Suspicious Christians like to say that you shouldn’t take grace too far. If it’s just all grace, all the time, then nobody will be motivated to do the right thing. You have to lower the boom on people at some point. The more biblically savvy of them will point to Romans 6:1, where no less an authority than Paul himself faces the question, “Shall we keep on sinning?” and answers it with a resounding “NO!!!”
“See?” they say. “Even Paul says you shouldn’t take it too far.”
But I want to know what “it” is that we “shouldn’t take too far.” What is it that they think grace is? Because they’ve fundamentally misunderstood both grace and Romans if they think “shouldn’t take it too far” is what Paul is saying in 6:1. The message of Romans 6 is not that you should only go so far down the road of grace. The message of Romans 6 is that when you red-line the engine and take it all the way to the end of the neverending road of God’s grace, that road doesn’t go anywhere near sin. Far from it!
When grace superabounds your sin, no matter how much sin there is, then–and only then–you can know that you’re truly dead to sin and alive to God; you can reckon yourself so. On that basis–what other basis would serve?–you can surrender your members as instruments to God. Of course that doesn’t quite work out the way you’d hope, there being another law in your members that strives toward sin despite your best intentions. Serving God with your mind and sin with your flesh is a devil’s bargain if ever there was one–“who will deliver me from this dead body?” indeed! Glory to God, He doesn’t leave us there.
The Law–the ever-present admonition not to go too far–could never deliver us from that predicament. But what the Law could never do, God did by raising Jesus from the dead. That same Spirit now indwells us, and although our bodies are not yet redeemed, He cheats and gives spiritual life to our (yet-dead) bodies. The life of the Resurrection is available to us now, before the Resurrection, and so we are able to offer our Spirit-indwelt bodies as a living sacrifice that is acceptable to God.
No amount of “not taking grace too far” could have rendered our yet-dead bodies even an acceptable sacrifice, still less a living one; nothing short of a resurrection could possibly do that. And a resurrection is precisely what we have–not ours, but His, and we participate in it solely by grace.
Now obviously all this is ridiculous, but Jesus did it anyway. Good thing He didn’t listen to the people who would have told Him not to take it too far.
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