“Ever since I was a new pastor and preached the grace of God, people said that if I believed that, I’d have no incentive to live a godly life. Then I said, if you lose any incentive to live a holy life once you lose fear, then fear was your only motivator, and that’s not right.If grace isn’t an incentive to live a holy life, you don’t have the right understanding of grace.One way to understand it is that it’s free. Right, okay. When you go to an event you get a free pad of paper with the company’s logo on it. Is that grace, well, yes, it’s free. But that won’t change your life. But what if you lived in a poor country and you were poor and needed a life changing surgery that you couldn’t afford or access. Now imagine your friend liquidated all of his assets to provide the funds for you to get that surgery. That is free, but that is costly. That changes your life.
That’s what Jesus did on the cross. But the cross wasn’t just physical pain. He was being separated from the Father. He was experiencing spiritual death. He was experiencing hell in some way.
How would you treat that friend who sacrificed everything for your surgery? Would you treat them poorly? No. Sacrificial love breeds sacrificial love.
In the Bible, joy that displaces the fear becomes the primary motivator to live a holy life. Not the only one but the primary one. Imagine a friend paid a bill for you. How are you going to feel about that? You need to know how big the check was right? If it was last months phone bill, great. That was nice. But what if it was that back tax bill for 8 years from the IRS that you were going to jail for. You need to know how big the check was before you know whether to say thank you or to throw yourself at his feet and say command me.” -from Tim Keller
When we really see what Christ has done for us, when we truly understand the sacrifice He made on our behalf. When we see the perfect God reduced to the worst, our human sin, and we understand that He did that out of love, for us. we can only have one response.
COMMAND ME!!!
