Romans 6:14
For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Last night I watched both of my sons struggle to get through with their homework, and as the clock edged closer to bedtime, a look of stress and anxiety started to grow on their faces. When I asked them if they were okay, Will just looked up and said, “I’m not going to get it done.” The pressure he (and Parker) were feeling at that moment was weighty, and as I read this passage early this morning, I couldn’t help but think about it in relation to the weighty pressure so many of us have lived with under the law.
We try our best to measure up to God’s standards, but at the end of the day the pressure of knowing that we can’t achieve the perfection the law demands begins to build until we, like Will, are forced to look at God with tears in our eyes and say, “I’m never going to get this done.” It is an awful feeling to live under the pressure of perfection when you know that you’ll never meet that standard, and life under the law was that way. One mistake, one missed sacrifice, one hateful word…it was all just too much pressure for any one man to live under. Any one man, except, of course, Jesus.
He did meet the standard and now offers us the chance to live under grace. That’s a subject for much lengthier writings than an Evotion, but let’s at least try to summarize it like this: all of us will live under something, either law or grace, and we will have passed down to us what each of them has to give us. The law gives pressure, religion, and eventually, death. Grace gives peace, relationship, and life.
I love listening to people complain about their jobs. They’ll go on and on about what a jerk their boss is and how demanding he or she is. They’ll talk about sticking it to the man and how miserable they are in that situation. But what they won’t talk about is a job search! It cracks me up to think that anyone would willingly stay somewhere that they hate. But we do it all the time in our faith. We keep plugging away at the law, trying to be the best Christians we can be, until eventually we get tired, burned out, and tired of the game. Even though Jesus offers us a room under grace, we keep paying rent for that dirty, small, cramped space we’ve had for years under the law.
Let’s wrap this up. The law basically said, “If you do these things perfectly, you’ll be my child.” There’s a lot of pressure attached to that. Will and Parker felt that pressure last night. “If you get this work done, you’ll be good 5th graders.” But grace says something different. Grace flips that statement and says, “Because you’re my child, you will learn to do these things perfectly.” Do you see the difference? Do you feel the pressure of the first and the peace of the second?
When we’re confident in our relationship with Christ, we have the freedom to work out our salvation without the unnecessary pressures of law and religion. We’re able to lay our heads on the pillow at night – even after a tough day – and hear our Father whisper to us what I whispered to my sons last night.
“I love you, I’m proud of you, and you’re going to be okay.”
Live under grace.
