I’ve been pretty sleepy this week. One sick little bug after another has bit these kiddos over a short stretch of time and every mommy everywhere feels that pang of empathy. Sleep has fled to some dark corridor of our hall and I’ve yet to find it again. It appears that I may be able to come up for air after the youngest recovers. I’ve had the kind of sleep deprivation (yeah, there are different kinds) that causes you to struggle to coherently string together a sentence; the type that leaves you staring into the eyes of someone you were just talking to, but now for the life of you, you can’t remember why or about what. And who are they again? Oh, yeah… Just thought I’d let you into the walls of this sweet home a bit, you know? Because we all live these for real lives despite the gloss of facebook walls and flawless pinterest boards. The real us is behind it all somewhere. So, here she is…just keepin’ it real as my bestie would say… just sincerely thankful, like with every fiber of my being, that I get to live of Christ’s grace and truth.

You mightn’t have noticed but our whole culture is a muck over this issue. We want to wallow in grace, and that just might be the best thing, but the culture shirks truth… And the thing is there’s just no such thing as grace without truth.

There is no such thing as grace without truth.

There is grace and truth. And if you’re reading the same God-breathed text I’m reading, it seems pretty clear that our Lord doesn’t want us to forget that. Why? Why at the start of nearly every epistle (letter) in the New Testament do we hear the word GRACE and elsewhere in the Gospels, these echoes of words that just drip beauty… grace and truth…. The Holy Spirit spoke through men and uttered grace over God’s people at the start of most epistles and then followed it up with page after page of rich, trustworthy truth you can live on. Yeah, you really can live on truth, because Truth is only always ever a person, Jesus. You can live on Him. 

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. John 1:17

It is through Jesus Christ that we have opportunity to live on the grace of God and the truth of God. And between the Beloved Disciple, the Apostle John and Paul’s protege Titus we are assured that Jesus Christ is both the grace of God and the truth of God. And actually John is all about this. See John 1:14, 1:17, 2 Jon 1:3.

So, what does this have to do with anything? It has everything to do with everything. Grace and truth is how a sinner…how a slave to homosexuality, a slave to self, a slave to material things, a slave to people’s affirmation, a slave to (you name the sin) gets FREE. I mean really free! Grace and truth has come for us all, pursuing us relentlessly, not delighting in the death of anyone, and that’s what sin is, death. And Jesus is everything sin is not, life. Life is after us, let us not love our own selves and pleasures to death, for He died to set us free from the useless, unfruitful, worthless ways that were passed down to us even from the most well-meaning parents. He died to set our children free from the nature they inherited from us.

No love is as pure, as constant, as beautiful as Christ’s.

Open your heart and receive. Drink deeply of His rest. We really can cease striving, we can rest in His work. In His life, for if we are His our life is hidden in Him. Hiding your life in Jesus is how anyone ever escapes slavery… This is how we escape living a life where we’re just working so hard to be good enough at everything, to be a good person (there’s no such thing). No, I’m not talking about sleep deprivation that comes from simply having kids (smile). I’m talking about a different kind, one that comes from being deprived of the rest that comes from God (see Hebrews chapter 4)…when you’re trying to free yourself from your own sin. Working so tirelessly to achieve….to feel as though you’re ok, like you’re really getting somewhere in life, as though you’re free. The truth is apart from Jesus we’re just all worn out weary, weary from ourselves, from our sin and without rest. The only way you get real rest is to rest in Jesus work…to let your life be found in His (Colossians chapter 3). It doesn’t matter what the sin bent is, Jesus is the cure.