Campus CrossWalk Magazine: 2007 Summer Issue -- A Personal Journey to Grace

I did not come easily or comfortably to a confident faith in the grace of God. So I know it may not have been a fun trip for some of you who have also made that journey. And I am aware of the obstacles and struggles you may face if you are still on that journey. So I’ll be as gentle as possible. No ranting here—just a critical but kind analysis of my own spiritual history.

At age fifty, as I scan my childhood memories I don’t recall ever hearing either of my Christian parents say anything that would lead me to think they were trying to save themselves by their own goodness or that they were trying to impress upon me a system of works righteousness. But what I learned in church assemblies and gospel meetings was an altogether different story. A great deal of the preaching I heard in my youth was more the proffer of human reason (proof-text induction framed in theological jargon) than the narrative and deductive proclamation of God’s word within its context. As a result, I became convinced of things about God, the church, and salvation which, I would later discover, were completely contrary to what the Bible really does say. Moreover, I experienced far more emotional manipulation, fear and guilt (bad news) than joyous Good News.

I was perhaps twelve when I started realizing that something just did not make sense. A friend, who is a baptized believer, told me, “I’m going to hell.” In early adolescence, he had started experiencing temptations and feelings that led him to feel confused, fearful and desperate. He had seen something or done something that made him feel horribly guilty, completely lost, and utterly beyond any hope of salvation—even though he was a Christian. So he declared that he was going to give up on even trying to live the Christian life. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Of course, I was no help to him at all. I knew that what he was saying made no sense and could not possibly be right. But within the tradition that had taught both of us, there was no theology of grace, only the residual guilt and fear of a legal biblical perspective. So I was as confused as he was. We didn’t have enough information. We were missing something that we desperately needed in order to make sense of the Christian life.

Apparently, other Christians our age were also confused and unable to cope with various contradictions. Because most of the teens in my first youth group eventually gave up and left the church. Decades later, I would learn that church historians considered us the “lost generation.” Why? I’m certainly not an expert on such things, but here’s my personal perspective. We had inherited a form of theology that left us with too little grace from God to save us personally, too little grace toward one another relationally (in a movement divided) and too little gracious outreach to share socially in the moral causes faced by our generation (in the 60s and 70s).

We had learned to sing John Newton’s Amazing Grace. But what we were taught told us exactly the opposite. How ironic that we actually sang Amazing Grace with feelings of guilt and fear, instead of gratitude and celebration.
We sang Just As I Am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me . . . And then we would leave the assembly to try to do our best to develop our own plea—or to conform to the plea contrived for us by others in the past.

Why did we even sing songs like Amazing Grace and Just As I Am—or His Grace Reaches Me—when the church did not teach the gospel of the grace of God or seem to believe or practice it? My teen years in the church made little or no sense. And, yes, I felt conflicted.

From before I could read, important people in my life had encouraged me to consider a life of ministry. That thought always remained somewhere in the back of my mind. But when I arrived at a Christian college as a seventeen-year-old (too young) freshman, ministry was not something I was willing to consider. I enrolled undeclared—no major (sound familiar to any students?). The registrar tried to convince me to be a Bible major. But I adamantly refused. Why? Later it occurred to me that I did not want to tell the message I had heard (if it meant telling it the way I had heard it) or produce in others the results that had been affected on me.

Then in my early twenties I met a preacher who simply proclaimed God’s word. He just taught the Bible. He told the stories in a way that made sense, just as they do in the Bible. Here was a man who made me think, again, about the possibility of a life of ministry (thanks, Gary). Around that same time, I read through the Bible, from beginning to end. And then I read it again. Just the Bible—I could deliver that message. Big picture:

From an in-depth study of Leviticus and Hebrews, I learned that only the perfect sacrifice of Jesus at the cross could save me (or any other sinner). That it was God’s doing, not mine.
In the Gospels, I was amazed to hear Jesus pronouncing woes of condemnation upon the Pharisees, who trusted in themselves that they were righteous.
I learned from Galatians that trusting in the kind of legal tradition in which I was reared actually separates people from God’s grace—it condemns rather than saves.
Romans made it crystal clear to me that by works of law no flesh is justified in God’s sight—that the only way that anyone has ever been justified is to receive the righteousness of God as a free gift of His grace on the basis of faith in Jesus.
I John taught me that Christians should be confident, assured of their salvation, for perfect love casts out fear, and we should know that we have eternal life.
And I learned from Ephesians—in no uncertain terms—that we are saved by grace through faith, not of ourselves, it is the gift of God.

By my twenties, I was on my way to discovering the God of grace. But it would take a few years, more study, and more life experience before I would take to heart the spiritual reality that God does for me at the cross of Christ what I could never begin to do for myself.

: He is God; I am not.; He is the One who saves; I am just a sinner whom He has saved.; He is gracious; my best efforts are still disgraceful.; It’s about what He has done; it’s not about what I do.; It’s about Him; it’s so not about me.; God’s grace, God’s glory. That’s my story.

Last year, a married couple (older than me) who had both been reared in the same religious tradition as I had been, caught me in the foyer after a Sunday assembly.

She said, “You’re the first Church of Christ preacher we’ve ever heard who preaches grace.”

I replied, “Maybe that’s because I’m not a Church of Christ preacher. I don’t preach the Church of Christ. I preach the Bible, Jesus, the cross.”

They nodded. There was no need to explain to them.

But maybe I should explain my answer to you (if you’re still reading). I love the church, and I have devoted my life to serving her. But I do that as a servant of God’s word, as a servant of the gospel of the grace of God. Not as a servant of our past, our systems, our traditions or our institutions.

Our present is as filled with frailty as our past. And our future on this earth will never be utopian. But our future as a movement depends on whether or not we are authentic in how we handle biblical truth. Our future as a movement depends on presenting a functional theology of grace:

: Grace from God that saves us at the cross,; To walk in grace with each other,; In communities of faith that reach out in gracious ways to a disgraceful world.

If I had it to do over, I would have added a line to the foyer talk that day. I might have said, “I’m certainly not the only one among us who preaches grace. I’m just the one you’ve heard. Maybe you should get out more.”

May our number become that of legions.

Click here for the next essay in Brian's series.
"Saved by Grace" (Ephesians 2:1-10)
Brian Cobb is a servant of the gospel of the grace of God to the Manhattan, Kansas, Church of Christ and Cats for Christ at K-State. He functions as editor for the Kansas Directory of Churches of Christ, a publication he started in 1988. A CCW board member since 2003, Brian serves Campus CrossWalk in the role of web designer / publisher.