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THE SCIENCE OF GRACE #14
OVER-THE-COUNTER GRACE
Today we’d like to say a few words about pills. No, you haven’t accidentally spun your radio dial over to a pharmacological report. But we’re thinking instead of people who are pills. They live their entire lives driving other people batty and making them ill instead of well.
Maybe you’ve heard about the woman who was just a crank, an explosive, nasty, born-again, no-growth, zero-sanctification Christian who went to church with a scowl every single Sunday of her 85 tumultuous years of life. She made people mad everywhere she went. But finally she passed away. Secretly everyone in the church heaved a sigh of relief and put on their black suits and dresses for the funeral service, which happened to be on a rather dark and gloomy day.
So standing out there in the cemetery amid the fog and the drizzle, they laid the old battle-ax, pardon the expression, to rest. Eighty-five years of sparks and smoke, and now all was quiet. But about five minutes after the dirt had been put in, the heavens above lit up with lightning and thunder. One of the parishioners, remembering the turmoil of the past, looked up toward heaven’s pearly gates and remarked to a friend: “Well, she got there all right!”
It reminds us of the tombstone of another saint of God who must have endured living with a Christian “pill,” because the inscription read: “He was married to So-and-So for 50 years, and died in the hope of a better life.”
We’re enjoying a rather extended radio series on the topic of grace, and perhaps the question could be properly raised here at the pharmacy counter: why do some faithful Christians take “grace pills” their entire life . . . and they doesn’t seem to work? They give other people migraines from morning to night and from the bassinet to the grave.
Speaking of pills, it’s kind of fun to look into C. S. Lewis’ medicine chest and read about a few of the sour stinkers he’s used as fictional characters. There’s a nasty lady in his book, The Four Loves, he calls “Mrs. Fidget.” And it makes you fidget in sympathy as you read about how this misguided saint spent a lifetime driving her own family to distraction. She “cared for them,” you see, and it was the kind of caring that was fingernails on the blackboard. She was an interfering, bossy, intrusive, meddling, mind-everybody’s-business pain in the neck. And finally, after describing a lifetime of horrors, Lewis describes how she passed to her reward.
“The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest,” he writes. “Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family [members] are.”
In The Screwtape Letters, he tells about another overbearing saint whose grace pills have taken very little effect.
“She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”
Probably the biggest pill in Dr. Lewis’ medical bag is the thankfully imaginary “Miss Bates.” In Mere Christianity he poses this hard question. Dick Firkin isn’t a Christian . . . but a pretty nice guy. Miss Bates IS a Christian . . . and nobody can stand to be around her. A lifetime of going to church and reading the Beatitudes hasn’t transformed her from being a witch into being anything else. She’s still a witch. Why, if Christianity is such a wonderful cure-all, such a life-changing movement, is Miss Bates still so awful to everyone she meets?
Now, friend, I know that you’re not Miss Bates or Mrs. Fidget. I can tell just by visiting with you here on the radio that you’re a really nice person. But I have to confess something. There have been times when there was a little bit of MISTER Bates in ME. Sometimes I look back over the past calendar year . . . and I just feel like those 365 pills didn’t do any good at all. Am I more spiritual? Have I grown? Am I kinder? Have I treated my fellow man as well as I resolved to on the 31st of December?
If you’ve been with us in this radio series, THE SCIENCE OF GRACE, you know that we’ve gotten a daily spoonful of very good medicine from a recent Week of Prayer issue of the Adventist Review, official paper in my home denomination. And the Tuesday reading, by Pastor Pardon Mwansa, who serves God’s cause over in Africa, is entitled “The Transforming Power of Grace.” By the way, I had the honor and joy of working with Pastor Mwansa in our recent “Hope For Our Troubled World” evangelistic series in Zambia. But this godly leader tells us about a bottle of grace pills that really do seem to work. They’re described in Titus 2:
“For the GRACE of God that brings salvation,” Paul writes, “has appeared to all men.” Now notice what the medicine of grace is supposed to do in our spiritual bloodstream: “It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for Himself a people that are His very own, eager to do what is good.”
And Pastor Mwansa tells about Wilfred, a man living in a African village. He was a “cursing, swearing, fighting man,” he writes, “and nobody dared cross him.” He slapped his children if they did anything wrong; he got drunk in taverns and provoked fistfights with anyone who looked at him cross-eyed.
And then he went to one of our Christian meetings. He went there drunk . . . but he went! And now, instead of taking his medicine down at the beer hall, he began taking grace pills instead. And in this guy they worked! His own wife soon said to him: “If there is anything this church has done to you, it has taken away your swearing and cursing.” And Wilfred said to her, in his new, kind, cultured voice: “My dear, it is not the church; it is the transforming grace of God that has changed my life. Jesus has taken away my old self and given me a new self.”
Isn’t that a good story? But it makes us wonder if the grace pharmacies in Africa are giving out a more potent dose than we receive here in Los Angeles, California, 90053. Why does Miss Bates not improve as she feeds her mind with grace? Why is she apparently not a “new creation”? Why does Lonnie Melashenko look back on December 31 and sometimes feel discouraged?
In his extended essay about Dick Firkin, the naturally nice pagan, and Miss Bates, the witch in the ditch (with the Jesus fish on her car), Lewis points out that there are often non-Christians who start out nicer than Christians. Dick Firkin was just plain GIVEN a decent disposition, a happily humming digestive system. He was born with a smile on his face. Who gave him all those things? God did, of course. Not that heaven didn’t want to give Miss Bates those blessings too, but the fact is that in this cold, hard world some people emerge from the OB ward of the hospital with a grimace and knotted-up insides that make them twitchy and mean their whole colicky lives. So the fact that Dick Firkin starts out as an eight, and Miss Bates is stuck at two-and-a-quarter is not the point at all. What would Mr. Firkin be like if he WERE a Christian? How hopelessly mean would Miss Bates be if she weren’t? That’s one thing.
The larger question is this. And it’s undeniably true that we often don’t see very big results from the grace pills we dutifully swallow all our lives. Some of us stubbornly hold them under our tongues; we don’t really swallow them. Many believers – even though they’re SAVED by grace – don’t truly comprehend the grandness of it all. We bump along, not really seeing how “amazing” this gift of eternal life is. And so we who glimpse little are transformed little. That’s not grace’s fault; it’s ours. But the gift is still good even when our interaction with it is limited by our humanness.
And C. S. Lewis finishes his thought. God can easily take Dick Firkin and Miss Bates up to a perfect, heavenly “ten” when the time is right.
“It is not what He is anxious about,” he writes.” “. . . He is waiting and watching for [something] both in Miss Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfill the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this is a needle that can choose. It can point to its true North; but it need not. Will the needle swing round, and settle, and point to God? He can help it to do so. He cannot force it. He cannot, so to speak, put out His own hand and pull it into the right position, for then it would not be free will any more. Will it point North? That is the question on which all hangs. WILL MISS BATES AND DICK OFFER THEIR NATURES TO GOD? The question whether the natures they offer or withhold are, at that moment, nice or nasty ones, is of secondary importance. God can see to that part of the problem.”
So there it is. Friend, grace WILL transform. It’s meant to. It’s supposed to. Our job is to aim ourselves at it – point our compass toward the cross every single day.
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