Grace and Truth
Do people who aren’t like you want to be around you?
That’s a question I’ve been asking myself lately. Personally and professionally. Do people who don’t agree with me what to be around me? Do people who don’t agree with The Mount, want to attend The Mount?
When I read the four gospels I’m constantly challenged the by grace and truth tension that Jesus displayed. He upheld a standard that nobody could live up to, but at the same time He continued to love everyone who fell short of it.
I think what amazes me the most is not the people who were trying to live a Godly life that were attracted to Jesus, but the people who were attracted to Him that didn’t make sense - the tax collectors, the adulterers, the outcasts, and the shamed. They didn’t avoid Him. They ran to Him.
Just being honest - I think we (the American Church) are spectacular at getting this wrong. We tend to group ourselves into two separate tribes - each warring with the other one for what is right.
One side turns truth into a weapon, fighting for right doctrine, right behavior, and right boundaries, all the while forgetting that the people they’re correcting are actually people. The other side offers grace so cheaply that it stops having any meaning. It becomes affirmations without transformation, acceptance without a vision for Kingdom living.
Neither looks like Jesus.
When someone lives in a way that you disagree with, what is your default posture? Is it distance? Do you immediately begin building a case against them? Do you want to point out their faults? Cast the first stone?
You see, somewhere along the way we’ve confused proximity with endorsement.
We believe that if we get too close to people whose lives are messy, whose beliefs are off, whose behavior we don’t approve off, we’ll somehow be leading them to think that their lifestyle is okay. So we keep our distance. We make sure that truth is displayed over grace.
But Jesus didn’t do that. He ate with tax collectors. Not because he endorsed tax fraud. Because He believed that love could reach farther than law. He touched lepers. Not because He was naive about contagion. Because He believed that isolation is worse than disease. He stood between a woman caught in adultery and a crowd of stone-throwers, and He did it without minimizing what she’d done.
The gospel of John says “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14 NIV)
Full of grace and truth. Not fifty-fifty. Not alternating days. Full of both. At the same time. In the same breath. That was the most exilic thing about Jesus to ancient Jews, and is still the most exilic thing about Jesus to modern Christians.
Grace and truth aren’t in competition. They aren’t on opposite sides.
Truth without grace is just hate with a Bible verse attached. It produces people who are right, but all alone. Grace without truth is just enablement with a smile. It produces people who are affirmed, but unchanged.
But grace and truth… that’s the thing that makes people run towards you, your church, and Jesus.
I think about this constantly in my work as a pastor. There are people in our community who are navigating complicated questions about identity, sexuality, marriage, and other things. And unfortunately, many of them have learned that the Church is a place where you can find answers or you can find belonging, but rarely both.
And listen, before you think the wrong thing here - I am not saying that we need to change what we believe. I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying, is that perhaps we need to recover how we hold what we believe.
We need to recover our posture.
The posture of an exile.
Exiles know they don’t fully belong anywhere. They know what it feels like to be on the outside. They should be the last people to build walls against the outsider. An exile doesn’t have a reputation to protect in the same way a settled citizen does. An exile is free to love dangerously. To get close. To sit at tables where the other guests make people nervous.
If we’re going to be exiles in this culture, we have to stop outsourcing our discomfort. We can’t just post Bible verses about loving our enemies and then make sure we never actually meet any. We can’t claim to follow a Jesus who touched lepers and then sanitize our own hands every time someone else’s brokenness gets too close.
So here’s the question again: Do people who aren’t like you want to be around you?
Not the people who already agree with you. Not the people in your small group. Not the people who vote like you and parent like you and believe exactly what you believe.
The tax collectors. The adulterers. The shamed. The ones who’ve been told, probably by the local church, that they are too far gone.
Do those people want to be around you?
- Adam