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.