Let’s be honest: do we believe in grace and choice? 

“I’ll believe in grace and choice,” sings out Mumford. I sing out and believe, too. In grace undeserved and in grace that both compels and propels choice. Responsibility, if you like that word better, which means work or labor specific to the task or duty 

We should know we’ve done nothing past, present, or future to merit the gift of God’s grace to our life. Yet, His grace requires choices. It opens up the way on new choices and new things to choose. New things pertaining to eternal and abundant life with God. To the kingdom of heaven and living as citizens of that kingdom. To being created in the image of God to reflect the image of God. To being born again and made a new creation in Christ. To resurrection life and the power of the Spirit. 

To be saved by grace is to be saved into a new life. A new way of living in which we can and should take on new characteristics, make new choices, and carry out new responsibilities. A new being and doing that corresponds to The Way, The Truth, and The Life. 

Grace toward sinners means God towards sinners. He extends a gift of forgiveness and freedom from sin and, freed from our sin, of desire and power to live free in holiness. It is “for freedom that Christ has set us free” Paul preached, an echo of the good news Jesus preached to a woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more”. Yes, you’ve received grace freely, now go and do different, choose different, live different. Go and be different—holy, other, set apart—because, in fact, you are. 

It’s important to understand that God’s grace is not free floating but rooted. It’s rooted in His love, and His love is rooted in His holiness. If grace is pictured as a flower and love as the stem, then the roots run deep into the soil of “holy ground”. Without God’s holiness, His love and His grace whither and die. 

So grace given has its roots going deep into God’s holiness, drinking deep of His life and character. Grace received, then, is to remain connected to or rooted in God’s holiness, if it is to thrive. “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 3:18) From God and His holiness we receive life and nutrition for growth into the new life implanted in us. “Be holy as I am holy.”

Yes, grace demands choice. Responsibility. Work specific to the task, duty, calling, and life of salvation. But grace and choice meet in a heart that has been reconciled, restored, healed, made whole—saved. A heart remade with love and commitment to the God who saved it Himself through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. 

Paul exulted in Jesus, the Christ of grace, when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20) Because His choice was grace, His choice was death. My death He chose. 

Yet, Paul exulted in the grace of Christ when he also said, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:10) Paul never ceased to rest in and to work from “the immeasurable riches of (God’s) grace toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7).

Dear Elim Grace, let’s be honest: do I believe in grace and choice?

To expend all my energy and strength for Jesus, who loved me and gave himself for me. To lay down my life for Him alone. To love Him with all my heart and soul and mind. To consider all things as loss for the sake of knowing Him…. All this is grace, of grace, and because of grace. He is my choice.