GRACE AND LAW EACH NEED THE OTHER

There can be no doubt at all that the commonest cause [of misinterpreting the Bible] is our tendency to approach the Bible with a theory. We go to our Bibles with this theory, and everything we read is controlled by it. There is a sense in which it is true to say that you can prove anything you like from the Bible. That is how heresies have arisen. The heretics were never dishonest men; they were mistaken men. . . they have been some of the most sincere men that the Church has ever known. What was the matter with them? Their trouble was this; they evolved a theory and they were rather pleased with it; then they went back with this theory to the Bible, and they seemed to find it everywhere. There is nothing so dangerous as to come to the Bible with a theory, with preconceived ideas, with some pet idea of our own.

Now this particular danger tends chiefly to manifest itself in the matter of the relationship between law and grace. Some so emphasize the law as to turn the gospel of Jesus Christ with its glorious liberty into nothing but a collection of moral maxims. It is all law to them and there is no grace left. They so talk of the Christian life as something that we have to do in order to make ourselves Christian, that it becomes pure legalism and there is really no grace in it. But let us remember also that it is equally possible so to over-emphasize grace at the expense of law as, again, to have something which is not the gospel of the New Testament.

From Studies in the Sermon on the Mount by Martin Lloyd-Jones

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has…it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows Him.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son…and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us all. Costly grace is the gospel that must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Dietrich Bonhoeffer