Authors: Paul Ellis
Tags: #Christianity, #God, #Grace, #Love
Before we get started, we need to get a
few things straight. What is grace? And what is
hyper
-grace?
Here’s something
you may not know about grace: Jesus never defined it. As far as we know, the
Lord of grace who came from the throne of grace full of His Father’s grace, and
from whom we have received grace upon grace, never uttered the word
grace
.
But He sure showed it.
Actions speak
louder than words. Jesus did not come to preach grace but to
be
grace
and He did this by loving unconditionally and forgiving indiscriminately. Jesus
hung out with crooks and conmen and hookers and tax-collectors. He ate with
sinners and Pharisees and reached out to filthy foreigners. He told stories of
radical grace, defended the guilty, and forgave the unrepentant. And in the
greatest demonstration of love the world has ever seen, He gave up His life so
that through Him we might truly live.
Inspired by the
radical love of Christ, the apostle Paul travelled the world preaching the good
news of God’s grace. Paul may have been the original hyper-grace preacher for
he made no distinction between the
gospel of grace
and the
gospel of
Christ
. He treated them as one and the same message. “Jesus is the
embodiment of grace,” said Paul. “All the blessings and favor of God are found
in Him” (see Eph. 1:3).
[4]
This is how I
explained it in
The Gospel in Twenty Questions
:
Whenever you read
the word grace in the Bible, you can substitute the name Jesus and vice versa.
Jesus is grace personified. He is Mr. Grace. What does the grace of God look
like? It looks like Jesus. What does the grace of God sound like? It sounds
like Jesus … The grace of God comes in many flavors but is ultimately revealed
in His Son, Jesus. Jesus is grace, and grace is Jesus.
[5]
If grace is Jesus, what is
hyper
-grace?
Some would say it’s a meaningless phrase, like wet water or sunny sunshine.
Others say hyper-grace is greasy grace, which is bad. Still others say it’s
abundant grace, which is good.
Surprisingly, those who coined the term
seldom define it. You would expect that in a book called
Hyper-grace
we
might be told what hyper-grace is, but we’re not. Dr. Brown recognizes that the
label appeals to some and offends others, so he leaves it up to the reader to
decide whether the “modern grace message” is hyper in the good or bad sense of
the word (p.xiii).
Dr. Brown’s
personal view, of course, is that hyper-grace is a dangerous thing. Hyper-grace
is grace plus errors. For the sake of discussion, I’ll take the opposing view
and say that hyper-grace is a good thing. It’s extreme grace. It’s over-the-top
grace. It’s grace on steroids. In the words of John it’s grace upon grace.
For from His
fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. (John 1:16, ESV)
God isn’t cheap when it comes to lavishing
His grace upon us. He gives abundantly out of His fullness. God does not give
grace in proportion to our needs, but in accordance with His riches (Eph. 1:7).
The thirsty man gets to drink from Niagara Falls.
When describing
the generosity of God, Jesus often used the phrase
how much more
. “If
you who are evil give good gifts to your children,
how much more
will
your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask Him!” (see Matt. 7:11).
When dispensing grace God gives
much more
than what you would give to
your own children. You may be the most generous parent in the world, but your
heavenly Father is more generous still. In the competition for Best Dad Ever,
God comes first and daylight second.
The rushing flood
of God’s grace is so great that the sandcastle of your sin cannot hinder it.
Paul wrote that where sin abounded, grace did
much more
abound:
But where sin
increased and abounded, grace (God’s unmerited favor) has surpassed it and
increased the more and superabounded. (Romans 5:20b, AMP)
The word Paul uses for describing grace—superabounding—is
made up of two Greek words: (1)
huper
, from which we get the English
prefix hyper, meaning “over, beyond, and above,” and (2)
perisseuo
, which
means “superabundant (in quantity) or superior (in quality).”
[6]
So to say that God’s
grace is superabundant only takes you halfway to Paul’s meaning. “It’s more
than that,” says the apostle of grace. “It’s over, beyond, and above
superabundant. It’s
super
-superabundant. It’s
hyper
-hyper-grace.”
That’s not me putting a spin on Paul’s words. That’s what he actually says.
Some might say,
“Don’t get carried away. You can have too much of a good thing.” Since grace is
Jesus, that’s like saying you can have too much of Jesus. That’s not possible.
While you may have too little of the Lord in your life, you cannot have too
much.
Let me prove this
with a question: How much does God love you? Can you quantify His love for you?
You cannot. On a scale of one to the biggest number you can think of, God’s
love for you is greater still. It’s Buzz Lightyear love. It reaches to infinity
and beyond.
In the Bible we
are challenged to plumb the depths and ascend the heights of Christ’s limitless
love for us. Paul prayed that we might have the power to
grasp how wide and
long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that
surpasses knowledge ... (Ephesians 3:18b–19)
This is an astonishing request. “May you
grasp the ungraspable, comprehend the incomprehensible, and know the
unknowable.” This is a prayer that can never be fully answered. Try and locate
the boundary of Christ’s love for you and you will never succeed. His love for
you is greater than you can know or imagine.
Again, that’s not
me spinning Paul’s words. That’s what he actually says. The love of Christ
surpasses knowledge. Trying to wrap your head around His love is like using a
thimble to measure the oceans.
A
thousand-year-old poem from a Jewish worship leader expresses the vastness of
God’s love better than I can:
Could we with ink
the ocean fill,
And were the
skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk
on earth a quill,
And every man a
scribe by trade;
To write the love
of God above
Would drain the
ocean dry;
Nor could the
scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched
from sky to sky.
[7]
This ancient poem reminds me of an even
older song written by another Jewish worship leader:
Your love, O
Lord, reaches to the heavens,
Your faithfulness
to the skies.
Your
righteousness is like the highest mountains,
Your justice like
the great deep. (Psalm 36:5–6)
We can see from Scripture that God’s love
and grace are hyper; they extend over, beyond, and above what you can conceive
or imagine. What you think of when you think of God’s love for you is inevitably
inferior to what His love really is. So you could say that grace is what we
imagine God’s love to be like, but hyper-grace is what it actually is.
Think of it like
this. Counting the stars in the night sky won’t give you an accurate picture of
the bigness of the universe. If you live in a dark place you may be able to see
several thousand stars. But what you see is such a tiny proportion of the
universe, that really you ain’t seen nothing. You have actually
not seen
far more than what you
have seen
.
It’s like that
with grace. You may look at Jesus and say, “I see grace,” but no matter how
much grace you see, you only have a tiny glimpse of an unimaginably vast
reality.
Grace is what we
see; hyper-grace is what it is. This is what John and Paul were trying to
convey when they spoke of heaped-up, superabounding grace, and love that passes
knowledge. It’s what Jesus was trying to tell us when He spoke of the
how
much mores
of His gracious and generous Father.
The hyper-grace
of God cannot be reduced to words or thoughts that fit inside our minds. It’s
simply too big. The only way we can begin to grasp it is to see the splendor
and awesomeness of God that He has revealed to us through His Son Jesus.
Now, let’s flip
this over. What is the opposite of hyper-grace? And why do some say we go too
far in our portrayal of grace?
This week I happened upon yet another
article attacking the hyper-grace message. The author of this article said that
those who preach it place a “strong emphasis on grace.” Indeed we do. We say
grace saves us and grace keeps us. It’s grace from start to finish.
So what’s the
problem?
The problem,
apparently, is we’re not preaching enough law. In the article the word grace
appeared nine times, but the word law appeared thirty times indicating a
relatively strong emphasis on the latter. The author wrote, “The Law doesn’t
save us, but it sanctifies us.” The grace of God gets you into the kingdom but
it’s your observance of the Law—with a capital L—which keeps you there, or at
least keeps you from upsetting a temperamental God who is intolerant of your
sin.
Since hyper-grace
opponents don’t like to be called legalists, I’ll swap the word law for the
word works to acknowledge their view that there are things
you must do
to be saved or sanctified. From this we can identify three gospels:
What is a graceless gospel? There’s no
such thing. It is grace that makes the good news,
good news
. Remove
grace and the good news ceases to be good. Someone once said, “Grace isn’t the
most important thing in Christianity. It’s the only thing.” Since grace is
another word for Jesus, I agree.
What is a
mixed-grace gospel? It’s the message that you are saved by grace but kept
through works. It’s the belief that says one of God’s blessings (salvation)
comes by grace but all the others (holiness, forgiveness, fellowship, etc.)
come through works. I call this a partial gospel because it’s partly good news.
Jesus saved you (that’s the good part), but the rest is up to you (that’s the
not so good part).
And what is the
hyper-grace gospel? It’s Jesus plus nothing. It’s Christ alone. It’s the
announcement that Jesus is the author and perfecter of your faith and that He
will keep you and present you as faultless to Himself (Heb. 12:2, Jude 1:24).
To quote Watchman Nee, it’s the declaration that “from start to finish, He is
the One who does it all.”
[8]
In the words of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, it’s the message that causes you to
trust in
… grace at the
beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our
death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there
is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what
we have done, but the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life
starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace
wondrous grace.
[9]
The hyper-grace gospel says all the
blessings of God come to us freely as gifts. Forgiveness is a gift. Salvation
is a gift. Acceptance is a gift. Righteousness is a gift. Holiness is a gift.
Brennan Manning expressed
this perfectly in
The Ragamuffin Gospel
:
Grace proclaims the
awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours not by right but by
the sheer bounty of a gracious God.
[10]
All the gifts of God are found in Jesus
Christ. Indeed, Jesus is
the
Gift (John 3:16). This is why the
hyper-grace gospel will always point you to Jesus. Whatever your need, He is
your rich supply. In the words of an ancient saint, “He who has the Lord has
everything.”
Some of the
differences between the mixed- and hyper-grace gospels are listed in the Table
below. As you can see, the two messages are very different. The former puts the
focus on you and your works; the latter puts the focus on Jesus and His grace.