P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

MEETING GRACE’S SISTER

There’s a tears-welling-up line that happens right at the very end of the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail. For two cinematic hours Kathleen Kelly has ranted against and booed and hated the villain-slash-hero, Joe Fox. The big bully bookstore bigshot has gone out of his way to put “The Shop Around the Corner’s” owner out of business, and every time they run into each other, she blurts out more nasty things. She’d much rather give her heart and affections to her invisible knight in shining armor, the anonymous e-mail pal she’s never met: “New York 152.”

But if you’ve seen the story, bit by bit, Meg Ryan falls in love with Tom Hanks – of course – and right at the end, she’s also about to meet the man hiding behind the cyber-curtain. But now she’s conflicted. Joe Fox has become her everything, the man she wants . . . and this Internet boyfriend had already stood her up once. And it really hurt when he left her high and dry! How could she forgive him for that? Is it pointless to go ahead and meet him when she’d much rather be with Tom Hanks?

Well, if you’ve never rented it I don’t want to give away a sweet ending, but of course, Joe Fox and her e-mail correspondent turn out to be one and the same man. The audience already knows it, and finally, she sees Tom Hanks coming around the nearest bend at Riverside Park. It’s really him. All her dreams have come true. And after gulping and blinking back the tears, she says in a voice choked with emotion and love: “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so bad.” And the final credits roll as the late Harry Nilsson sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while Tom Hanks’ big dog, Brinkley, tugs at the coattails of the kissing couple.

But now the spiritual question I want to tie to this Internet fairy tale. Meg Ryan still has to forgive Tom Hanks for the earlier sin of standing her up. He left her hanging at a café; he had shamed her by not showing up. Could Meg Ryan now extend grace to him and declare his slate clean?

Well, the answer is obvious! She loves him! Forgiveness is going to be easy because he is the man who has won and occupied her heart.

We’ve been getting some wonderful truth nuggets from a one-time special magazine issue that came out in my denomination back in the Fall of 2003. In an article entitled “Abundance of Grace,” Wesley Torres gives us a great truth to ponder. Listen:

“Grace is the English word translated from Latin, gratia, which in turn is translated from the Greek, charis, meaning “undeserved favor.” Now get this, please: “LOVE is the twin sister of grace. Christ is the personification of God’s grace, and that’s why His death to save the human race is the utmost act of love. Jesus came to manifest grace and love, to rescue humankind from its condemnation and bondage to sin.”

Maybe this truth is so obvious, so “self-evident,” that we don’t put it on the billboards enough. But friend, love is the twin sister of grace! Without love, there would be no grace. If God didn’t love us, He wouldn’t try to save us. If He didn’t love us, He wouldn’t have sent His Son on this rescue mission we call Calvary. If Jesus didn’t love us, He would have abandoned the whole salvation venture there in the Garden of Gethsemane that bloody Thursday night, or for sure on Friday afternoon, when some of the people He loved so much drove nails through His hands and feet and called Him obscene names.

I remember a while back when we did a Voice of Prophecy radio series on the two doctrines – speaking of twins – of adoption and salvation assurance. If you were with us, you remember that we got some good resource material from a book entitled Eternal Security. And the author puts the grace of God in these very stark, unvarnished terms:

“God chose to adopt YOU,” he writes, “as His child before the foundation of the world. Why? For one reason and one reason only: HE WANTED TO.”

Just like that. Why does God want you in His family? Because He loves you. He feels like saving you! And why, then, does He extend grace? If He loves you, then He HAS to extend it! It’s natural for Him to extend it! It’s not a “stretch,” or a twisting away from His natural, godly inclination. Saving you is the most real, instinctive thing in His divine existence. And we discover that grace and love are twins.

Clearly the doctrine of grace is entwined with the Christian teaching on the judgment. We are all going to face the judgment seat of God, it says in II Corinthians 5:10. Even God’s redeemed children have to give an account of our loyalty. What a blessing grace is going to be on THAT day, as all of our failures are covered by Jesus’ blood! But wouldn’t you agree with me that if a Judge loves you, you are in extremely good shape when you walk into His courtroom? Here on planet earth, we would hope that a judge would recuse himself if he had an intense love relationship with the accused, but in the panorama of biblical justice, God openly announces that – oops! – He has fallen in love with the condemned prisoner! He is on the side of the defendant! He and His Son, the incomparable, undefeated defense attorney, may as well abandon the facade of impartiality and come right down and sit at your table. Because love is the twin sister of grace!

You’ve probably heard the story – I hope it’s reliable – where Fiorello H. La Guardia, mayor of New York City, strolled into night court one evening and said to the presiding judge: “I’ll take over here.” And then his heart was touched by the plight of a woman who had stolen some bread to feed her starving grandkids. The mandated punishment was ten days or ten bucks. But he was so moved by love or pity that he got out his wallet and tossed the ten dollars in himself. What’s more, he announced to the gallery: “I’m fining every single one of you 50 cents just for living in a city where a woman’s got to steal bread to feed her family.” So the story goes, the lady left there with a clean slate and forty-seven bucks to boot. Why? Because love and grace were twin sisters that night.

This Adventist Review article by Wesley Torres cites two verses in revealing this twin-sister family connection. John 3:16, of course – and we know from our good seats at the Super Bowl and that sign by the fan in the rainbow wig that “God so LOVED the world, He gave His only-begotten Son” – which is the very definition of grace. But then Torres takes us to Ephesians 2:8, where Paul reminds us:

“For it is by GRACE you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, IT IS THE GIFT OF GOD.”

And why does God give us this grace gift? Because He wants to! He feels like it! And He feels like it because He loves us with an overwhelming, helpless love. It would have made a bad movie ending in You’ve Got Mail if Kathleen had slapped Joe Fox in the face and said: “You miserable excuse for a man! You stiffed me! I hate you! I won’t forgive you till hell freezes over!” But she was completely unable to say those words. Why? Because she had fallen in love. And with the love came automatic grace.

We can get into a chicken-and-egg moral centrifuge here, going round and round wondering whether God gave His Son to die for us because He loves us, or if He loves us because His Son died for us. And I guess the answer is . . . YES! Certainly the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross puts a high value on you and me both, which heightens the love of the Father. But Romans 5:8 again links love and grace and gets the order right. When it counts, the love comes first.

“But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

So He loved us from the beginning. Even before we could kneel at the Cross, He loved us enough to begin fashioning it on our behalf. In J. I. Packer’s incredible book, Knowing God, he reminds us that God’s adoption of us is, more than anything, an indicator of His love.

“The New Testament gives us two yardsticks,” he suggests, “for measuring God’s love. The first is the cross” – and he quotes that same verse in Romans as well as I John 4:10, which says the same thing. “The SECOND is the gift of sonship.” And now here’s I John 3:1, which he quotes too: “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God!”

So, friend, we can sing “Amazing Grace” or we can harmonize with its twin sister: “Amazing Love.” Actually, there’s a Christian song with that very title, written by Charles Wesley, who wasn’t a twin but a very close brother to a proclaimer of love and grace. It goes like this:

“Amazing love, How can it be? That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me.”