Grace Released, Truth Revealed (Continued)

I’ve tried to put a definition on the dynamic of full grace and full truth that John weaves through his Gospel. Nothing satisfies. Trying to define this kind of thing is like standing underneath a water fall, trying to catch the falling current with your hands. Grab and snatch all you want, you will never be able to confine the flow in your grasp. You don’t define it, nor can you confine it. You can only relinquish yourself to the gush and attempt to describe what it’s like.

What if our communication of truth wasn’t limited to well-placed words, neat formulas, or rational argument? What if our words of truth were clothed with flesh and blood grace? Sometimes I wonder if what we need in our search for and communication of truth is not more teaching, more thinking, more doctrine, more programs, or more rules, but more grace. I wonder what our lives would be like if we let the dynamic combination of full grace and full truth capture our hearts. I wonder what our witness would be if, more than concentrating on great church experiences and programming, we released full grace into the lives of the people we live with, study with, and work with. I wonder what kind of truth would be revealed, what kind of forgiveness would be experienced, what kind of salvation would come, and what kind of Kingdom stories would be told.

Grace Released, Truth Revealed (Continued)

...continued from October 26 and October 30....

The gap between what’s true and what’s not true about God is not bridged by good feelings of church friendships, a system of rational thought, a carefully outlined God-doctrine, or even a well-articulated belief system. God bridged the gap by binding truth to a person—the person of Jesus Christ—who comes full of grace and full of truth. The world of words and concepts becomes a life of flesh and blood. By embodying the fullness of God’s grace and truth, Jesus’ life of grace becomes the catalyst for God’s truth. Releasing the grace of Jesus reveals the truth of Jesus. I’m not suggesting the truth of Jesus is always received, only that until and unless the grace of Jesus is released, the truth of Jesus will not be received.

I’ve seen research that declares a truth crisis spreading like a plague through the value system of American teens. By looking at these polls, you would think all young people are morally adrift in a sea of moral swill, not the least bit interested in anchoring their lives to bedrock, absolute truth. And, I have to say, that anyone who works with young people can easily find some merit in the statistics. But maybe there’s a crisis of truth in our culture because there’s a crisis of grace. I’d like to see a poll on that.

Grace reaches out and grabs truth out of the ethereal world of the propositionally abstract and deeply plants it into the messy world of human living, providing a relational context in which the truth of God becomes visible, touchable, tangible, and even vulnerable. Wherever, whenever, and with whomever God’s grace—his generosity, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, kindness, faithfulness—intersects our lives, defying our conventional expectations of what’s true and not true of God, God’s truth is revealed, and the potential exists for his truth to be received.

More to come...

Our Shared Stories

This past Friday we held our annual Fellowship Dinner... which is a fancy way of saying our annual fund-raiser. Four of our student-interns shared their stories via a video we produced for event. And along with their stories, we introduced our supporters to one of the big reasons we need to raise funds: Big Blue.

I had a lot of fun putting this video together because it offered me the chance to get to know some of our interns a little bit more. We have a great team here. They love God, and they love each other. In the end, that is all we can hope for and all we are called to do.





The music in this video is performed by our friend Matt Maher. The song is called You Know Who I Am from the album The End and the Beginning. You can find Matt here on or on iTunes.