Morgan Guyton writes at Red Letter Christians I Want To Be In The 1% Who Get God’s Grace.
What does he mean? Is he making some Calvinist point, that only 1% of people benefit from God’s prevenient and irresistible saving grace, and that the 99% are predestined to eternal torment? There are plenty of preachers around who would agree with that, at least if pushed. But I don’t think Morgan Guyton is one of them – he is a United Methodist pastor, and so unlikely to be a Calvinist.
No, by “get God’s grace” Guyton doesn’t mean “receive and benefit from God’s grace”. He is using “get” in a different colloquial sense and means “understand God’s grace”. And on that point I can agree with him. From my experience, barely 1% even of professing Christians come near to understanding this grace. But, I am glad to say, God is gracious enough that he gives his grace even to those who don’t understand it.
And his grace is not just that we can be saved from our past sins but must now work hard at being godly. Louie Giglio, in his DVD series Grace: The One & Only
Morgan Guyton is of course alluding in his post to the “We are the 99%” slogan of the Occupy protesters. But he notes that both these protesters and their “anti-99%” opponents are trying to justify themselves:
One side justifies themselves by talking about how hard they work (which means that other people who aren’t as hard-working should stop whining). The other side justifies themselves by talking about how hard their lives has been or how well they sympathize with people who have hard lives (which means that people who lack sympathy should recognize their moral inferiority). Both forms of self-justification cause us to be presumptuous, judgmental people who either call all rich people greedy or all poor people lazy … Self-justification is the basis for most hatred in our society …
But, Guyton argues, instead of being in this 99% of self-justifiers, we need to be among “The 1% of people who understand God’s grace to be the foundation of their being”. Then,
let’s be grateful for all that God has given us and use it as responsibly as we can, so that we can be extravagantly generous in how we share it with other people. Then maybe we’ll get to be part of the 1% who actually experience the joy of living under God’s grace, which is a joy I hope to experience one day when I’m finally free of my poisonous self-justification.
To this I would only add that, by God’s grace and to the extent that we live in Christ, Guyton and all of us are already “free of [our] poisonous self-justification” and indeed of all our sinful attitudes. We just need to live in that freedom and joy in the power of the risen Jesus.
Wow I’m so honored that you wrote about my piece. Yeah I was being sneaky in my use of the word “get.” I think I tried to make it clear that I’m still not in the 1% who get God’s grace, because there are still people whom I would be offended to see in heaven.
Thank you, Morgan. I’m honoured to have you commenting here. Yes, I agree that none of us, not even 1%, fully get God’s grace. Of course we would struggle about seeing some people in heaven, but at least we understand why they are there. I was just sad that you ended on a negative note when in fact you and I get a lot more of this than most other people.
Far be it from me to venture into the territory of serious theologians, but I’m very suspicious as to whether even 1% of us have got a clue about grace. For a start, I think most of since Augustine have been wrong in picturing it as a sort of spiritual commodity, rather like the oil that flows down Aaron’s beard, which people have to align themselves with to receive it. If they do, they receive grace. If they don’t, they don’t.
I’ve recently been beginning to suspect it’s something much simpler and more fundamental than that, not a sort of divine pyroclastic flow with a life of its own, but part of God’s personality, what he’s like, how he is.
If so, though, and if it doesn’t have an existence of its own, it ceases to be something one can debate much about.
Thank you, Dru. I wouldn’t want to speculate on quite how accurate the 1% figure is. But I would agree with you in rejecting any idea of grace as a “spiritual commodity” “with a life of its own”. Yes, it’s a part of who God is. Although in Greek and in our English translations it is represented as a noun, it is really more of a verbal or action concept: something that God does, and how he does it. In fact I would think that in many languages it has to be translated with some form of verb.
Getting grace has nothing to do with any theological tradition. It has everything to do in believing in the Jesus of the Gospels and it amplification by the Apostles. Jesus is the source of grace, not a theological tradition.
Jud, I agree. I suppose the problem is that some theological traditions do not encourage people to expect to receive grace from the Jesus of the Gospels.