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Grace on Trial – Week 3 -  Identity Concerns · Your Daily Grace

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  Welcome to your daily Grace By Timothy Wilder Grace on trial week 3 identity concerns accusation 15 can we trust grace when people are so broken?
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  One of my grandfathers, of German heritage and with a thick German accent, had a simple observation about human nature.
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  He would often say that people is no darned good.
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  The older I get, the more I understand why he said it. I've lived long enough to see people disappoint each other. I've seen selfishness, poor decisions, broken relationships, and failures of character. More importantly, I've seen enough of my own life to know that I'm not exempt from that list.
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  That reality shaped some of the questions I wrestled with when I first began hearing Grace Centered Teaching. If people like me are as broken as they seem to be, how can grace possibly work? How could I be worthy of grace?
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  How could something that seemed so free and so dependent upon God accomplish what years of striving and religious effort often could? Not those concerns sound reasonable? If the problem is human brokenness, shouldn't the solution require more effort, more discipline, and more control?
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  The remarkable thing is that God does not describe the solution in those terms. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God promises, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. Ezekiel 36:26 I have always found that language striking. God does not promise to repair the old heart. He does not ask us to rehabilitate ourselves. The promise is far more radical than that. He gives us a new heart. Paul describes the same reality when he writes, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17 NKJV Many believers are quick to acknowledge their failures. We know our weaknesses. We remember our mistakes. We can usually produce a long list of reasons we fall short. What often gets overlooked is what God says happened when we came to Christ.
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  He made us new.
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  Grace works because it is built upon God's work, not ours. That does not mean believers never struggle or fail. We will talk about that later this week. It does mean that God's answer to our condition was never self improvement. His answer was transformation. Paul writes that our old man was crucified with him.
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  The gospel is not a makeover for the old self.
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  It is the end of the old self as our identity.
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  Looking back, I think one of my mistakes was assuming grace underestimated how broken people are.
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  The truth is just the opposite. Grace takes our conditions so seriously that God does not merely tell us to try harder.
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  He does not simply give better instructions. He does not offer a cleaned up version of the same person, he creates something new. That is why grace can be trusted with broken people.
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  Not because brokenness is insignificant.
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  Not because sin is excusable.
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  Not because human beings are secretly better than we think. Grace can be trusted because God's solution reaches deeper than our behavior. It reaches the heart itself.
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  The question is not whether people are broken. Scripture is completely honest about that reality. The question is whether God is capable of creating something new. The Gospel answers that question with a resounding yes.
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  When you think about your relationship with God, do you spend more time focusing on who you were or on who God says you are in Christ?
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