Drop Your Bags!

In his book, "One Way Love," Pastor Tullian Tchividjian audaciously refers to God's grace as the: "divine vulgarity."   His point is that God's grace is so far beyond our grasp and comprehension that it reeks.  God's grace is bold, free, liberating, inexhaustible, infinite and shocking.  To those who think they are "in control" it is offensive because it cannot be harnessed, or administered like a government program.  We don't get to decide the invitation list for God's grace.  We are NOT God.  Grace is His to dispense whenever, wherever and to whomever He chooses.   

For Christ-followers this week is known as Passion/Holy Week.  It is the week that God demonstrated the depth of His grace to ALL humanity in the most mind-blowing sacrificial act the world has ever known.  A hint, or cue for the depth of God's love that will be demonstrated at Calvary comes earlier in Matthew's gospel when Jesus reflects upon Jerusalem and her response to God's leaders and Word through the ages:

37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 38 See, your house is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

This is bold and downright audacious love.  Jesus offers the heart of a mother hen to the very people (like you and me) that will not only approve of His death on a cross, but cheer for it on Good Friday.  Imagine being there and getting swept up in the emotion of a mob mentality chanting, "Crucify, Crucify!"  

Control is about one thing. The inability to humble oneself in the face of grace.  The trumped up charges, the mock trial and the insults can all be reduced to pride, the father of control.  Prideful, arrogant men refused to accept the remote possibility that God's love outweighed the law they had manipulated and twisted and His outrageous love was embodied in the Christ standing in the flesh before them.  Pride is the worst kind of blindness because it convinces us that what we see is real.  Instead of relying on God's infinite vision we settle for our own limited sight.  

The Law of God (better yet, the interpretation of the one's citing it) has always been our Achilles.  By itself the law displaces pride and challenges us to be obedient to God.  The problem is that we use the law to justify, or suit our prejudices, beliefs and personal opinions.  We come to the law with our personal baggage.  Tullian writes:

"The law offends us because it tells us what to do---and most of the time, we hate anyone telling us what to do.  But ironically, grace offends us even more, because it tells us that there is nothing we can do, that everything has already been done.  And if there is something we hate more than being told what to do, it's being told that we can't do anything, that we can't earn anything----that we are helpless, week and needy.....Grace generates panic because it wrestles both control and glory out of our hands." (pp.72-72)

Jesus' obedience is what enables us to stand before God empty-handed, no baggage.  HE has freed us from the tyranny of control, pride, arrogance-----sin.  His death, burial and resurrection don't abolish the law, but fulfill it.  The Law ultimately brings glory to God.  Jesus' sacrificial act brings the ultimate glory to God.  We can't do it.  We never could.  In Tullian's words: 

The Gospel declares that our guilt has been atoned for, the Law has been fulfilled.  So we don't need to live under the burden of trying to appease the judgment we feel; in Christ, the ultimate demand has been met, the deepest judgment has been satisfied.  The internal voice that says, "Do this and live" gets drowned out by the external voice that says, "It is finished!"

At Holy Week, Jesus took the weight of ALL our baggage.  The weight has been eliminated.  Drop your bag and stand before a Holy and Righteous God knowing that He has done what we, or any human is incapable of doing for ourself!  Drop your bags and live free!