Boxing In God's Grace

Read a great description today from Ray Anderson:

For Jesus, the purpose of prayer was not for excluding sinful actions of others, but for including others and their sinful actions in His own life with the Father as the basis for redemption of sinners.

Professor Anderson was writing in the context that Jesus prayed for Judas, and that Judas was an answer to prayer. Yes, he betrayed Jesus and the disciples, but this was not merely about God allow Judas to go through with it. This is much more than that. It is about God's promise of redemption that He is able to include sinful actions into His life.

And this isn't just about Judas obviously. This is about everyone else. This is about how God views me, that He prays for me and includes the sins that I have yet to commit. He is not praying that sinful actions in my life would be excluded, but that it would be inclusive of who I am so that He can continue to do His work in me. Professor Anderson, earlier in the book, writes:

When we view God's grace as conditional upon our perfection - our success in living by His commands - we will tend to use prayer as a way of securing God's promises by meeting the right conditions. In this view of God, a failure to produce a result through prayer throws us back upon our own lack of faith - or worse, upon some unconfessed spiritual defect that sabotages God's work.

This view of God's grace and prayer is something I know has been entrenched in my life. I completely use prayer as a tool to secure God's promise. And if that promise is unfulfilled, then it's a result of my own lack of faith or past sin. This theology and view of God limits God's grace and puts parameters onto God's willingness to accept my imperfections. At the same time that discounts God's redemptive nature and the grace He fully extends to me.

My view of God's "tough love" is a way to help me understand and reconcile that a perfect God could also accept and love imperfect beings. And it's way of boxing in God's grace and love that He fully extends. And the unconditional nature of God is part of the inconsistency of my own theology and understand of God's providence. The freeing nature I am meant to feel is displaced by self condemnation, feeling short of God's call/standards. But that doesn't allow myself to be redeemed back into God's family/kingdom. This has been a huge breakthrough in my viewing God's sovereignty and how it is that He can fully accept me as just me.

Is God Praying For Me?

I've been meaning to read Ray Anderson's book, "The Gospel According to Judas" for a long time now. It's not a book about Judas' view of how Jesus' life played out, but rather, it's a book about the extent of God's love and grace. I'm not done with the book yet, but there are many things that strike me about the different perspectives I've never thought about the difference in God's view and our view of Judas. We see Judas as a traitor because that's how he's portrayed in the Gospel. In many instances you read, "Judas Iscariot, he being the betrayer." But in all of that, Jesus loved him anyway. He spent 3 years with him, traveled with him, broke bread with him, washed his feet, and ultimately, also died for him.

One of Professor Anderson's observations that many of us skim over is that Judas is an answer to Jesus' prayer when He was given the apostles.

 

Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot, and Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. [Luke 6:12-16]

 

 

So he had prayed for each of these men, even Judas.

I'm not here to analyze Professor Anderson's writing, but it got me thinking about how God must be continually praying for me. Is that possible? Would God need to pray for me. I think He is. I think He's praying that I would always come back to Him. I would worship Him. I would have communion with Him. And in many cases, I've let Him down and His prayers go unanswered. And as I think about prayer, my misplaced ideology and theology focuses prayer on the immediacy of God's hand in my life. It is either favor or tough love. It is either giving me success or giving me a lesson to learn. And that view of God is not only wrong, but limiting God to a mere train conductor - one who either gives me what I want or withhold blessings because I've been bad. But to view God has a praying God and praying for me is a destruction of pre-concepts of God that is choking the grace that God wants to extend to me. God prays for me because He wants to bless me, but that doesn't mean He enables bad thoughts/attitudes/behaviors. And I am an answer to His prayer - just as Judas is an answer to Jesus' prayer. I am an answer to His prayer that I would follow Him, believe in Him, and have faith in Him. He doesn't require perfection, but what He prays for is pursuit and worship. And regardless of how I respond, He continues to pray for me, and that is comforting. It would be wrong to write that God is happy with imperfection, as it would be wrong to write that He does not love us because we are imperfect. He is wholly perfect and gracious. And He continues to pray for me because He loves me. That will never change.