The Obligation of Grace

I usually don’t look for deep insights from TV shows, but the opening of Monday night’s CSI: Miami surprised me. (Of course, I don’t really watch TV). Horatio, the show’s main character, confesses to a priest a sin that he has evidently confessed many times in the past. He killed someone; there is blood on his hands. No details are given, but he is convinced that he had no choice other than to do what he did. And yet he feels intense guilt. He desperately wants to be forgiven and to feel forgiveness. The priest tells him, “God is not looking so much at the life that was lost in the past as He is looking at the people that you can save now.” Horatio responds, “But I need to hear the words.” He needs to hear that he is forgiven. But the priest replies, “When you’ve done enough, then you will know it.” Of course, then he has to leave church to run out and shoot someone also!

How horrible to go through life always feeling guilty and never feeling forgiven. How hard it must be to think that you must do enough in order to be forgiven, but then at the same time you know that you haven’t done enough and can’t do enough. How frustrating it is to work and work hoping to reach the point when you feel you have done enough… but never really getting there.

But it is shallow to go through life feeling no obligation to God’s grace. No, we can never earn grace through obedience. But if we truly understand the gift of grace, then we are placed under a tremendous obligation. In 1 Corinthians 15:10, Paul says, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.” Paul clearly understood the obligation of grace. He understood that not only does grace lead us to work for God, but it is grace that works through us. Do we view grace in terms of obligation? Or do we rather see it excusing us from serious service? We might want to go back and seriously study some of those grace passages again!