must not be confused with the Gospel. Our best obedience is corrupted, so how could that be good news? The Gospel is that Christ was crucified for our sins and was raised for our justification. The Gospel produces new life, new experiences, and a new obedience, but too often we confuse the fruit or effects with the Gospel itself.

I have, for a few years, mixed law and gospel in my own mind (this is neonomianism or Galatianism) and so I have been a false teacher as well as a joyless Christian. Grace is not grace where it is mixed with works. In future posts I aim to show how the two are distinct.