By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor

After Sunday’s sermon on grace (click here to listen), I was asked an especially good question:

“But what about my friends who say they are Christians, who have heard this message of grace and abused it; people who say they are Christians but are living in such a way that brings dishonor to Christ? What should our posture be toward them? How can we not be ‘self-righteous,’ yet not act like everything is acceptable?”

I actually had that question as an application in my original notes for the sermon but decided to save it for another time, not wanting to dilute the “scandal” of God’s incomprehensible grace.

We said a couple weeks ago, at our State of the Church service, that the grace of God is always a “double grace” (click here to listen). That, to use a word picture, a picture of a healthy life is like a bicycle with two tires.

To become a Christian means you live in union with Christ, and out of that union flows, inseparably, a double grace. Distinct but inseparable. You can no more separate this grace than you can tear Christ in two, “rend Christ asunder.” Like two tires, a double grace.

The front tire – always the front tire – always first, always primary, is the grace of God in the face of Jesus. He is always the God who loves sinners. Period.

Don’t nuance that.
Don’t say “but.”
Don’t add a comma.
Don’t try and balance that.
Let it bother you.

At the same time, Jesus calls us into a new life. Period. Unequivocably. Back tire. Not as a condition of His love. He doesn’t say, “I’ll love you IF you change.” But as a consequence of His love, He says, “I love you, as you are. Now follow Me into a new and better life.” The Bible’s word for that is discipleship.

Last week I suggested something false. I suggested that some of us have huge front tires.

GRACE, GRACE, GRACE.

So large in fact that we use grace as a license not to follow JESUS. “He loves us anyway, right?”

And I suggested that some of us – we don’t have bicycles. We have Big Wheels.

But that word picture suggests something entirely false. That, strictly speaking, grace can be cheap. And grace, when it’s real, can never be cheap.

The “big front tire” word picture suggests that you can receive grace, and it not, at the same time, transform you. (Like the putative “my friends who say they are Christians,” but just want to live how they want to live).

But it’s impossible, as impossible as it is to divide Christ in two. Bonhoeffer himself would agree, “Cheap grace,” he wrote, “means no grace at all.”

Your heart should be grieved for your friends. Grieved for Christ’s honor. Grieved for their healing and your own. You are grieved not just with them, but for them, because you know grace that is not transformative means grace is only a word.

Thus, rather than a huge front tire, we have – many of us – a tiny, tiny bicycle. And the thing about a tiny bicycle is that no one can ride it. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t get you anywhere.

It’s more like a Monopoly icon – you know, one of the Monopoly pieces. “You be the thimble, I’ll be the bicycle.” Like a tiny metal bicycle, you can put it in your pocket and carry it around with you. A relic. That’s what a lot of us want to do with God: have Him in our pockets, close by if we need Him, still under our control.

But remember: Jesus is not self-righteous toward the self-righteous.