One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World by Tullian Tchividjian Read Free Book Online Page B

that you should get any blessing before you work for it.” 7
    Against this tumult of conditionality—punishment and reward, scorekeeping, you-get-what-you-deserve, big-L Law, little-l law, whatever name you choose—comes the second of God’s two words: His grace, His one-way love. Grace is the gift that has no strings attached. It is what makes the Good News so good, the once-and-for-all so that we may be free. Ironically, though, this amazing word of relief can be offensive to us.
    I’ll never forget hearing Dr. Doug Kelly (one of my theology professors in seminary) say in class, “If you want to make people mad, preach law. If you want to make them really, really mad, preach grace.” I didn’t know what he meant then. But I do now.
    The law offends us because it tells us what to do—and most of the time, we hate anyone telling us what to do. But ironically, grace offends us even more, because it tells us that there is nothing we can do, that everything has already been done. And if there is something we hate more than being told what to do, it’s being told that we can’t do anything, that we can’t earn anything—that we are helpless, weak, and needy.
    However much we hate the law, we are more afraid of grace. Because we are natural-born do-it-yourselfers, the vitriolic reaction to unconditional grace is understandable. Grace generates panic, because it wrestles both control and glory out of our hands. This means that the part of you that gets angry and upset and mean and defensive and slanderous and critical and skeptical and feisty when you hear about God’s one-way love is the very part of you that is still enslaved.
    The Gospel of grace announces that Jesus came to acquit the guilty. He came to judge and be judged in our place. Christ came to satisfy the deep accusation against us once and for all so that we can be free from the judgment of God, others, and ourselves. He came to relieve us of our endlessly exhausting efforts at trying to deal with judgment on our own. The Gospel declares that our guilt has been atoned for, the Law has been fulfilled. So we don’t need to live under the burden of trying to appease the judgment we feel; in Christ, the ultimate demand has been met, the deepest judgment has been satisfied. The internal voice that says, “Do this and live” gets drowned out by the external voice that says, “It is finished!”
    But I am getting ahead of myself.
    URBAN MEYER IS DEAD; LONG LIVE URBAN MEYER
    After Urban Meyer’s very public collapse, he took some time off. He went on a road trip with his son. He attended his daughter’s volleyball games. He made peace with his father. He even rediscovered the reason he got into football in the first place: love of the game. Eventually he took a new position as coach for Ohio State, and above his new desk he hung his contract—not the contract he signed with the university, but the one he signed with his wife and children—the one that prioritized his family and his health. An expression of love rather than judgment. It’s a beautiful story, and it’s not over.
    An article about Urban during his transition mentions a book he used to live by, written for business executives, called Change or Die . He has talked about the book in speeches, given away countless copies, invited the author to meet with his teams, but never did he realize the book described him down to a tee. The article recounts an episode that occurred in the car on the way to Cleveland, in which someone read Urban a passage from the book:
    “Why do people persist in their self-destructive behavior, ignoring the blatant fact that what they’ve been doing for many years hasn’t solved their problems? They think that they need to do it even more fervently or frequently, as if they were doing the right thing but simply had to try even harder.”
    Meyer’s voice changes, grows firmer, louder. “Blatant fact,” he says.
    He pauses. A fragmented idea orders itself in his