Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.
1 John 3:21–22
Throughout my academic training, I was repeatedly dismayed by the ongoing debate about the relationship between “faith” and “grace,” between our moral obligations and God’s abundant mercy. As I read the scriptures, I wondered whether I am “justified by works”1 or “justified by his grace as a gift.”2 And if redemption is a gift freely offered, then why did Jesus command his followers to lay down their lives and love their neighbors?
One day, my confusion finally dissipated while I watched God’s seeds of Life, Light, and Love move within me. The realization seemed to hit me all at once. “The seeds are God’s grace!” I exclaimed aloud, with the exuberance of a child. When I exercised my soul through works of faith, I was being simultaneously filled with grace. During the days and weeks that followed, I studied the miraculous dynamic between the movements of my soul and the Word flowing within me. I wanted to know, with precision, how my labor of faith and God’s gift of grace danced together.
I began by observing the soul’s luminous mist—where, through sustained attention and conscious effort, we cultivate freedom. Every time I engaged this soul aspect, I saw multiple seeds of Life enter my soul. As they did so, the mist of my soul expanded and became more luminous. In addition, my freely chosen thought or action became infused with these seeds, thereby carrying Life out into the world. Within and around me, my act of faith multiplied the Presence of Life.
Similarly, whenever I freely chose to turn away from selfish preoccupation, the seeds of Life and Light appeared. Coming forth from the pearly gateway, both types of God's seeds entered my soul, expanding and brightening both the mist and the golden light respectively. Next, I saw the seeds continue outward to the shadowy source of my selfishness, weaving together into a single stream of golden Light. Thus transformed, the Light accompanied my faithful action, making it a vehicle of God’s Light.
Finally, I studied the effect of offering love from my heart. As I reached out to another with my soul, I saw the fulness of God’s Word—Life, Light, and Love—flow into my soul, resulting in the expansion and illumination of all three aspects of the soul. Then, God’s seeds interwove with my thought, word, or deed, filling my act of faith with the fulness of God’s Word. As the seeds moved outward into the world, I could no longer distinguish one from another, for the entire mass was a glistening cloud of white that held me and the one I loved in God’s embrace of Love.
Grace is the Word
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. […] And from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.3
Like faith, grace is a challenging word to define. Luke, the author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, upheld Stephen as an exemplar of grace. Known as the first Christian martyr, Stephen performed “great wonders and signs among the people.”4 Those who were present at Stephen’s death said “his face was like the face of an angel,”5 and that he was “full of the Holy Spirit.”6 Luke seemed to believe that Stephen’s profound intimacy with God—evidenced by his miraculous abilities, his fearlessness, and his heavenly appearance—revealed God’s grace within him.
Later in the Book of Acts, a story about Peter offers another glimpse into Luke’s definition of grace. Peter was presiding over a council of early Christian leaders who were wondering what to do with converts who had not been circumcised according to the Jewish custom. After much debate, Peter stood up and declared,
Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.7
In this powerful speech, Peter affirmed that submission to the Mosaic Law was a yoke too heavy to bear. However, the grace that comes through Jesus made the path to God accessible to Gentile and Jew alike. Grace is portrayed as an alternative to the Law; it offers the same outcome, but it does so in a universally achievable manner.
James provides another essential piece of the conceptual puzzle of grace:
Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is in vain that the scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit which he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace; therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.8
In this fiery rebuke, James reveals that we who receive God’s grace experience two outcomes: the devil flees when we resist him and God reciprocates when we draw near. James called these outcomes “grace.”
From the three passages given above, we can craft a definition of grace. Stephen was “full of grace” because his words, deeds, and physical appearance were imbued with God. Peter proclaimed that we are “saved through grace” because Jesus made immediate access to the Word available to all mankind. And the extraordinary outcome of faithful action to which James testified is the presence of God moving in and through our souls. Grace is God’s Word.
In his Gospel prologue, John wrote that Jesus was “full of grace and truth,” meaning that Jesus was the fulness of God’s Word made flesh. Because of the Word poured out in Jesus’s blood, “we all received grace upon grace,” for we now have immediate and unlimited access to God within us.
Jesus’s death and resurrection linked faith and grace together in a reciprocal relationship. In a miracle that I simply cannot capture with language, our works of faith form a bridge between Creator and Creation. Whenever we exercise our souls in thought, word, or deed, God’s Presence is multiplied within and around us, and all Creation shares in the glory of God.
Forgiveness of Sins
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. […] If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. […] If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.9
Since the beginning of the Christian religion, forgiveness of sins through Jesus has been proclaimed as a central doctrine. Despite being well-versed in the theology of atonement, I never really knew what forgiveness meant. Listening to many sermons and lectures on the topic, I imagined God as a cosmic Santa Claus, keeping a list of my naughtiness and then, because of the gentle pleadings of Jesus, mercifully crossing out the sins I confessed. Though I knew that was obviously inaccurate, it was not until I spiritually observed the phenomenon of forgiveness that I finally understood its triumphant power.
To explain what I observed, I must first define that which we call “sin.” John offered this short definition: “sin is lawlessness.”10 The word “lawlessness” means, quite literally, “without the Law.” As I explained previously, the Mosaic Law was the Word of God, and Jewish men and women were able to lay up the Word in their hearts by obedience to the Law. On the basis of this connection between Law and Word, we can modify John’s definition to be: sin is Word-lessness, or any action that is absent of the Word.
John expanded on his definition of sin:
No one who abides in [God] sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. […] He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. […] No one born of God commits sin; for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother.11
Sin is the linguistic label used to describe the absence of God’s seeds. When a thought or action welcomes the seeds of God’s Word within us, then that act of faith empowers us toward becoming a child of God. When a thought or action is not accompanied by God’s seeds, then it is called a sin. In contrast to faithful action, sin gradually deforms us into “the children of the devil.” Nothing we do is spiritually neutral: either we are sowing the seeds of the Word or we are sowing the shadows of the Deep. A sin, therefore, is any thought, word, or deed that welcomes the Deep within us.
Not long after I came to understand the intricate subtleties of faith and grace, I felt a pain in my chest that seemed to be saying, “You have some work to do.” For decades, I had carelessly cultivated shadowy selfishness behind the guise of pathetic rationalizations.
I need this...
But she did that to me...
Look at what I've been through...
Oh, it doesn’t really matter if I do…I had whispered so many lies to myself. Now, with the eyes of my soul opened wide, I felt naked and ashamed. I could see the countless shadows that I had woven within me. It was time to pause my spiritual investigations and actually live what I was learning.
Every afternoon for a week, I looked back through my life—year by year, one relationship after another—and found the many shadows that had long held me captive. From the depths of my heart, I prayed that God would breathe the seeds of Light onto the weeds of darkness I had sown. As I did so, the golden Light encircled each and every shadow, holding them in a sphere of gold until they disappeared, as wax melts before the fire. By the end of that exhausting and victorious week, my eyes were red from weeping, and the shadows were no more.
When I had earlier imagined that forgiveness entailed God crossing items off my heavenly record whenever I prayed the right prayer, I could not have been more wrong. Forgiveness is a baptism of Light, whereby we are clothed with God. As we repent, consciously laying aside our selfish preoccupations, a river of golden water flows from the resplendent pearl within us and washes us clean. God is Light, and when God abides in us, darkness scatters and we are set free.
Love Perfected
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. […] God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment; because as he is, so are we in this world.12
As it was in the beginning, so it is with us. On the first day of creation, Light separated the waters of the Deep in order to create the golden foundation upon which something new could be made. Likewise, every day within the hearts of the faithful, Light overcomes the shadows of the Deep in preparation for that which ought to come next.
Love is the culmination. On the second day of creation, God spoke Love and created the sphere of Heaven within the waters of the Deep. God longs to speak Love in us as well. When we act with love toward others, reaching out to them with our souls, then Love enters through the doorway in our chests and abides in us. If we love without ceasing, day after day, year after year, then the shadows of the Deep will eventually vanish altogether and only Love will reign within us. Love will be perfected, and we will be “as he is.”
When Jesus told his followers, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,”13 I don’t think he was exaggerating. The labor of perfecting Love is a command for all who seek to live as Jesus did. However, it is impossible for our love alone to achieve perfection. Because Jesus voluntarily poured out his blood for us, our works of faith are infused with the presence of God. When we live in freedom, Life is breathed within us. When we lay aside selfishness, Light conquers the Deep. And when we love all that surrounds us, every day for the rest of our lives, we will become Love.
Grace For All Creation
My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.14
Grace was never meant to be an individual affair. The Tree of Life was not planted in my heart so that I alone could feast on its fruits. Rather, that fountain of abounding grace, which makes possible both the forgiveness of sins and the perfection of Love, was given to me for the sake of the whole world. From the fulness of the Word within Jesus’s blood, we have received grace upon grace, so that through us the entire Earth and all created beings may shine with the glory of God.
We are the ones created in the image of the Creator. Grace is ours so that we can give it to all men and women, animals and plants, mountains and oceans, and so on. Just as the first man was placed in the Garden to “keep” and to “cultivate,” so too are we to drive out the Deep and fill all Creation with the seeds of Love. And as we do so, we will grow God’s Garden “on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
James 2:24
Romans 3:24
John 1:14,16–17
Acts 6:8
Acts 6:15
Acts 7:55
Acts 15:7–11
James 4:4–8
1 John 1:5,7,9
1 John 3:4
1 John 3:6–10
1 John 4:11–12, 16–17
Matthew 5:48
1 John 2:1–2