Dane Ortlund - Defiant Grace: The Surprising Message and Mission of Jesus

Jesus is surprising. His coming fulfilled ancient prophecies, but not expectations. He shattered expectations.

Each of the four Gospel accounts in the Bible uniquely gives us a Jesus who turns upside down our intuitive anticipations of who he is and how following him works. Like a bad back that needs to return repeatedly to the chiropractor for straightening out, our understanding of Jesus needs to be straightened out over and over again as our poor spiritual posture throws our perception of him out of line domesticating him and conforming him to our image, rather than transforming us into his.

For the grace that comes to us in Jesus Christ is not measured. This grace refuses to allow itself to be tethered to our innate sense of fairness, reciprocity and balancing of the scales. It is defiant.

Few have captured this defiant grace better than the American Episcopalian priest and author Robert Farrar Capon in his description of what the Protestant Reformers recovered five centuries ago. Reflecting on why Martin Luther refused to endorse forced celibacy on the priests, Capon wrote:

The Reformation was a time when people went blind-staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, 200-proof grace of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture that would convince anyone that God saves us single-handed. []

The Reformations rediscovery of grace is a discovery that must take place afresh, in kind if not in degree, in each generation. The church is always only a few generations away from losing the gospel. D. A. Carson recounts a memory of his that is both fascinating and frightening:

I have heard a Mennonite leader assess his own movement in this way. One generation of Mennonites cherished the gospel and believed that the entailment of the gospel lay in certain social and political commitments. The next generation assumed the gospel and emphasized the social and political commitments. The present generation identifies itself with the social and political commitments, while the gospel is variously confessed or disowned; it no longer lies at the heart of the belief system of some who call themselves Mennonites. []

The gospel was first cherished, then assumed, then lost. Such a process of spiritual devolution is not, of course, limited to a particular branch of the church. Left in neutral, all of us tend to slide away from the wonder of the gospel. My aim in this book is to help us cherish the gospel.

Easier said than done. However much we may pay tribute to grace with our lips, our hearts are so thoroughly marinated in law that the Christian life must be, at core, one of continually bathing our hearts and minds in gospel grace. We are addicted to law. Conforming our lives to a moral framework, playing by the rules, meeting a minimum standard this feels normal. And it is how we naturally seek to cure that deep sense of inadequacy within. The real question is not how to avoid becoming a Pharisee; the question is how to recover from being the Pharisees that we already are, right from the womb.

Law feels safe; grace feels risky. Rule-keeping breeds a sense of manageability; grace feels like moral vertigo. After all, if all that we are is by grace, then there is no limit to what God can ask of us. But if some corner of our virtue is due to personal contribution, there is a ceiling on what God can ask of us. He can bring us only so far. He can only ask so much.

Such is not the call of Christ. The Jesus of the Gospels defies our domesticated, play-by-the-rules morality. It was the most extravagant sinners of Jesus day who received his most compassionate welcome; it was the most scrupulously law-abiding people who were the objects of his most searing denunciation. The point is not that we should therefore take up sin. It is that we should lay down the silly insistence on leveraging our sense of self-worth with an ongoing moral record. Better a life of sin with penitence than a life of obedience without it.

Its time to enjoy grace anew not the decaffeinated grace that pats us on the hand, ignores our deepest rebellions and doesnt change us, but the high-octane grace that takes our conscience by the scruff of the neck and breathes new life into us with a pardon so scandalous that we cannot help but be changed. Its time to blow aside the hazy cloud of condemnation that hangs over us throughout the day with the strong wind of gospel grace. You are not under law but under grace (Rom. 6:14). Jesus is real; grace is defiant; life is short; risk is good. For many of us the time has come to abandon once and for all our play-it-safe, toe-dabbling Christianity and dive in. Its time, as Capon put it, to get drunk on grace 200-hundred-proof, defiant grace.

This book exists to stoke the fires of grace renewal already spreading throughout the twenty-first-century church. Something of a resurgence of the gospel is taking place today across various swathes of the Christian church. We must, of course, avoid facile generalizations. Yet it is evident from todays preaching and teaching, books and blogs, conferences and coalitions, that the gospel of grace is being wonderfully reasserted and cherished. Many have been walking with the Lord for years, yet are only now discovering the new mental and emotional universe of grace.