Gracious Christianity | Douglas Jacobsen & Rodney Sawatsky

Douglas Jacobsen & Rodney Sawatsky. Gracious Christianity: Living the Love We Profess. Baker, 2006. 144 pp.

We have a gracious gospel. The good news that Jesus proclaimed is that God is graciously disposed toward us. God loves us, and, indeed, God loves everyone and every good thing in this wonderful world in which we live. We are expected to do the same. The gospel invites us to mimic God’s own graciousness in our lives. It calls us to become so enveloped in God’s graciousness that we become conduits of God’s grace and love for others. Graciousness is a nonnegotiable dimension of Christian faith. It goes to the very core of the gospel. It is what makes the gospel good news.

Defining Terms

The terms related to the word grace (including graceful and gracious and their various derivatives) play an important role in Christian faith, but the meaning of these terms is not always clear. . . . Grace describes the experience of receiving God’s love.

As for graceful and gracious . . . the kind of gracefulness and graciousness we have in mind is a response to God’s love. Graciousness is how we externalize to others the grace we have internalized from God.

Graciousness understood in this way focuses on kindness, compassion, and friendship rather than on mere attractiveness or elegance. . . .

In many ways, grace and love are synonyms. To be gracious toward someone is to show that person love, but graciousness points toward love with an important qualification. Graciousness is love that never forces itself on anyone. . . .

That, of course, is precisely the kind of love we have received from God, and when we understand the gracious nature of God’s love for us, the only appropriate response is to love other people in the same way. And that is what we mean by gracious Christianity. It is Christianity so deeply rooted in God’s love that we cannot help but love others in the same gracious way. It is cause and effect. The love and grace we receive from God are refracted through our lives and redirected toward others.

Overcoming Ungraciousness

While all Christians are called to be gracious, none of us is as gracious as we should be. We get grumpy. We snipe at one another. We are sometimes downright nasty. This should not be the case, but it comes as no surprise. Christians are imperfect. We are sinners who still need to be fully redeemed. We are works in progress, but thankfully God is still active in our lives slowly making us better. Someday, by God’s grace, we will become the people we were meant to be.

The goal of becoming more gracious as Christians is not, however, a matter of simply waiting for God to change us. The Christian life rarely works that way. Instead, we are called to cooperate with God’s will for our lives, and we are called to actively strive to live up to the standards to which God has called us. . . .

While the pathway toward greater graciousness in Christian faith and life involves behavior, emotions, and ideas, this book focuses primarily on the realm of ideas. Some practical comments about behavior are included, and some emotional connections hopefully will occur along the way, but the main concern is with the ideas that form the framework for living the love we profess. Within the realm of faith, this kind of framework of belief is called theology.

A Theology for Gracious Christianity

This book is a theology for gracious Christianity. It is a concise but relatively comprehensive overview of what most Christians have believed about God, the world, themselves, and others for most of the past two thousand years, explaining how those beliefs encourage and support graciousness in faith and life. . . .

Sometimes it is easier simply to repeat old answers without analyzing them, but graciousness requires thoughtfulness, self-awareness, and empathy. If our faith is true, knowing what we believe and why will ultimately increase our ability to listen to others with genuine fairness, respects, and compassion.

The Jesus Creed

The heart of gracious Christianity is Jesus’ dual commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31). . . .

This book takes the Jesus creed, this simple but profound core of Christian faith, and uses it as a lens to examine the various subject areas of theology. The eight chapters of this book describe what this creed has to do with:

• how we understand God and creation
• what it means to be human
• how God speaks to us
• what salvation entails
• what the Spirit does for us
• why the church exists
• how to read the Bible
• what will happen in the future.

Looking at these topics from the perspective of the Jesus creed does not change the message of historic Christian faith. Instead, it refurbishes our theology, like polishing a tarnished silver tea set helps restore its original luster. . . .

Generous Orthodoxy and Gracious Christianity

Love of God and neighbor has always defined the heart of Christianity, but the need to reaffirm this truth visibly and vigorously is especially urgent today. Mean-spiritedness and hate are on the rise in both America and around the globe, and religion is often implicated. Instead of acting as a restraint, religion is sometimes the cause of tension, tirades, and terror. . . .

Christians currently account for almost one-third of the world’s people, two billion out of a global population of just over six billion. If the faith professed by those two billion Christians became even a little more gracious, the dynamics of the world community could be changed dramatically for the better. Before it is public, however, gracious Christianity is intensely personal. We are compelled to be gracious because we have been loved so graciously by God and because we have been loved by others—the love of God usually flows to us through others.

Taken from pp. 17-26 of Gracious Christianity by Douglas Jacobsen and Rodney J. Sawatsky. Used by permission of Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright © 2006. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group. Visit http://www.BakerPublishingGroup.com

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