No cheap grace...no cheap answers

I'm sure you've heard of cheap grace. Paul talks about it in Romans. First he says:

^{Romans 5:20-21 NIV} The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, ²¹so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Then he anticipates the "cheap grace" argument:

^{Romans 6:1-4 NIV} What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ²By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? ³Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

If you continually keep sinning KNOWING that God will graciously forgive your sin, you are counting on cheap grace. Hebrews warns us that there is no more sacrifice when we knowingly sin. Paul's answer in Romans is, of course, more gracious, basically, "Don't you know that if you're baptized into Christ Jesus that you're dead to yourself? And don't you know the RESULT of that death to self is so that we can have NEW life?" (Read the text and you'll see what I mean.)

So that should pretty much stop us in our tracks when we get ready to sin. If the warning from Hebrews isn't enough--

^{Hebrews 10:26-27 NIV} If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, ²⁷but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.

Then Paul's admonition SHOULD be enough.

The temptation, of course, is to read Paul flippantly or to dismiss the writer of Hebrews (in context) as simply constructing rhetorical hedges in order to support his point. That brings us to the point of cheap answers.

I don't want to rag on people who really made it tough on me over the past few years. But I have to make a comment. I read the book of Job. How helpful do you think it is, as a friend, to try and tie the difficulty to some fault in the person that is suffering?

That legalism is cheap and easy. It's SO much easier to give God a pass than it is to confront why the world works this way. And we can give that pass to God by simply blaming the person for the trouble.

It is the dark side of the (not so good news) of the prosperity gospel. In order for the prosperity gospel to be true--that God blesses me because I'm good--necessarily God must cause difficulties to rain down on those that are NOT good. You know...the man that just lost his job. Or the mom who just lost her husband and now her grandson has leukemia. Or...the greatest lie of them all...that God withdraws his blessing when we don't tithe, or don't pray, or don't go to church enough.

Those are cheap answers and, according to the book of Job, they are lies:

^{Job 42:7 The Message} After GOD had finished addressing Job, he turned to Eliphaz the Temanite and said, "I've had it with you and your two friends. I'm fed up! You haven't been honest either with me or about me--not the way my friend Job has.

A friend of mine recently told me the truth when she said that she doesn't know why bad things happen to good people, but she hopes that we will know one day. She did that as she expressed genuine concern about what we went through. I could tell that if she could have made it better for us in any way, she would have.

That willingness to sacrifice for others is precisely what Jesus did on the Cross for us. There is nothing cheap about that grace and nothing cheap about his answers.