Grace and Effort

1 Corinthians 15:10
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.

As a young pastor, I was approached by older congregants who let me know that when I said the Christian life involved ‘effort’, that they felt that I did not understand the ‘Grace Message’.  They looked at me reproachfully as some sort of ‘legalist’, and suggested that perhaps, someday, I might see the light, as they. In response,  I spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand what this ‘Grace Message’ might be, only to conclude that it involved separating “Grace” from “Truth” , lifting the word out of any context it might find itself in scripture, and simply  making it a synonym of “permission”.

This isn’t the only time I encountered imbalanced teaching on grace. It has been a recurring theme….as it was in the generation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer  

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

A rule of thumb in Biblical study is to allow the context of the word to inform what it means in that context.  Given that, let’s consider what the apostle is saying, here, in our quoted scripture ( 1 Cor 15:10), which is representative of several other texts.

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.

·         He owes who He is to grace.  He is what he is, by grace.

·         This grace is effectual.

·         It caused him to worker harder than everyone.

·         In fact, he would not even say that it was he that worked, but instead the grace of God that was with him.

Let’s be clear. Effort can never produce grace.  Grace is not contingent upon my effort. However, my effort is a consequence of grace. Grace makes effort possible.

Why do I write this?

Well,  by nature we tend to spiritual passivity. You know we do.  If we are honest, we know it is an ongoing battle. If we have a view of grace that justifies our passivity, we are dead in the water. Any view of grace that leads to spiritual passivity needs to be challenged. We need a robust view of His grace which is “ not without effect”.  This is grace that transforms and empowers. It is  grace that releases and enables us to do what we could otherwise never do. This is God’s grace.  

Robb Powell