Grace is Not "Unmerited Favor"

I live in the land of spiritual breakthroughs.  My latest spiritual breakthrough was occasioned the other day within the context of a familiar scenario:  My husband Jim and I were rehearsing our same script wherein his role in the fight is to say, “Sarah, it’s your filter.  If you would get rid of your filter, you wouldn’t feel offended by my tone,” and my role in the fight is to say, “Of course it is my filter!  The whole world knows that it is inconceivable ever for the problem to be Jim’s tone.  Jim’s tone is not the issue. My filter is the issue. I am the issue.  Sarah is the issue yet again!”  Then Jim feels indicted, and I feel blamed, and we hurt each other more by huffing and puffing and snorting as we go about doing our chores — which, by the way, burns more calories than Pilates. 

I had no trace of awareness during that fight that I would soon be visited by God.  But that same night, as I was trying to take refuge in the shadow of God’s wing, a crystal clear question flashed into my mind that I believe was posed to me by the Lord. “Do you know what grace is?”  The question cut through everything, my pain, my self-absorption, my fatigue.  So I asked myself pointblank, “Do I know what grace is?”  

The question was so timely and strangely pertinent that I concluded on the spot, right then and there, that maybe I don’t really know what grace is.  

For forty-one years, I’ve been wanting to write a book on God’s grace. I started working on it earnestly back in college.  By age twenty-one I knew without a doubt that a book on grace resided deep within me.  The first cataclysmic appearances of my future book ong grace outcropped in my head when I was a student at Baylor right around the time my parents divorced.

I wrote my own definition of grace:  “Grace is the giftedness of love.”  Though I still hold to that same definition, when recently I found myself laying in a separate bed after fighting so ridiculously with Jim, I mused with a fresh new curiosity, “What is grace?”  It’s hard to describe what happened to me subjectively, but I went into a zone.  My mind became a kaleidoscope. The designs in my cerebrum rearranged.  Suddenly I realized that the famous definition of grace as “unmerited favor” is misleading.  

Grace as “unmerited favor” subtly shifts the focus off Jesus by making you, me, and whoever else the reference points of grace because we are its recipients.  I am not the first to say that grace has been commoditized.  In yours and my era of church history, grace is a commodity that Christians swig.  Tacitly we have been taught that a good dose of grace can be ingested as a remedy for all the ways we poison ourselves with sin.  Folks, grace is not a libation.  It cannot be bottled up and distributed as a commodity.  Grace cannot be separated from the Person of Jesus.  Grace is what Jesus accomplished through the actual demonstration of His own righteousness.  Grace is a function of Jesus’ righteousness.  

Yes, we are saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9).  But we are not saved by a cool dude God who is winking at our sin and telling us it’s okay for us to keep on sinning as long as we keep professing a sincerely held belief in God’s “unmerited favor.”  In God’s court of judgment, Judge God does not resort to giving us a urine test to see if we gulped down gallons of His “unmerited favor.”  Chugging down God’s favor is not the gospel.  But that is what churches teach.  They more or less just tell us, “Here, swallow it, and you’re good.”  

A big part of the gospel, so overlooked, is that Jesus lived a sinless life by fulfilling God’s holy law.  The shock of the gospel is that Jesus actually merited God’s favor.  My  breakthrough is that people are not saved by “unmerited favor.”  You and I are saved by Jesus’ merited favor.  Jesus earned God’s favor when He fulfilled God’s law.  

For decades I have known and been able to articulate that God imputes to believers the righteousness of Christ.  As Christians, we are clothed in Jesus’ righteousness because Jesus is so righteous that He shares His righteousness.  When Jesus died on the cross, by grace He became sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God (II Corinthians 5:21). Christ absorbed our sin.  Had Jesus not absorbed our sin, He would not have died because He, in his state of sinlessness, would have been immune to death.  Death results from corruption (Romans 6:23).  In Christ, there is no corruption.  Uncorrupted Jesus could not have physically died had He not absorbed our sin.  

Miraculously, Jesus took our sin, so that He could save us from it.  He also took our death to save us from that too.  I have known since childhood that Jesus conquered Sin and that Jesus conquered Death. But if I really understood what grace is, I would not have been such a smart aleck in that heated conversation with my husband.  Instead of throwing a fit in reaction to my husband who pointed to my filter right when I was trying to tell him about his tone, I could have told myself then and there, “Sarah, you are saved by Jesus’ righteousness.  You are so solidly saved that any blame cast on you judicially is irrelevant.  A far wiser way for you to handle yourself right now is to be patient with Jim.  Understand that Jim is trying to let you know that his motives are benevolent.  You feel offended by his “tone” when Jim isn’t even thinking about his tone!”  

Upgrading my theology by thinking about Jesus’ righteousness is literally revolutionizing the way I engage in conflict with my husband.  Jesus’ righteousness does far, far more than drench my immaturity with grace.  His righteousness displaces all of my defects.  So when Jim talks about my “filter,” I can check my filter with humility.  And if my wifely filter is relatively clean, and the issue (don’t tell Jim) really is Jim’s tone, then I can be forbearing and realize that Christ’s righteousness saves Jim and Sarah both.   

Thinking about Christ’s righteousness is changing my inner being.  Nothing else calms me the same.  His righteousness literally saves me.  It doesn’t purchase me; it saves me.  You and I were purchased not by silver and gold, but by Jesus’ precious blood (I Peter 1:18-19).  By contrast, Jesus’ righteousness saves me because it transforms me.  “By One Man’s obedience, the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:18-19).  Jesus' righteousness makes me righteous, not just favored and forgiven. So many Christians are nominal because they heard that “becoming a Christian” entails nothing, nothing more than a personal decision to trust the Lord Jesus to forgive their sins.   

Forgiveness made synonymous with God’s grace produces Christians who don’t act like saints.  Christians like me have stayed stuck in certain patterns because the lightbulb didn’t go on regarding the actual miracle Christ performed.  I am getting unstuck because I am not saved by God’s “unmerited favor.”  The gospel of grace is that you and I are saved by Christ’s merited favor.   

If you want to experience spiritual breakthroughs, I encourage you to sign up for our offerings at Right On Mission.  Come get your mission statement or do Strategic Futuring or take a course.  You’ll be amazed at all the spiritual breakthroughs just waiting for you to find them – because that is normal in the Christian life as we learn to live on mission.  

Read the full June Update here