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THAT’S JUST LOVE SNEAKING UP ON YOU

There’s a cute story out about this married couple that once had the mother of all fights. They had both screamed themselves hoarse, and now the battle had settled into a cold winter freeze. Not one word between them. Not a glance; not a syllable; not a grunt. She was simply not going to acknowledge this idiot’s presence in the world, and he likewise had clammed up. When they went to bed – and amazingly, they still did climb into the two halves of a queen-sized regular bed, there was almost a row of ice cubes down the middle between them. As B. B. King once sang, “The thrill is gone” . . . and now the chill was on.

But the husband, knowing that his wife usually got up before he did each morning, and also remembering that he had an important meeting the next day, left a terse little note on her nightstand. “Crucial teleconference with boss at nine,” he printed out in a frosty, impersonal handwriting. “Please awaken at seven.” Then, without putting the usual x’s and o’s for hugs and kisses, he climbed into his side of the bed and fell into a restless slumber, clinging to the precipice of his Simmons mattress.

Well, you can guess the rest. He woke up the next day with a noonday sun filling the room with a condemning glare. He looked at his watch, and sure enough, it was just about high noon. He’d only overslept by five hours and missed the life-and-death meeting by three. “That stupid wife!” he grumbled to himself, trying to think what suit he should wear when he went down to the unemployment office. Just then he noticed a note on his side of the bed. Sure enough, in his wife’s equally chilly penmanship, was a reminder from his better half. “Wake up!” it said. “It’s seven o’clock.”

Have you ever “loved” someone in your life with about that much impersonal warmth? It reminds me of the cartoon where a groom is sitting outside the church with his beautiful bride, when all at once, a SECOND bride comes walking up. She has on a $900 gown, the jewels, the pretty hair, everything. This is awkward! And the guy says to her: “Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

Well, friend, that’s one church parking lot and a queen-sized bed removed from our radio topic in this series, which we’ve entitled THE SCIENCE OF GRACE. But I just want to give you this Friday nugget to think about: the grace of God is an active thing. It’s a pursuing power. It’s not just a note left on a pillow, or the kind of phone call you deliberately time to catch just their answering machine.

Luke chapter 15 seems to be the most pertinent Bible passage for exploring this concept, and we find here a trilogy of parables by Jesus about how heaven feels toward lost sinners. Lost sheep, lost coin, lost kid. Badda-bing, badda-bang, badda-boom . . . Jesus reels off these three powerful vignettes, one right after one another.

However, in the most famous of the three, the parable of the prodigal son, some point to the fact that the father in the story, who obviously represents God, stays home on the farm and does NOT pursue the rebellious boy. The kid drives off to Las Vegas in a huff, and the dad stays home. He doesn’t chase after his son; he doesn’t prevent him; he doesn’t spy on him. When his boy is down and out, the dad stays away in the distant country. And so some wonder if this story teaches that we are on our own in finding our way home. Will God respect a man’s privacy? Does heaven have a tough-love policy of saying, “Hey, you made your bed, now lay in it”? Does grace just stay home on the ranch and only get applied to those who make the long journey of confession and repentance under their own steam?

Those are all fair questions. And friend, it’s true that God respects our free will. He doesn’t force us into an unwanted relationship with Him. If we demand our space, He gives it to us.

But it’s also true that parables are generally designed to teach one main point, one central idea. And here in this story of the prodigal son, the core teaching has to be the attitude of the father when his son came home. As Dad looked down the road and saw the bedraggled figure of his boy, what did he do? How did he react? Did he condemn? Did he make his son re-qualify for sonship? Was his boy temporarily lost? No. None of those things. With great joy, the dad announced to the world that this boy, still his son, always his son, had returned and that the party would begin in 15 minutes.

That is the point of this story . . . and I would suggest to you that we must look only seven verses earlier to find out about the active nature of God’s grace.

“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep,” Jesus proposes, “and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?”

And in both this story and the next one, about the woman who loses a coin, we find that relentless searching, painstaking, diligent looking and sweeping and calling and imploring are all parts of heaven’s campaign to win us back to the Father’s heart. His gift of “Amazing Grace” is a powerfully ACTIVE thing, a determined searching. Just four chapters later, still here in the book of Luke, there’s the story of a certain tax collector named Zacchaeus – although the PC police tell me it’s out of fashion to call our friend a “wee little man.” Instead, he is to be referred to as “sycamore-enhanced.” I’m not sure what kind words we should use to relate that he works for the IRS, but we all know that Jesus looked up into that tree and invited Zacchaeus to invite HIM to lunch that day. And when people marvel that Jesus would go looking for a selfish little shyster like the infamous Mr. Z, Jesus makes this marvelous announcement:

“Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.” And now get this: “For the Son of Man came to SEEK and to SAVE what was lost.”

The NIV notes for this great verse remind us that this was Jesus’ mission: “To BRING salvation, meaning eternal life.” No, friend, Jesus doesn’t chain us up with grace, but He certainly knocks on our door. He comes to your high school and waits outside your classroom for the bell, hoping to win an encounter with you.

It’s interesting that in the recent CBS hit, Joan of Arcadia, God is always coming right to this young high school girl; He confronts her in the parking lot, in the hallways, as she is going to lunch. There’s a warm kind of “in your face” love expressed here, as God pursues this special young lady that He needs for His kingdom.

My friend Morris Venden has dissected this trilogy of Luke 15 parables in some of his books, and he concludes:

“God is out looking for us, and . . . His efforts completely surpass our attempts to find Him.”

In his own marvelous conversion story, related in the autobiography, Surprised By Joy, C. S. Lewis admits about our own efforts to “find” God:

“You might as well talk about the mouse’s search for the cat.”

If you ever get the chance, read the one chapter, “Checkmate,” where Lewis confides about how God just plain and simple CAME AFTER this arrogant young atheist. Bit by bit, he was beginning to see that he had been wrong, that his cocky bravado about the empty skies above was in a shambles.

“All over the board my pieces were in the most disadvantageous positions,” he writes, using the motif of a game of chess. “Soon I could no longer cherish even the illusion that the initiative lay with me. My Adversary began to make His final moves.”

And friend, let’s bear in mind that we are thinking of more than just God’s pursuit of us. He is pursuing us here WITH GRACE, with His desire to forgive us, to give us an erased past and a brand new beginning. He’s not just chasing because He’s a jealous God or because He wants to beat Satan in some contest. He is coming after us with the redemptive blood of His own Son.

In the exceptional Adventist Review issue we’re using in this series, Jan Paulsen shares a great quote from one of the founders of my denomination. Here it is:

“God loves the sinless angels, who do His service and are obedient to all His commands; but He does not give them grace: they have never needed it; for they have never sinned. Grace is an attribute shown to undeserving human beings. We did not seek after it; IT WAS SENT IN SEARCH OF US. God rejoices to bestow grace upon all who hunger and thirst for it, not because we are worthy, but because we are UNworthy. Our need is the qualification which gives us the assurance that we shall receive the gift.”

A man once stood up during a meeting’s altar call, tears in his eyes, and he made this confession. “All my life – I mean, ALL MY LIFE – God chased me . . . and He finally got me.” Friend, that’s the determined power of grace.