14. True Grace vs. Enabling - The Difference

The Christian Statement

Grace is one of the most misunderstood words in the Christian vocabulary and one of the most frequently deployed in defense of positions that are not grace but its counterfeit.

Genuine grace is costly. It was paid for at the cross. It is freely given to the recipient but it was not freely produced. And it is not passive. Grace receives the prodigal and then restores him - but the restoration is a change, not an affirmation of the far country. Grace says to the adulteress "neither do I condemn you" and also "go and sin no more." Grace to Zacchaeus produces the immediate response of fourfold restitution. Genuine grace does not leave people where it finds them. It finds them where they are and moves them.

Enabling is the counterfeit of grace. It looks like grace because it accepts people where they are. It differs from grace because it leaves them there. It does not cost anything to the giver - there is no cross in enabling, only the avoidance of the discomfort of allowing consequences to land. And it does not transform the receiver - because transformation requires the poverty of spirit that enabling prevents.

Paul addresses this in Romans 6:1-2 with characteristic directness:

"What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?"

-- Romans 6:1-2 (NET)

The genuine grace that abounds where sin abounds is not a license for continued sin. It is the power to leave it. The community that deploys grace language to avoid the discomfort of addressing sin has not understood grace. It has understood comfort.

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