As promised, today Lore Ferguson, over at Sayable posted my second guest post on her blog, as she is on a sabbatical. My first post went up yesterday. Originally, Lore had asked me to write a post on grace. Ironically, this was the first post I wrote for her (almost an anti-grace article–even thought it’s really not). Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Leave comments and, like I said yesterday, follow her blog. You won’t regret it. Here’s a preview of today’s post:

I grew up in a pretty stereotypical Evangelical setting, which led to a pretty stereotypical back-and-forth between guilt and self-righteousness. That is, until I heard the Gospel of radical Grace.

Many of us have this same story, where it has been so healing to hear that how God relates to us is not, in fact, based on our performance. Instead, everything necessary for God to be pleased with us has been accomplished on our behalf by his Son.

And so, in response to this, we fall in love with God’s Grace. We pray for it, long for it, and cry for it. We read books about it, write about it, and blog about it (I even did a five-part series on it myself). We try and speak it into others’ lives while trying to figure out why we don’t apply it to our own. We joyfully build our relationship with God on the glorious foundation of His Grace. It is fundamental, primary, and essential.

In short: we love Grace.

Imagine my surprise, then, as I fell in love with liturgy and forms of worship that were centuries-old, to begin noticing the utter lack of “grace” from the prayers and worship of the earliest saints.

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