NILS VON KALM expresses his thankfulness for God’s gift of grace…
Melbourne, Australia
This has been a big year for me. It started with a change of career after 23 years of working in international aid and development, has included bouts of debilitating anxiety, and sees me emotionally tired from regular pushback over my views on the Israel/Hamas war.
It’s enough to make a highly sensitive empath like me just want to go back to bed and have somebody wake me up when it’s all blown over.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that. That’s where I’m thankful for grace.
PICTURE: Brian A Jackson/iStockphoto
In a world of so much of what Christian author Philip Yancey calls ungrace, we regularly need moments of pure gift in our lives. Amidst the more tumultuous times that this year has brought me, I have experienced moments of grace. In fact, I have experienced them so regularly that I’ve probably become a bit blase about them.
When I talk about grace in my life, I’m referring to things I have received which I haven’t even asked God for. I see grace as a gift from God that is given just because the Giver is outrageously generous. It reflects the character of the One giving the gift.
“When I talk about grace in my life, I’m referring to things I have received which I haven’t even asked God for. I see grace as a gift from God that is given just because the Giver is outrageously generous. It reflects the character of the One giving the gift.”
What a contrast this is to the culture we inhabit. We live in a society where we are given the message of not trusting others. Look out for number one. Bunker down and look after yourself first because no one else will do it for you. That’s the message we’re given. Just the other day, I saw an ad for that night’s episode of a long-running current affairs program. The ad started with the exaggerated, overly dramatic voiceover saying, and it then appearing in red capital letters on the screen, “Trust no one!”. It was promoting a story about a scam that is currently doing the rounds in my country of Australia.
This is the problem with tabloid media. It has screaming headlines which regularly proclaim that everyone is out to get you. And it’s the tabloid media that sells the most. Just like sex, fear sells. We see it in political campaigning all the time too.
In a world where karma seems to have the final say (or where we’re at least told that it will have the final say if you don’t take care of yourself first), grace is a radical message. If someone gives us a gift just because they want to be generous, we often become suspicious. What do they really want? What’s their real motive? We’ve long had a breakdown of trust in our culture.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame us for being cautious. Many of us have experienced so much betrayal in so many ways. And, tragically, the church has done much of it. The child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the church are a prime example and the ultimate example of betrayal of the worst kind.
Added to that is the fact that it’s often Christians who haven’t understood the message of grace that the Gospel proclaims. I’ve recently been listening to the audio version of the revised edition of Philip Yancey’s bestselling book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?. In it, Yancey tells the story of an article he wrote when he was writing for the esteemed evangelical magazine, Christianity Today. The article’s title was “The Atrocious Mathematics Of The Gospel”. The criticism Yancey received for his article was vicious. Readers didn’t appreciate the grace he was writing about and the fact that they thought he was calling the Gospel atrocious.
The point Yancey was making in his article was that, in Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), grace was shown to be something that just isn’t fair. Yancey’s point didn’t go down well in a church culture that often seems more steeped in the principles of capitalism than those of the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard is a timeless and regularly needed reminder for me of how radical the grace of God is. We are so indoctrinated with the message that we need to earn our acceptance, that, although we might intellectually accept the notion of grace, it just hasn’t filtered down from our heads to our hearts. It is said that the longest distance in the universe is that from our head to our heart. When it comes to accepting grace, that is a long way indeed.
A recent study shows that the average person sees around 10,000 advertisements per day. That’s not a typo. It’s 10,000! No wonder we don’t understand grace when, in a capitalist society, we are so indoctrinated with the message of performance and profits and earning our way.
I don’t blame us for just not getting the parable of the workers in the vineyard. It’s outrageous. It’s just absurd to us who think in terms of performance, status, and wealth accumulation.
To ears like ours (let alone the ears that first heard it 2,000 years ago), what could be the merit in giving those workers who had turned up late in the day and only put in an hour or so, the same money as those who had slaved away all day under what was probably a belting hot sun? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s completely unfair and unjust, especially to social justice activists like me.
But that’s the whole point of grace. It isn’t fair.
“Grace is not about counting up what we have done. It is about what God has done for us, not what we think we can do for God. Jesus demonstrated that himself on the cross when He said to the thief next to hHm, ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’. The thief had done absolutely nothing to deserve or earn his place in Paradise. In fact, to our sensibilities, he had done everything possible to not earn his place in Paradise.”
Grace is not about counting up what we have done. It is about what God has done for us, not what we think we can do for God. Jesus demonstrated that himself on the cross when He said to the thief next to hHm, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” The thief had done absolutely nothing to deserve or earn his place in Paradise. In fact, to our sensibilities, he had done everything possible to not earn his place in Paradise. After all, he was a thief.
I mentioned at the start of this article that I have experienced moments of grace amidst the tumult of this year. It all started back in January when I was out of work. Wondering what I was going to do all of a sudden in my newfound unemployed status, I received an email from someone I would loosely call a friend. The email was completely unexpected. This person had never emailed me before and had no reason to believe that I was out of work. But his email contained an offer to proofread a thesis he was working on, and he wanted to pay me for it. When I told my housemate the news, he beamed and said, “God has so got your back!”.
Another instance occurred just recently when I was facing a very stressful personal situation. I was waiting on some medical results, and I was losing sleep over it. The day was coming closer when I would find out the results, but as it turned out, I got the results early and they were all clear.
When you’re an anxious person like me, you tend to think the worst in any situation. I recently realised that these little moments of grace in my life have been helping me to trust God more. They have been teaching me that, yes, life happens and bad things take place, but it’s not the case that everyone is out to get you, which I can often unconsciously believe.
These examples are just a couple that have happened to me over many years. In my mind, they are too numerous to be put down to coincidence. They have come when I have made self-destructive choices or when things just haven’t gone my way through no fault of my own. Either way, they have been moments of grace. A good and loving parent will want the best for their child. That’s what my experience of God has been like.
I need grace because I am one of those who, like the late arrivals in the vineyard, turns up late in the day and still receives the best that God has.
If we could just catch a glimpse of the amazing grace of God, our lives would be turned upside down. We would realise that no longer do we need to play the games, those games where we say like the four-year-old, “I’m not going to be your friend anymore.” It’s not just kids who do that. We do it when we’re 4 and we can do it when we’re 34, or 54, or 84.
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Grace is so hard to accept because it is so foreign to the message we are bombarded with every single day, thousands of times over, that we need to perform in some way to find the life we’re all so desperately looking for. We need to meditate on grace more. We need to let it sink into our bones until we can begin to say, “Oh, maybe God really is trustworthy!”.
Ask yourself if you really believe that, that God is trustworthy. Not just in your head as an intellectual belief you ascribe to because you’re a Christian. I mean, do you really believe it, deep down in your bones?
When we learn to accept grace, it will transform us. Not only will we be happier and less anxious as a result; we will be more free to love others because we will have learned to trust more and give our cares away to the One who cares for us. And learning to love is the very essence of life. In fact, Jesus said it sums up the whole Law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:12).
We are all on a journey, and the journey for many of us begins in our heads, but the final destination is deep in our hearts where, once grace is firmly entrenched, we can “love because He first loved us” (I John 4:19). That’s the difference that grace makes, not just to our individual lives, but to a world that so desperately needs it.
