Cracked by Grace
An exclusive early look at my forthcoming book, Agents of Grace
My latest book, Agents of Grace, releases on May 9th. Here is an excerpt exclusive to my One Little Word subscribers. You can pre-order here.
I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time but put it off for various reasons until unforeseen events finally propelled me: I was let go, in a very public way, from a position at a Christian ministry. It was a painful time, one that I wish hadn’t splashed across the pages of leading newspapers and websites and dominated social media for a few weeks. When, so many years ago, I walked a down dusty aisle at summer camp to commit my life to ministry, I didn’t dream that my calling to follow Jesus would include being a breaking story in the New York Times. But there it was.
This experience and the last few years of rough-and-tumble conflicts among Christians have me thinking about Jesus’ command to love one another. This book is not a juicy tell-all. It’s not a revenge memoir. It’s a plea from one Christian to another that we take seriously the words of Scripture that urge us to cling to what unites us as God’s people rather than focus on what divides us.
In my office is a photo frame, given to me by my wife last Father’s Day. It contains the lyrics to the hymn “Amazing Grace,” written by the former slave trader John Newton. This is the heart of our faith: amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. The frame is cracked at one end, a casualty of a cross-country move from Tennessee to Texas. And yet cracked grace is an apt metaphor for Christians, isn’t it? We bear the message of good news, but we, the messengers, the vessels that bear this message, are, well, a bit cracked. “Fragile clay jars” (2 Cor. 4:7 NLT) is the way the apostle Paul describes us.
You’ll need to know, up front, that I’m hopelessly in love with the church. And when I say the church, I’m talking not only about the worldwide communion of saints in heaven and on earth, made up of every nation, tribe, and tongue but also about the local church. The addresses and buildings have changed for me over the years, from Illinois to Tennessee to Texas to whatever church I happen to be visiting to speak. I’ve been walking up the aisles, sitting in cramped pews, belting out verses of hymns since the moment I could form words. Despite the church’s visible cracks, the sins and failures within her walls, and even with four and a half decades of church already in me, I still can’t wait for Sunday.
I think it’s appropriate, before we talk about what it means to love as Jesus loved, before we talk about living as agents of grace in a fractured world, before we challenge ourselves to pursue unity among followers of Christ, that you get to know me a little bit. My story is one of God’s sovereignty and grace. When I reflect on my life, I can’t help but see the finger of God writing my life’s story before I was born. That story begins in 1971 in Chicago, before I was born. My father, abandoned by his alcoholic father and raised by an equally troubled stepfather, only ever knew dysfunction. At fourteen he got himself up early to work at a bakery, giving his mother every penny so she could supplement her earnings as a crossing guard and whatever her new husband, a mailman, would hand over after his gambling at the race track.
But in the midst of this mess, a message of hope arrived, delivered by a captivating, fiery, silver-tongued preacher named Billy Graham. He shared a simple gospel for a world troubled by Vietnam, race riots, and Watergate. Graham’s message was sweeping the globe, and it swept right into a family on a trajectory toward failure. In 1971, at the Billy Graham Crusade at the McCormick Center in Chicago, Dad walked forward with his mother. He found Jesus. Or rather, Jesus found him.
A few years ago, when Graham died, I looked up on YouTube the sermon Graham gave the night my dad went forward. I sat there, watching it on my phone, tears streaming down my face as I imagined my father, almost a half-century earlier, hearing that good news and finding salvation in Christ. On my office wall is a framed black-and-white image of the crowd from that night, a gift from a friend at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Somewhere out there, among those throngs of people, is my father.
Dad, in those early days, was a Jesus freak, so intoxicated by his newfound faith. He met my mother, a Jewish girl also swept up in the Jesus movement, and they got married. Her grandparents, my great-grandparents, had emigrated to America at the turn of the twentieth century, escaping the pogroms in Poland and Russia. My grandfather, a tank commander in World War II, was a charter member of what we now call the Greatest Generation, enduring the Great Depression and serving his country when summoned to war against fascism. He and my grandmother raised their children on Chicago’s North Shore.
Mom and Dad were not exactly what you would call a match: an outspoken new convert and a shy Jewish girl. If dating apps existed in the early 1970s, both would have swiped right and I wouldn’t exist. But my mother was charmed by Dad’s earthy authenticity and found her spiritual questions answered by the same fresh gospel Dad wore on his sleeve in those days. Her conversion to Christianity was a mini scandal, as was her marriage to my father. But over time, Dad’s steady faithfulness won over my grandparents, who professed faith in Christ before they passed away in the early 2000s.
My parents joined the first church they ever found, a fledgling independent Baptist church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago led by a charismatic young pastor from Kentucky. With the zeal of first-generation converts, they imbibed everything they heard. They were pretty strict. We had no TV in our home, listened only to certain kinds of Christian music, and never visited a movie theater. I had to hide my Amy Grant CDs.
So this is where you’d expect me to say that I escaped all of this, deconstructing the ridiculous beliefs of my youth. But that is not my story. I still love those old pews, the hymns that speak of God’s matchless grace, the gospel word that reminds me of God’s love on my worst days. I may not be as strict as my parents were in those early days—Southern Baptists wear jeans, listen to good music, and some of us even dance—but I’m thankful for the things I learned as a child that stuck: the habit of attending church every week, seeing my father open his Bible every morning, and the way the gospel fills the cracks in my soul with grace. Billy Graham brought my parents to Jesus, and my parents brought me to Jesus. I’m thankful for God’s steady hand guiding me along on a journey I couldn’t have planned myself.
Today I’m a father, trying my best, with my wife, to point our children to the same gospel that changed Dad’s life so many decades ago and is still changing mine. I’m a pastor, an author, and a professor. But most important, I’m a member of this wonderful yet messy family that stretches around the globe and into the great chorus in heaven, the worldwide body of Christ.
I’ve seen up close the good, the bad, and the ugly of our movement. I’ve endured backstage divas. I’ve been fired unjustly. I’ve been attacked by Christians online. Still, the people of God are my people, and the church is my home, Sunday after Sunday, year after year. The church is the place where I often stumble in, weary, squeezed by the pressures of life, uncertain of the future, and it is where I keep hearing God speak to me from his Word, where timeless lyrics keep healing my heart, and where the beauty of Christian orthodoxy keeps anchoring my soul.
The last few years have seen so much conflict among believers, and the cultural fault lines run through families and churches and communities. Perhaps you have fresh pain from a wound inflicted by a brother or sister in Christ. Perhaps you are increasingly cynical about the scandals, the controversies, and the tribalism of many Christians. Or maybe you know that you are supposed to love your fellow believers, but you wonder how it’s possible to love those particular Christians who annoy you so much. Perhaps you are tired of the fighting and hope to be a bridge builder among the people of God. Perhaps, like me, you wonder how we can live out the lyrics of that hymn, how we can be agents of grace when we are, like the frame in my office, so cracked.
I’m writing to say that God is still at work in the world and to say that Christian love and spiritual unity is still worth pursuing. While I’ve been hurt by Christians, I’ve also been immensely blessed by Christians. It has been my brothers and sisters who have been there for me in my pain: single mothers who made meals when my wife endured a serious illness; small-group leaders who gave me money when I was suddenly unemployed and scared; a pastor who called and preached the Word of God to me when I was in despair. I’ve been blessed by wise matriarchs with arthritic knees who called down spiritual fire from heaven on my behalf when I was weak. I’ve been healed by friends who left everything and came to my side when I needed hope.
Sure, there have been some who, in moments of despair, sounded like the negative cast who surrounded Job, but so many more have been like the friends of David, supporting, encouraging, and strengthening me in moments of deepest need. Perhaps this is your experience as well.
It is Christians who taught me to serve and sacrifice, and it is in church where I first learned that because of Jesus’ resurrection, all that is broken will be made new again. It is in church that I first understood that the most vulnerable among us—babies and refugees and orphans—have full dignity from their creator. It is in church that I have been reminded, over and over, that I am part of a forever family, this wild and messy gathering of flawed humans from every nation, tribe, and tongue throughout history.
If we are not careful, if our perception of the church is formed only by bad headlines, we will let the darkness overshadow the slivers of light, the pinpricks of hope. We will overlook the way the Spirit of God is moving in the world through ordinary people.
We shouldn’t paper over scandals and corruption as though they didn’t happen. Paul didn’t spare the church at Corinth. The book of Revelation didn’t spare those seven churches. I weep over the stories of people wounded by those who claim the name of Christ, by the sheep spiritually devoured by wolves. I see why, for too many, the church has been a place of pain.
Yet the same Spirit who has awakened every generation since Pentecost, who has breathed gospel fire through sinners around the globe, is doing his work in this age. Jesus declared that the church is unlike other movements or organizations, which fade and fall through history. “I will build my church,” the man from Nazareth says, “and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).
Perhaps this is why the tears flow when I hear the lyrics that beckon me back to the cross: “I hear the Savior say, ‘Thy strength indeed is small, child of weakness, watch and pray, find in me thine all in all.’” I remain in the church not because I refuse to see its many obvious flaws. I am here simply because I have nowhere else to go. I still believe Jesus Christ walked out of that borrowed tomb and is at work transforming the hearts of sinful people.
This one who rose from the grave still anguishes in love over his bride, including all those people we find too annoying to love. Jesus calls them my brothers and my sisters, and so must I. For better or for worse, these are my people.
Consider this book a family letter to remind us what we are called to be. We live in an age of disunity, with perverse incentives to turn on each other. But the Bible calls us to love each other in such a way as to arouse the attention of those who do not follow Jesus. Unity in the body of Christ is not just a nice thing if we get do it. Unity is a command, a way of life, a practice.
I’ve divided this book into two sections—one about worthy virtues and one about worthy fights—to reflect the tension of living as a faithful Christian. We are called both to love with an otherworldly love and to courageously fight for truth. What does love require? What does unity look like? How can we get along with believers with whom we disagree? Which conflicts with fellow Christians are worth engaging and which are frivolous? How do we process the pain inflicted on us by other believers? These are all questions I hope to address from Scripture.
My prayer is for God’s Spirit to blow a fresh wind across our divides, that as we weep over the ways Christians bite and devour (Gal. 5:15), we might commit ourselves to Jesus’ call to love one another.