Grace isn’t cheap, it’s free.

The event of preaching is a moment for Christ alone to be poured into our ears.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Recently, I’ve been devouring a collection of essays edited by Virgil Thompson called Justification Is for Preaching, which, as the title suggests, aims to advance the fact that the biblical doctrine of justification isn’t meant to exist in lectures or theological theories or seminary halls. Rather, the good news of God’s gratuitous gift of justification of the sinner through the death and resurrection of his Son is an announcement for real sinners and real people. It is meant to actually deliver actual sinners from their wretched rebellion and waywardness. Accordingly, when preachers openly and publicly preach the Word of God, they likewise, openly and publicly invite one and all to revel in the justification that theirs not due to anything they have done or not done but solely because God in Christ delivered himself up to die on behalf of those who were already condemned (Gal. 1:4). To borrow from Gerhard O. Forde’s “Preaching the Sacraments,” the event of preaching is, in particular, a moment for Christ alone to be poured in the ears of every sinner and saint all over again (149).

While such assertions might garner “Amens” in the main, there is a natural recoil that occurs when such talk of justification is untethered from any consequent conditions. Church folks get nervous when too much focus is spent on God’s grace because they fear that such a message carries with it an implicit disregard for decorum, spiritual discipline, and holy living. If the preacher talks about grace too much, then everyone will just carry on doing whatever they want to do. God’s free justification by grace through faith is, then, correlated to anarchy, which, to be sure, is a sure indication that the devil has done his work. The fact of the matter is that there’s no problem with God’s gospel of Jesus’s self-donation on the cross to reconcile the world to himself. The problem lies with us. We’re the problem. We misunderstand, misuse, and mar the grace of God both by willful negligence and by our insistence that such a prodigal announcement ought to be couched with at least some sort of requirements obligating those who believe to “live well” and “be good.”

At this point, I very well could quote Paul’s letter to the Galatians as a response to such logic since that’s almost exactly the issue that found itself in his crosshairs. The apostle’s objective in that epistle was to stubbornly contend for “the truth of the gospel,” which, to cite his words, is precisely the fact that “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Gal. 2:16). But setting Paul aside for a moment, I’d like to cite Gerhard O. Forde’s “Preaching the Sacraments” again since, as he attests, the solution to free grace being misapprehended isn’t to recoil from it or neuter it with provisos, but to preach it all the more radically. Forde writes:

When the sola gratia does not seem to work to our satisfaction, the temptation is always to retreat and make it not quite sola. When we get nervous about ‘cheap grace’ the remedy seems to be to make it at least a little expensive — bargain basement, maybe, but at least not cheap. But then the battle is lost. When confronted by the perpetual crisis of God’s liberality we must simply forge right ahead and become even more radical about the sola. Grace is indeed not cheap. It is free! But the radicalization must be carried out precisely in the preaching. Grace full and free must always be preached so that it kills and makes alive. If it is cheapened to coddle the old Adam, that is indeed bad enough. But if one tries subsequently to remedy the cheapness by making it expensive, that is absolute disaster. The only cure for cheap grace is radical grace. And this can be done only in the preaching of it, doing the text to the hearers. (168)

It is the epitome of ironic tragedy that some have resorted to making grace “at least a little expensive” in hopes that under such auspices, sinners saved by “not cheap” grace might actually start surrendering habits, changing their lives, and living for God. The issue with that, however, is that, as Paul makes clear throughout Galatians and Romans, whenever collateral conditions are applied to the unilateral message of the gospel, such conditionality seems to out-volume grace. This, I’d wager, is due to the fact that our sin-sick hearts are hell-bent on the project of self-salvation. We want something to hang our hats on, some virtue or discipline or good deed we can claim as our own. But, in so doing, we’ve castrated the essence of the gift by insisting we had something to do with it. Accordingly, making grace “at least a little expensive” recasts grace as a wage (Rom. 4:4; 11:6), bringing us right back to where we start with a system that’s dependent upon us “doing something” in order to get out of this mess.

The grace of the gospel of God’s absolution of sinners in and through his Son’s sacrificial death on the cross is a gift through and through. It’s grace all the way down. Even if only one sinner out of ten returns to worship the Savior, it’s still worth it (Luke 17:11–19). Grace is still true. Justification is still free. And those called to preach the Word are bound to declare it as such.

Grace and peace to you.

Works cited:

Virgil Thompson, editor, Justification Is for Preaching: Essays by Oswald Bayer, Gerhard O. Forde, and Others (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publishers, 2012).