The eCrozier

If you’re wondering what book to read next, then I suggest One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World by Tullian Tchividijan. Tchividijan is, by the way, the grandson of Billy Graham. As much as I’ve admired Billy Graham’s preaching over the years, I’ve always been struck by what I heard as “creeping conditionalism” in his preaching. What I mean by “creeping conditionalism” can be best evidenced by a statement like: “God loves you, but only if….,” as if there were a quid pro quo in the grace of the cross of Jesus. I don’t wish to be unfair to the Reverend Graham, and maybe I misunderstood him, but nonetheless that was his effect on me growing up.

So, I thought that the Christian faith was about being good. It was for nice boys who obeyed the law. It was about clean thoughts and good boys who drank their milk and ate their spinach. Of course, there was more to it than that: Jesus also loved me. That was the official position. But as I actually lived in Christian community, I heard something else: what really mattered was being good. There were strings attached to God’s love. Even though the message started out as “Jesus loves me,” it wound up: “Jesus loves me, but with certain conditions.” It was hard to be sure of those conditions. Just how good did I have to be and how often? 51% of the time? 75% of the time? All the time? Where was the cut-off line?

But the Gospel of Jesus isn’t about being good. It’s actually about our recurring failure to be good. It’s about the sin and brokenness of life. It’s about our repeated inability to be the people God intends for us to be. It’s about how everything about us, even our best intentions, can become an avenue for sin. So, the Church isn’t a community who has come together to be good. Rather, we’re a community called together by God to proclaim God’s grace in the cross of Jesus. In spite of all we are and all we do, God loves us. Now that bears repeating, because many of us need to be deprogrammed. God loves you and me and this world (see John 3:16) no matter what, no strings attached.

Tchividijan is clear that there are no “but only ifs” of God’s love. God’s love is One Way Love. It’s without condition or required response from the one loved in order for that love to be true. He writes about what he calls “performancism” in the Church. He’s quick not to downplay loving one’s neighbor as one’s response to God’s one-way, sacrificial love, but that’s not a pre-condition for God’s love of us. He contends that    

 The good news of God’s grace has been tragically hijacked by an oppressive religious moralism that is all about rules, rules, and more rules; doing more, trying harder, self-help, getting better, and fixing, fixing, fixing–—ourselves, our kids, our spouse, our friends, our enemies, our culture, our world. Christianity is perceived as being a vehicle for good behavior and clean living— and the judgments that result from them—rather than the only recourse for those who have failed over and over and over again.

He’s right. The only recourse is God’s inexhaustible Grace for an exhausted world. Read this book and then read Grace in Practice by the Reverend Paul Zahl.

+Scott