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Editors’ note: 

This article is an excerpt from Chaos and Grace: Discovering the Liberating Power of the Holy Spirit (Baker).

The day started normally enough. Peter and John were walking to the temple to pray. This is apparently something they did every day, the type of thing religious people from time immemorial have done. Peter and John then stepped through the Beautiful Gate to enter the temple area and passed a few beggars, as they did every day. And most of these beggars, either by sign or word, pleaded for some money.

This is a reasonable thing for a beggar to do. And the reasonable expectation is that religious people will feel compassion and toss the beggar a few coins. This is something religious people have done from time immemorial.

We don’t know what Peter and John usually did in this situation. One might suppose, like us, they sometimes ignored the beggars, and sometimes gave up some spare change. But this time, Peter sensed a shift in the wind, the arrival of the Spirit, which signaled that some holy chaos was about to be unleashed.

He told the beggar he had no money, but he could give him this: “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”

One can easily imagine a snicker coming from bystanders. Or maybe the lame man sarcastically thinking, Right. How about just a few coins, mister?

Peter acts as if what he said is perfectly sensible, and he grabs the man’s hand and pulls him up off the ground. The man’s feet and ankles “were made strong” in the very act of Peter pulling him up, so that the man, halfway up, now leaps up, and walks with Peter and John into the temple.

This becomes no ordinary prayer meeting: the man is alternately “walking and leaping and praising God” and clinging to Peter and John. Pandemonium broke out as people, who watched the man “walking and praising God,” now “were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened.” So “utterly astounded” were they, they also “ran together” with Peter, John, and the healed man to Solomon’s Portico.

It was another one of those moments when the Holy Spirit turned reasonable religion—-with its mundane expectations for piety and morality—-into something extraordinary.

Miraculous Religion

We prefer reasonable religion. Reasonable religion has taught us to pray and give alms. Miracles are possible, we formally acknowledge, but then again, we don’t like to be disappointed. So our prayers are not so much for divine and miraculous healing but for wisdom for doctors and nurses. Or we just raise money to build clinics.

We do this, of course, because miraculous religion has deservedly gotten a bad name. It may be true that the holy chaos of the Spirit made some miracle possible. Someone prayed for another who was healed, and before you know it, some preacher is exhorting people to claim their miracle. They start pointing to all those verses that seem to imply that the only thing stopping us from more miracles is lack of faith. They open crusades and tell people to “expect a miracle,” acting as if the whole business were under our control. That leads inevitably to disappointment by sufferers, and the discovery of not a few charlatans. So we run the faith healers out of church, and get control of things again.

But notice: there’s not much difference between reasonable religion and miraculous religion: both are attempts to bring the unexpected work of the Spirit under our control. In the one case, we’ve made healing the province of our doing—-train up doctors and nurses and build clinics. And in the other case, we’ve made healing the province of our attitudes—-have more faith!

If we try to tame miracles, even more so do we try to tame grace. Reasonable religion has taught us not to take grace too seriously. We give a few alms of moralism to silence the desperate cries of the guilty and get on with our prayer meetings. If we were to stop and give people Jesus Christ himself—-well, you never know who would start showing up at church, maybe a bunch of crippled human beings. Before you know it, they’ll be on the church membership roles, and then they’ll get nominated for the church board. My gosh, who knows what policies they might promote? Or what type of people they’ll attract. Pretty soon we’ll have to open a homeless shelter, and start ministering to prostitutes and drug addicts.

In fact, when a church starts attracting such people, you can be sure that holy chaos is at work. Most churches are happy with making people a little better, tossing a few alms of spirituality at sinners. The Holy Spirit comes along and announces that the church’s business is helping the lame walk and the blind to see and to bring life to the dead.

Judgmental About Grace

To be sure, some churches are known for proclaiming grace. But unfortunately for some, grace has become a mere principle. You can tell it’s become such when they start using grace to bludgeon people who don’t talk about grace the way they do. Some people can get awfully judgmental about grace.  Again, notice what is happening. If reasonable religion tries to control grace and rein it in with moralism, the religion of grace tries to control by means of a principle. It justifies all behavior by pulling out the grace card and waving it—-and condemning people who don’t. It is a principle that we control, and it is this principle that orders our life.

But biblical grace is not a principle. You cannot have a relationship with a principle. You cannot disappoint a principle. You cannot be forgiven by a principle. You cannot love a principle. You are in control of principle from start to finish.

Grace is first and foremost a merciful gift of a loving God. This gift is very personal, offered to us each and every time we fail to live as the very personal God has called us to live. Grace is the offer of a very personal forgiveness by a loving heavenly Father who cares deeply about everything we do.

And to receive this grace is to know freedom from the colorless expectations of a merely moral life, with its predictable and dreary consequences, and to know instead the extraordinary liberty of the children of God.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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