When I was a child, I spent many nights with my grandfather. Afflicted with polio before his first birthday, he lived with great disability but he lived as though he were as whole as any man. It is understatement to say that a book could be written on my grandfather’s life as encouragement for anybody who suffers limitation or infirmity.

Grandpa had an ancient school clock hanging on his living room wall. I can still hear the tick and the chime of that grand old clock, which now hangs in my mother’s home.

Sometimes in the night I would awaken after the sounds of neighborhood life had stilled and the night had laid down its blanket of peaceful quiet and I would lie in my bed listening to the steady “tick, tock, tick, tock” of Grandpa’s clock. Now and then I could tell that the clock had been bumped and was now ticking irregularly. Tilted too much to the right or too much to the left, the imperfect tempo was unsettling to me and I would go to the living room and move the clock until my ear was satisfied that the “ticking” and the “tocking” matched in perfect rhythm.

Everything in existence, all of the components that comprise our universe, all of it moves according to divine rhythm and balance. Day is balanced against night; hot balances against cold. The opposite of “up” is “down.” All of God’s creation moves in perfect synchronized balance and order.

This balance, this divine equilibrium is lost when man misrepresents or misinterprets God’s character and His word.

Within the church currently exists a growing “all or none” distortion of God’s meanings concerning grace and work. This perversion is visible in the “all grace” or the “no grace” camps. Both extreme views are flawed. The “works” faction complains that the “grace people” lack reverence and respect for God; that they believe they can get away with sin since God’s grace covers every error man might commit, either willfully or ignorantly. Extreme “Grace people” argue that it’s all grace or no grace; that either we rest fully in grace and ignore any effort, works or labor or we must put all our trust in the works we do for God.

James understood the conflict and observed simply; “faith without works is dead.” Both faith and works are required components of divine balance. Works do not negate faith and faith does not exclude works – that is, so long as these are divinely balanced.

Colossians 3 provides the “works” of those “who have been raised with Christ”:

Seek those things where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.

Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. 

Put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Put off: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language. Do not lie to one another,

And then, “as the elect of God, holy and beloved,”

 Put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering;

Bear with one another,

Forgive one another,

Put on love, which is the bond of perfection.

“Seek” and “set.” “Put to death” and “put off.” “Put on” and “bear,” “forgive” and once more, “put on.”

If the collective Body of Christ would engage in these works, God would provide the balance. James, the “works” guy also wrote, “He giveth more grace.”

A young boy lay in his bed in the middle of the night, listening to his grandfather’s clock “tick, tock, tick tock” in perfect rhythm; and he closed his eyes in sleep, and he rested.

God, what do You want of me? What shall I do; where shall I go? What shall be Your purpose for me, in me, with me? Tell me, Lord and I will do whatever You ask, go where you send me, endure what you desire for me.

It all sounds profoundly spiritual. The heart of the martyr seems to resonate in the words. But sometimes the discovery and the resolution of God’s will requires something more complicated than the default response, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

I was in the eighth grade and had noticed the “new girl” on the school bus. I don’t recall how I managed it, but in spite of my shy and timid ways I somehow introduced myself. We began to sit together on the bus route to and from school. When the appropriate number of days had passed, a number determined by some form of advanced calculus unavailable to a young boy, we were recognized as “going together,” whatever that meant.

But I do know this, when that girl announced she was having a pool party, I was on the invitation list.

My dad got involved, wanting to help his son’s introverted soul. He took me shopping. We were going to purchase a new outfit just for the upcoming pool party with “my girl.”

I expected that we would go to J.C. Penney or to Sears and Roebuck, but we did not. In those days, the coolest, most expensive, most “with it” men’s clothing store I knew about was called Frankel’s. I had been in there before, but never was able to carry with me enough money to purchase a pair of their socks, let alone a shirt or a pair of shoes.

Dad took me straight in and we began to look at racks of shirts and slacks and shoes and after a few minutes, dad asked me a question, “Well, do you see anything you like?” I responded with, “sure, dad, but what can I have?” And his answer shocked me into awe.

You see, there were six children in the Austin household. Six hungry mouths to feed, six bodies to clothe and I had long since grown accustomed to living by limitation and not by extravagance. I needed dad to give me a price range, to determine my limit, but his response to my “what can I have” was a straightforward, “What do you want?”

What did I want? For cryin’ out loud, I wanted that green and white short-sleeved shirt that just cried, “neato” or “cool,” or some era and age-appropriate exclamation (I guess that “awesome” perhaps would be an equivalent in today’s vernacular).

What did I want? “You mean, I can have whatever I want?” And it was so. That shirt. A pair of white Levis (you have to be a Baby Boomer to get this one) and a pair of Freeman penny loafers that the salesman ceremoniously placed on the counter and personally inserted a penny into each.

We are conditioned by a false theology to come to God as beggars, humbly asking for a crumb from His table of plenty.

When we approach Him for direction we instinctively await His edict, His wisdom, His permissions; His limitations. We were taught to tremble in His presence, to fear Him with whom we have to do. Ours ought to be, it is an inferior position before the Almighty. We are beggars and mendicants; He is in all ways superior to us.

And some of what I have just stated is true: Some of it, but not all of it. God is above us; He is the Almighty God of heaven and earth. He is in every sense, superior to man, His creation.

But He does not insist upon our trembling timidity. God invites us to come boldly before Him, to enter His gates with thanksgiving in our hearts and to enter His courts with joy. God never celebrates in proving to us that He is greater than we but “He made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.” God relates with us; He does not Lord over what would be no difficulty to Lord over. The Maker of heaven and earth stoops to look eye to eye with us and condescends, bends to make us of equal stature so that we might engage in intimate fellowship. He calls us not servants, but we are “friends.”

Our misguided, faulty teachings insist that we tell God what we want at the peril of His eternal condemnation and judgment, but in so believing we reveal only gross misunderstanding of what it means to walk with God.

And so we wrongly learn to never presume to tell Him what we want; instead we timorously ask Him what we can have.

But my earthly father, my dad took me into the most expensive store in town and asked me, “What do you want?” The unspoken and obvious completion to the question was “you decide and I will pay for whatever you choose.”

So I chose: White Levis, green short-sleeved shirt and penny loafers. Oh, and a nifty belt that coordinated with the burnished brown of my new penny loafer shoes. Since dad had asked and was planning to fit the bill.

I recently engaged my God in prayer regarding a singular and enduring issue. I asked Him, “What do you want me to do?” I repeated the prayer I have prayed for far, too long, “What is your will? What shall I do? What do you want?”

And shockingly, surprisingly, but clearly I heard Him turn my question on its ear and repeat it back to me. He asked, “What do YOU want?” In all this “store of potential and possibility with all this remarkable finery, what do YOU want?” He continued, now truly surprising me, “…. and whatever YOU want, whatever YOU desire, I will bless it, I will fit the bill.” But nobody had ever trusted me with this degree, with this measure of choice. No, I couldn’t be trusted to decide, to not just want but to speak out my want, my desire, my choice in such lofty and consequential matters. Oh, the abysmal poverty of our wrongheaded theologies!

In a moment’s time, theology and reality suffered a head-on collision. The repercussions of that impact were monumental. I already knew, in my reservoir of theological understanding that God could, that He might ask such a question: “What do YOU want?” But I had never considered how the implications of His question would spawn wonder and insight into the greater depths of who God is. He is more, far more than mighty Potentate of the Universe. God is more than Creator and Sustainer of all that is. God is greater than man’s visions of a giant Deity, some uncaring, unflinching monolith of power and strength and explosive, destructive energy. God is our Friend; He is our “called-alongside-cannot, will not desert, forsake, leave us God.

He comes to us, His Spirit draws, woos us. He bids us come to Him, lean on Him, learn of Him, become like Him. And we come and we discover, we die and we live but still, we so seldom fully understand. We hear His voice and we rejoice in the sound of His calling while we refuse or we fail to hear what He is saying.

The moment arrives and we ask and as we ask, He asks, “what do YOU want?” “What if you will choose and I will bless your choice? What kind of relationship would you then believe you might have with the sovereign and omnipotent God of all that exists?”

“Perhaps and maybe you would call me “Friend.”

He said to the Son, “Ask of Me and I will give You . . .” And the Son called Him Father.

The juxtaposition of these, “when I became a man, I put away childish things” and “unless you become as little children, you can in no wise enter into the kingdom” can appear to be both contradictory and impossible to reconcile. On first reading, these verses, attributed in the first case to Paul and in the second case to Jesus are polar opposites, yet in fact, they are complimentary and in perfect agreement one with the other.

Jesus used the phrase, “become as little children…” He identified adolescent nature. It is the nature of a child to believe. Children trust. Children, since no one has told them that it is impossible to fly, tend to believe they can fly. Ask a young boy to join you on Jupiter, and before you can finish the invitation, he is already on the planet. Imagination takes him there instantly. Imagination conveys a child to places an adult will never see, spectacular dimensions belong to the child because the he can imagine while the adult insists on evidentiary data and reasonable criteria before moving towards an objective.

I am not speaking of unrealistic expectations here. I am focused on that vital link between what is and what can be. Imagination forms the bridge that carries us from the limitations of the present to the possibilities of the future. Where would the world be without imagination? We would still light candles to provide our evening light. We would still be transported by horse-drawn carriages instead of riding 35,000 feet above the ground in insulated comfort if not for the magical gift of imagination.

The unfortunate and self-defeating practice of far too many followers of Jesus is to put away, to deny the very enablement, imagination, that allows us to believe the unseen, to reach to the invisible, to touch that which is beyond. Take note when the Bible provides words such as “consider,” “think,” “behold.” These are encouragements, no, requirements to go beyond the natural faculties we place so much value upon to the neglect of other, more penetrating senses; the ability to believe, to imagine, the capacity to see what the natural eye can never behold.

Faith and imagination are inseparable in the venture of pleasing God. Faith and imagination are essential to the enterprise of missionary effort, the birth of ministries, the establishment of business, the development of new products, the improvement of marriages and families.

Often, faith stands ready to believe, but is restrained until imagination creates an objective to be obtained. The well known song, “Only Believe” is not entirely theologically correct. Believe, and imagine are interwoven as a divine tapestry which becomes a road map to the miraculous, the unheard of, the supernatural displays of God’s mercies and graces. Try it. Imagine, then add to your imagination, faith. “Impossible,” you counter? Ah yes, but tell that to a child!

On the highway to Perfection
I met a misperception,

That Perfect was place to dwell
And not a sometime ocean swell.

And though I’m lifted now and then
To heights of flawless regimen

I cannot always perfect sail
And so from time to time . . . I fail!
© Greg Austin, 2013.

We’ve all heard it and used it, though it most often rings hollow to hearts well acquainted with failure, mistake, the gaffes and the errors of life:

“To err is human,”

The completion of that idiom is often omitted: “to forgive, divine.”

Yet forgiveness is not intended by our God to be within the exclusive domain of His capacity and simple, loving care for each of His creation. Indeed, His word compels us to forgive others, and that we must forgive even ourselves if we would be forgiven of God. In a portion of scripture no less central to the heart of God than the invocation we call “The Lord’s Prayer,” we find the principle: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

“Forgive us . . . as . . .” It is a conditional equation. I forgive, and He forgives. If I withhold forgiveness, He withholds His forgiveness. He is teaching us. He must lead us in the heart-act of forgiving if we are to understand Him, His heart, His mercy.

It is a fundamental of His character: God is love, and love therefore must become fundamental to our lives. And love is not amorphous, it is not nebulous, but love walks in the flesh of man, love reaches with hands worn rough and hard through life’s necessary work, and love touches in the gentle embrace of a mother’s arms.

Love must therefore forgive, else the effort can be called by many things, but it cannot be called “love.”

Matthew chooses the term, “debts.” The Greek of 6:12 means “that which is owed.” The Greek for “debtors” is “one who owes another.”

Matthew uses “debts” to indicate “sins,” but Luke, a physician is more direct. “Forgive us our sins (hamartia rather than ophelilema).

Mirriam-Webster describes “trespass” as “a violation of moral or social ethics: TRANSGRESSION; especially: SIN.” Our “trespasses” are more than slip-ups, boo boos, blunders or errors: They are sins. And sin brings forth death. Sin must be dealt with, forgiven, absolved, carried away.

When we have sinned against another, whether by design or unintentionally, our first response must be to enter the arena of forgiveness. We must ask God’s forgiveness, but the progression in the Lord’s Prayer is clear: “Forgive us . . . as we forgive (others).” The forgiveness of God is not the first gift we must seek! Forgiving others comes first, and even as we forgive, God is forgiving us. We cannot enjoy God’s forgiveness without the accompanying forgiveness of others – again, even if the “other” is our self. Forgiving my brother, my sister, myself is critical to receiving and appropriating God’s forgiveness! Forgiving is crucial to becoming more like God.

I “sinned” against a church last Sunday. I shared what I was fully convinced was factual, accurate, reliable, troubling but honestly presented truth in support of my main message. I invited my listeners to investigate the legitimacy of my words. “Don’t take my word alone; research, study, discover for yourself” I encouraged. And people did. I had been caught by a satirical presentation that I hadn’t noticed was satire.

Me, the guy who chastises his friends for not checking apparent facts with an “Urban Legends” website fell prey to sloppy investigation, hurried research and just plain humanity. Indeed, if ever I had reason to suspect I’m not divine, not even close to perfect, I’ve just gotten my report card. As my little poem above declares, “from time to time…I fail.”

And that’s really the point of this brief examination of the subject of forgiveness: I fail. You fail. We all, every one of us, fails. That’s why God provided for us a Savior. It’s the reason Jesus descended from His heavenly throne to occupy a place of little honor on this planet. It’s why He lived the PERFECT life and died a perfect death. Because when He rose again, He did so with power to break all the miserable chains of our failures. He rose victorious over hell, death and the grave and, oh yes, He arose victorious over imperfection, failure, trespass. His blood has washed away my sin and yours. His grace has provided freedom from the guilt of our failure and, if you will forgive me, He will forgive you, as He has forgiven me as I forgave myself.

There will most surely be more MISTEAKS . . . uh, mistakes to come, but when they do, the power and the availability of the blood of Jesus will once again be declared. God will be glorified, and we will be forgiven.

What if much, what if most of what we believe about God and man, about His relationship with us, about His will and purpose, His character and heart, about heaven and earth and hell and eternity and the future and the past were more the product of false foundations, misunderstandings of intent than they are emanations of Gods own heart?

What if much of what we believed about God and His Word were based on our own, fallible perceptions, our misperceptions; our sinful, broken, carnal, our failure-bent minds? What if these, and not “holy inspiration” and simply accepting the words we read in the library of scripture as direct, straightforward truth were the actual sources of our iron-clad ideas about God and man, about God and us?

What if many of our understandings were actually misunderstandings? What if we have read truth but believed untruth: what if we got the information right but in the process of “getting it” we have re-processed, re-arranged, re-translated what God said and what He meant in our humanness and not from His “Godness”?

What if we, and not God were the architects of theology, of religion, assigning to Him what we believe He must think and feel, how He must speak and act towards us?

How might our human fallibility and the resulting chasm between truth and assumption, the breach between imagination and reality impact the very core of what we believe and therefore the way we live?

We have built our holy systems, our theological camps, our understandings of the Divine – The God of our creation is marked by justice and holiness, by righteousness and divine perfection, and He is all those things; He is just and holy, righteous and true. But is He, at His core, at the center of His character primarily just and holy and faultless? Or is God, indeed, something else, something beyond?

Could He be, is it possible, “what if” God were primarily merciful and gracious, patient with our foolishness, understanding of our stumbles, forbearing at our collapses – our stupidity and our wanton disregard for Him and for His being? What if God were altogether and first, good and not judgmental? What if overwhelming, unconditional, unlimited, unrelenting love marked the character of God, and not holy wrath and divine judgment against sin?

What if God saw, long before you or I or any human life existed that we would be, as creatures of choice, predisposed to blunder and failure, to weakness and collapse – to sin? And what if God, in His mercy and grace provided, long before the first cry emitted from the first human, a cure, a remedy, a solution to the sin problem, and that He would entrust sin’s anti-toxin that would heal from every sin and from every sin’s effect to none other than His only begotten Son, Jesus, the Son of Mary, the Carpenter from Nazareth.

What if God would ensure, by coming to us in miraculous fashion and in sinless form and by dying a substitutionary death and rising again to seal His perfect work that the sin problem would be dealt with? Fully, finally, once and for all? What if?

What if He asked us to consider the cross, to remember the death and to celebrate the resurrection of His Son’s provision; that He desires that we live now in celebration and not in sorrow, that His will is that we should live with rejoicing and not regret. What if.

 So much time, effort and toil is spent by so many good people, trying to live righteously, trying to deny sin and weakness and failure because of a simple and fundamental misunderstanding of Who God is.

He IS mercy. He IS grace. He IS love. God does not merely possess a capacity to be merciful; He IS merciful! God’s grace is not an inanimate mechanism. His grace is not a partial cure – it IS the cure for our false theologies, our crippled understandings, our self-made gods of criticism and rejection, our gods of religious gratification, our weak and empty and lifeless gods that lead us to unfulfilled, unhappy, confined and crippled lives.

What if we began to see God as He is and not as we have thought Him to be? What if we ran like horses let loose from a man-built corral? What if, like lions freed from their confinement we found our freedom on the Savannah’s of God’s great and boundless grace? What if we became, who and what He always intended us to be? What. If?

I’ve been thinking, (yes, the conventional, religious term is ‘meditating’) about grace this morning. Specifically, I’ve been focused on the whole reality that life in Jesus, as forgiven, redeemed, born again people, is not as sterile and ‘clean’ and simplistic and as cut and dried as modern evangelicalism wants to – needs to make it.

“Stuff” happens to believers just like “stuff” happens to non-believers. Good “stuff” and bad “stuff” touches all our lives. God’s sun rises on the evil and on the good, He sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45).

There is an inherent need within many Jesus followers to make the whole concept of living for Jesus so attractive, so unbelievably perfect, that we run past truth and we bait our candidates for salvation with false hope and with undeliverable promises.

The oft-repeated assurance, “Come to Jesus and you will never have another problem or shed another tear or be tempted to perpetrate another sin, or suffer a loss or experience a failure” is neither realistic or true.

People come to Jesus and live the remainder of their lives found and flawed, both perfect (in God’s sight) and imperfect (in practice). We are all “unfinished furniture” until the Carpenter finishes the final edge and buffs out the last blemish on the table of our hearts. Paul’s testimony echoes through time, “Not as though I had already attained , either were already perfect” (Phil. 3:12).

Remember the old bumper sticker: “Please Be Patient, God’s Not Finished With Me Yet?” Well, it was true. It is true.

Here are but a few verities I have observed over time with regard to the reality of life in Christ:

– “Born again” people sin.

The best among us stumble. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Ro. 3:23) even after we come to Jesus and give Him our “all.”

– Children of “born again” people sin.

Enough said.

– Husbands cannot force their wives to fit the mold fashioned in Proverbs 31.

Among a host of qualities, the “virtuous wife” seeks wool and flax, and willingly works with her hands. She brings her food from afar. She rises in the night to ready her man’s breakfast. She is a real estate magnate and a farmer and an entrepreneur. She must spend time daily doing push ups since Scripture says “she strengthens her arms.” She is a seamstress and a sage and I have yet, in more than sixty years to meet one woman who meets all the standards of this “virtuous wife.”

– Wives cannot force their husbands to serve Jesus.

No amount of praying, fasting, hoping, trusting, calling prayer chains, pushing, shoving, preaching, deal-making with God will bring a husband to the place that only the Spirit of God can draw him. It’s not our suffering that God looks for, it’s our sincerity. It’s not our sacrifice that prompts God to act, it’s the substance of our faith and the grace of a caring God.

– Nobody is immune to sin.

Preachers, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, disciples, elders, bishops, even the Pope is vulnerable to the suggestions, the lusts of the flesh.

We “come to Jesus” and soon discover that we are in many respects, the same people we were before we came to Him. The huge and critical difference is that we have been forgiven, we have been made righteous in God’s sight. We are made whole, cleansed by the blood of Christ and we now experience and enjoy a living relationship with and by a living Savior. But the experiential reality within that relationship we call “salvation” is that we still trip, stumble, fall, fail. We are potentially and positionally perfected but we are not practically perfect.

And that’s why we need, and the reason He gives “more grace” (James 4:6).

The human penchant for presenting only a perfect, uncomplicated, unchallenged, “holy and “righteous” public persona is in fact, sinful. We do not live lives that are without mistake or fault or blemish or imperfection. We are, indeed, all of us, “sinners, saved by grace” (Eph. 2:8).

Paul displays frankness and candor in Romans 7, but we want to skip that chapter and focus on the 8th. We discourage new believers, we frustrate those who are struggling with our less than honest testimonies that “since I came to Jesus, I never am even tempted to sin. My kids are all perfect. We never question God. We are never sick. Life is perfect.”

Before we allow guests to cross the threshold of our homes, we first must vacuum, dust, pick up, make the beds. At all cost we must make our friends believe that we live magical lives. Our dishes never get dirty, our garbage cans stand clean and empty and we have no need of washing machines, because our clothing is never soiled. We send our friends home in despair, because their kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms aren’t picture-perfect candidates for the cover of Better Homes and Gardens.

I don’t think we should purposely invite friends into a rubbish heap, but only the exceptionally meticulous among us never have a molecule of dust adorning their bookcases or leave a magazine (horror of horrors!) on top of a coffee table.

I read an article today about Amy Grant’s 1999 divorce. Several denominational churches held CD-burning parties to destroy Amy’s “sinful” music – the music everyone raved about before hearing of her divorce, and to vent their anger and wrath that they had been seduced into listening to a sinner sing. Burning her CDs? As if her formerly sweet and spiritual songs were suddenly satanically-inspired?

Could it be that Amy Grant, with her failure was just a more public and obvious personification of some of our lives? Of some of us who have begged God to be gracious to us in our failures and collapses?

God hates divorce. As His people, we ought to hate what God hates. God loves sinners. We should, too. God forgives. So should we. God embraces, we too often reject. God gives more grace, and expects us to be like Him.

God’s grace is amazing. It held Amy Grant when the church would not. God’s grace knows no boundary, it expands even to where you and I live today.

“ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Do you notice that “grace” precedes “truth” in John’s lexicon? Do you know that either commodity, grace or truth without the other is incomplete and even potentially deadly?

It is true that Amy Grant’s marriage failed. But it’s grace that caught her when she fell. It is true that you have, I have, we all have sinned, but the glory of God is that His grace is always sufficient for us all.

The church has too often majored on truth and minored on grace. We have too frequently butchered wounded souls with the “truth” of the matter while withholding the very essence of the character of Jesus and of the Father, unmerited favor from heaven’s deep well of living water.

These two, “grace and truth” always travel together. Perhaps we should invite these as our own traveling companions on the road we’re called to travel.

Tony Vincent sings,

“You can’t have one without the other
Green and blue need earth and sky
They cannot separate us if they try.”

I would add,

“Grace and Truth need one another,

Green and blue need earth and sky.

They cannot separate us if they try.”

Grace and truth, in that divine order

Grace and truth, in heaven’s measure

Grace and truth, in every action, thought and word.

Grace and Truth will transform a wounded people, church and earth.