The Cost of Grace
The concept of grace is a funny thing.
It’s hard for us as a people to understand it. We wrestle with the idea of receiving grace when we have wronged someone, and then turn around and wrestle with the idea of giving grace when we perceive we have been wronged. Sometimes grace mends friendships and marriages, restores joy to the depressed and heals a broken heart. Sometimes feelings of guilt or shame are associated with grace, knowing that our transgression have wronged someone with no cost to us.
I think that’s the biggest problems that we as a people have when we are confronted with grace. It’s free to us. It’s free, so we minimize the cost of grace because we don’t feel the repercussion of it being given. When a wife shows grace to her husband who has had an affair, there is a price to that grace. The thoughts that haunt the mind of someone betrayed in marriage take a toll. However, it’s free to the transgressor, and that’s beautiful. It’s amazing when grace is shown. The freedom that comes from your wrongs being made right with no effort of your own is something that every person struggles understanding. It’s nothing short of a miracle. A miracle with a price. And I believe that is where we have forgotten the cost of grace.
Isaiah 53 is one of the most famous passages in scripture about the coming Messiah. It was written roughly 700 years before Jesus’ birth, and gives excruciating detail about what Jesus would go through for our salvation. However, there’s always one verse that jumps out at me whenever I read it that almost brings me to tears every time.
“But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting Him to grief; if He would render Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, And the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand. As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied; By His knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, As He will bear their iniquities.Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, And He will divide the booty with the strong; Because He poured out Himself to death, And was numbered with the transgressors; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, And interceded for the transgressors. ” Isaiah 53:1012 NASB
Notice two things here. Our grace had a price. It took crushing the King of the Universe, torturing him with whips and beatings, being spat on, mocked, and slapped, nailed to a cross which would take His life for our free grace. The freedom which we experience when God pursues us and calls him into relationship with Him is priceless in every sense of the word. It costs us nothing, but cost Him everything.
Secondly, it pleased the Father to do this. So often there’s a twofold way that grace is taken advantage of. We think of it costing nothing because we receive it freely, or we walk around with self righteous attempts to punish ourselves because of the guilt we feel. If the goal of our life is to walk in obedience to the Father, and bring Him joy and glory, we must remember that it was for His joy that Jesus was sent to the cross. It pleased God to sacrifice the 2nd person of the Godhead for you and for me. It pleased Him to pay a price so that we may freely have grace.
Praise God our Father for his relentless love for us.
Praise Jesus Christ His son for paying the costly price so I may have grace.
Praise The Holy Spirit who instructs and encourages me to walk in that grace daily.
Our freedom and grace has a cost: Jesus Christ. And it was for His joy that he paid it, so that you and I can be made white as snow, and have a relationship with Him now and forever.