Letter to a Man on the Brink of Grace
The following was written to a dear friend in the midst of his struggles to comprehend grace, forgiveness, and the Christian’s battle with sin. I pray it is of use to you.
I have spilled my heart to you in this letter. Please interpret its great length as being a measure of my love and concern, rather than mere prolixity. My aim has been to pour you a river of grace; if even a drop splashes effectually upon your ankles from my Jordan correspondence, I shall thank the Lord, though my prayer is that it may go over your head and submerge you entirely in the love of God in Christ.
Friend, I wish to be clear. Perhaps the tremendous difference between your and our experience of Christian life is that you approach God and godliness with a very different concept of what grace is. You affirmed my interpretation of your words, that grace is “the act or state of forgiveness.” But this is hardly what we understand grace to be at all. Forgiveness is one of many things grace does, but is not grace itself. In fact, forgiveness is only one half of justification. Grace as we speak of it is something else entirely.
Jobless, Single, Penniless: Letter to a Man in Despair
The following is a response I wrote to a person who had sunken into despair over what he felt to be his sorry circumstances in life. He publicly lamented that he was shadowed by “a particular agony and frustration building from joblessness, singleness, and pennilessness that found expression in intense anger, jealousy, and envy toward others who ‘have it all’.”
I empathized with his position and grief. Besides the usual share of hard lumps, I consider the period from August 2009 to June 2010 to have been among the worst periods of my life in terms of desperation and listlessness. Yet this was also the time when I came to grips with my circumstances through an intense, albeit somewhat unintentional study of what it means to be “in Christ” both personally and providentially. I learned that it is one thing to say, “it is no longer I who lives, but Christ” and another to embrace the paradigm practically and heartily. From this vantage I wrote as follows,
Letter to a brother who has difficulty speaking of Christ
Dear brother, don’t be discouraged because of your seeming lack of words. Even the best orator’s speech may fall on deaf ears, but the Spirit has a voice of His own which cuts straight to the hearts of men. Have you only enough words to say, “Father, thy kingdom come,” you may trust that in response to your humble, fervent prayers the Spirit may speak many into His Kingdom. God who spoke the heavens into existence can as easily declare new creations in the hearts of unbelievers.
