Grace: Terms Apply
There is a strange tension in the modern church that I don’t think we talk about enough.
We preach a gospel built around grace. We quote Romans 8:1. We sing about forgiveness. We tell people that no one is beyond redemption.
And I believe every bit of that.
But there’s a question I keep coming back to:
Why, then, do so many people associate the church with judgment?
I don’t think the answer is that Christianity has moral convictions. Jesus certainly did. He talked about sin, repentance, obedience, and transformation.
Maybe the issue isn’t whether we believe certain things are right or wrong.
Maybe the issue is what happens to people when we believe they’re wrong.
Maybe We Need to Define What We Mean by Judgment
When I use the word judgment, I’m not talking about Jesus calling sin what it is. I’m talking about something much more subtle, and sometimes not so subtle.
It’s the way we can treat people who don’t look like us, vote like us, believe like us, behave like us, or have their lives together like we think they should.
It’s the tone.
The look.
The conversation that happens after they leave the room.
The assumption that because we know the truth, we somehow have permission to forget grace.
And when I go back and read the Gospels, I have a difficult time finding Jesus leading with that posture.
“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”
— Matthew 9:12
Jesus wasn’t afraid of broken people.
He moved toward them.
People Have Left Because of How They Were Treated
This isn’t just something Christians are imagining.
Pew Research has found that among religiously unaffiliated Americans, 30% said bad experiences with religious people were an important reason they are nonreligious.
That number should bother us.
Not because every person who leaves Christianity does so because someone mistreated them. The reasons people become religiously unaffiliated are complicated—belief, politics, scandals, personal experiences, and many other factors can all play a role.
But behind that 30% are real people.
People who encountered something associated with Christianity and walked away carrying an experience they didn’t want to repeat.
And if our mission is to reach people, that ought to make us curious enough to ask a difficult question:
What are people experiencing when they encounter us?
This Is Where It Gets Personal for Me
I’ve been in church leadership long enough to know this isn’t just theoretical.
I’ve heard comments from pulpits about groups of people the church simultaneously claimed it wanted to reach.
I’ve sat in rooms where people were discussed in ways we probably wouldn’t have spoken if they had been sitting at the table.
And I’ve wrestled with the contradiction.
How do we tell people, “We want you here,” while talking about them in ways that communicate, “You’re really not one of us”?
I’m not suggesting that churches stop talking about sin.
I’m not suggesting Christians abandon conviction.
And I’m certainly not suggesting that loving someone means affirming everything they believe or do.
I’m asking something more uncomfortable.
Can we hold conviction without losing compassion?
Because Jesus did.
Look at Who Jesus Moved Toward
“I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”
— Matthew 9:13
Then there was Zacchaeus.
Before Zacchaeus announced restitution, before he demonstrated how much his life was changing, Jesus said He was going to his house.
Relationship preceded visible transformation.
Then there’s the Samaritan woman in John 4.
Jesus knew her history.
He didn’t pretend it wasn’t there.
But He also didn’t reduce her to it.
He had a serious theological conversation with a woman many people would have dismissed because of her ethnicity, gender, and personal history.
And then there’s Peter.
Peter denied Jesus three times.
If failure permanently disqualified someone from usefulness, Peter’s story should have ended there.
Instead, the resurrected Jesus restored him.
“Feed my sheep.”
Failure wasn’t the final chapter.
Maybe We've Been Asking the Wrong Question
Maybe the question isn’t simply:
Should Christians judge?
Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.
A better one might be:
How did Jesus actually treat the people everyone else was judging?
When I look at the Gospels, several things stand out.
1. Jesus didn’t require people to clean themselves up before He got close.
He met people in their mess, not after they escaped it.
2. Jesus didn’t reduce people to their worst decisions.
He knew their history without making their history their identity.
3. Jesus didn’t use someone’s sin to entertain a religious audience.
His confrontation was aimed toward restoration, not humiliation.
4. Jesus didn’t confuse proximity with compromise.
He could sit with people without surrendering truth.
5. Jesus didn’t reserve His strongest criticism for the people furthest from God.
Some of His sharpest words were directed toward religious leaders who placed burdens on others while failing to examine themselves.
6. Jesus didn’t leave people where He found them, but He loved them while they were still there.
That’s an important distinction.
Grace wasn’t the reward people received once they changed.
Grace was often what made transformation possible.
Terms Apply
And that’s where I think the tension becomes uncomfortable.
Churches say:
Come as you are.
But sometimes what people experience sounds more like:
Come as you are…
as long as you eventually look like us.
Think like us.
Vote like us.
Talk like us.
Don’t ask the wrong questions.
Don’t make us uncomfortable.
Don’t take too long getting your life together.
We would probably never put those words on the church sign.
But people don’t need to read them on a sign if they can feel them when they walk through the door.
And that’s the fine print we’ve added to grace.
Not Jesus.
Us.
When Does It Change?
The church doesn’t need less truth.
And it doesn’t need a cheaper version of grace that pretends nothing matters.
It needs what John described when he wrote that Jesus came “full of grace and truth.”
Both.
Truth without grace can become cruelty.
Grace without truth can become sentimentality.
Jesus somehow embodied both without sacrificing either.
That’s the challenge before us.
We can write all the right things.
We can preach all the right sermons.
We can post all the right verses.
But eventually the question isn’t what we say about Jesus.
It’s what people experience when they encounter those of us who claim to follow Him.
So maybe this is the question worth sitting with:
When people encounter us, are they encountering the Jesus we keep telling them about?
