Grace AND Truth

By Keith Watson

John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

We live, for the most part, in a world of Either/Or.
For or Against.  Love or Hate. Liberal or Conservative.
And over our either/or, we often divide. If you are not 100% for, you are against, and an enemy. If you do not love as I see love, then you hate, and are an enemy. If you are not liberal in all the ways that are liberal, then you are conservative and an opponent.

This is not a new trend.  I think we just see it more openly because of social media.
We see it again and again with Jesus and the Pharisees. Last week we looked at Luke 6:1-11 as the Pharisees confronted Jesus over the Sabbath day laws.  You can listen HERE.  In one of the confrontations, the Pharisees were upset that Jesus would heal a man on the Sabbath; it was against their rules as it was defined by them as “work.”  It struck me that they had so little compassion for the man in need of healing.  They seemed to love the rules (which they added to the Law of God by the way) more than they loved the man who was suffering and in need. 

The “truth” was that God had commanded His people to keep the Sabbath holy, in part by not working.  But the definitions of “work” that the religious leaders added negated the second greatest command – to love your neighbor as yourself.  The Pharisees were full of truth but lacked any grace.

The Apostle Paul addressed the same issue but from the opposite side.  As he preached grace and God’s complete forgiveness of our sin in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, there were some who claimed that how we lived as believers didn’t matter.  They believed that we didn’t need to live holy lives following Him, because we were forgiven – sin all the more and grace abounds.  May it never be, Paul said in Romans 6:2!

Grace or Truth.
We live in a culture that seems to have become divided over these two.

Grace
“Grace means that we love people like Jesus loved people.”
“Grace means that we overlook the sins of others.”
“Grace means that we don’t pass any judgment and accept people as they are, no matter what.”
Anything short of such grace is seen as anti-Jesus.
OR
Truth
“Truth means that we call sin what it is no matter what.”
“Truth means that we confront the sins of those who are sinning even if it hurts them.”
“Truth means we combat the sin of the world by standing against sinners.”
Anything short of that is to be weak on truth and makes you a liberal, compromised person who is part of the problem.

Grace or Truth?  Which should it be?
I think we get a glimpse at an answer in how Jesus responded to the religious leader who sought to trap him in Matthew 22:

35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

What Jesus is saying in that last statement is that every Law and all that the prophets called God’s people to was rooted in loving God and loving the people around us as we love ourselves.  Truth then, as it relates to the Law and God, is a picture of what it looks like to love God and love our neighbor. 

If we separate the Law from love we have completely missed the spirit behind the Law.  The Law (truth) does not stand apart from love. But the same is true of love.  Godly love for the people around us is never divorced from the Law.  The Law shows us what love looks like.

Grace is a product of love.   I don’t have a verse for this nor enough space in a blog to make my case, but I believe that grace and love go hand in hand.  The grace we receive from God in Christ is ours because He loves us.  I don’t mean here the “common grace” that we all receive in air and food and rain.  I mean the grace that brings about mercy and forgiveness, the grace that saves sinners like me.

Let me try to bring these together in an amazing picture from the life of Jesus.  This event takes place in John 8 verses 1-11.  Jesus is at the temple teaching. The religious leaders want to trap him and bring charges against him.  They had caught a woman in adultery.  She was guilty.

The leaders place her in the middle of the crowd, her and them with Jesus.  “She has been caught in adultery,” they tell him. “And the Law says that we must stone her.  What do you say?”
Jesus didn’t answer. He knelt down and began writing something in the dirt.
They persisted.
Jesus stood up, looked at them and said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Then he bent down and began writing again.  One by one the men began to leave until no one was left but Jesus and the woman.

A Beautiful Picture of Grace.
They were right.  By the Law she should have been stoned to death.  But with incredible wisdom, Jesus opened the door of amazing grace.  With his words, the woman caught in adultery, who should have been stoned to death, was left alone by her accusers.  Then we read this:

10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

“Neither do I condemn you,” is a statement of incredible grace! 
And it is followed by a statement of truth.  “Go, and from now on sin no more.”
Jesus did not ignore her sin.  He didn’t excuse it.  He addressed it.  Go, and sin no more.

Here we find the perfect picture of Grace AND Truth united together and flowing out of love for Jesus’ neighbor!  Here we see that our proper Christ-like position is never Grace OR Truth; it is Grace AND Truth, and always guided by love – love for God and love for people.

Jesus did not abandon truth as if it could not stand with love. Neither did he abandon love for the sake of truth. He graciously pointed his neighbors, the people around him, to the life they were created to live (truth). He lived the life that the Apostle Paul called the Corinthians and us to in I Corinthians 13 where he wrote:

“4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

With patience, kindness, and humility, he extended grace to the woman caught in adultery. With the same patience, kindness, and humility, he pointed out the truth, she was an adulteress, and she was created for more. “Go and sin no more.”

We often miss this, but Jesus was addressing another group with grace and truth. With patience, kindness, humility, and the same love he held for the woman, Jesus reminded the self-righteous, religious men ready to stone her for her sin, that they too were sinners who had received much grace.

Grace AND Truth.
If we are to love like Jesus, it isn’t an either/or; it is a both/and - both truth and grace. We cannot abandon truth in the name of grace and we cannot abandon grace in the name of truth. One leads to the self righteousness of the Pharisees while the other leads to a license which ultimately denies our great God and Savior (Jude 1:4). If you find yourself standing readily on truth and lacking grace, be like Jesus, full of grace and truth.  And if you find that stand firmly on grace with no real place for God’s truth, be like Jesus, full of grace and truth.

This is one of the ways we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and a glimpse of loving like we are loved.