The Grace that Awakens

By Bill Ury

A beloved mentor of mine would shake up a room when he would talk about the free grace of God and the sinner’s response by saying, “God has a problem!” He would go on to discuss the fact that Jesus would not misuse his love to bribe us or force us to recognize or accept him. How then could we come to any spiritual perception without losing our freedom? Salvation is always pure gift and yet he will not save us without ourselves. How is this paradox dealt with to preserve both God’s sovereignty and a real human responsiveness? The answer begins with prevenient grace.

It changes everything when grace is viewed as the life of God. Grace is much more than an attitude or disposition. Salvation is only possible through the life-giving power of the God of grace. Grace originates in the heart of the Holy One who is Love. This powerful self-giving permeates all of our human existence, even when we have refused it. Our gracious God never forces any one to receive him. But he always extends life to our death, light to our darkness.

Our Wesleyan tradition has agreed with the interpretation of sin as originating in Adam and which has affected all of humanity (Romans 5:12). The withering, yet indisputable, conclusion is that we are deprived of the presence of God and totally depraved. This devastating rejection of God touches every area of our lives — body, spirit, will, and mind. John Wesley described our fallen nature as the loss of our Breath, the Spirit. Without the Breath of God, we are devoid of Life. Yet, he comes to dry bones and offers revivifying power. (Wesley, “The Circumcision of the Heart”). Human nature alone, without grace, is a dead nature. Grace issues from the heart of God to offer himself to our self-imposed destruction. He enters every place of our blindness with light. The Wesleys used the phrase, “Wake up, sleeper” to indicate the indefatigable love of God for us in our darkened and deadly state (Ephesians 5:14).

Paul calls human nature apart from saving grace the “natural man” (I Corinthians  2:14). Our nature apart from the Spirit’s presence and work in our hearts is spiritually lifeless. The normal emphasis on John 3:16 often misses what must come before we believe, the eternal love of God and the sending of the Son decided before the foundation of the world. This means that no one is totally “natural.” In our benighted state we are never left abandoned by God, without the choice to either receive him or reject him. Wesley compared us to an unborn child, surrounded by life yet without perception of it (Wesley’s sermon, “The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God”).

So, grace is more than merely divine concern. It is the dynamic life-giving essence of our Creator and Redeemer who will not let us go. The Church has struggled to explain how the grace of God intercepts lifeless hearts without stacking the deck. Our Savior will not save us against our will. So how does he enable spiritually blind and dead persons a real offer of conviction, confession, and new birth?  All of us need to be awakened, given spiritual sight in order to be able to respond to the self-offering of God. This spiritual capacity initiated and enabled by the Holy Spirit brings enough light to an unredeemed person so that any response to grace is truly free (see Herbert McGonigle’s volume, Sufficient Saving Grace, 2001).

Some have said that our wills are bound and our fallenness so severe that only sovereign irresistible grace is the solution. In this view, our sinfulness is entrenched to such a level that only supernatural determination and selection of a few for salvation makes sense. The intensity of total depravity requires that salvation only works one way. They advocate “monergism” (monos ‘one’ + ergon ‘works’) a term to assure that God alone saves without sinful human involvement. On reflection, this view is not totally wrong. For every cell, breath, or thought originates and is sustained by the providential goodness of God. No life, despite its spiritual destruction, is totally divorced from grace. Unless he gives himself, life is impossible.

The Wesleyan tradition rejects the perspective that God alone works in salvation because it is impersonal. As creatures made in the image of God who are enabled to respond as persons before the Fall, we assert that true freedom is central to what it means to be a person. While never delimiting the freedom of God to graciously offer himself we recognize at every point God coming to each person in self-giving love.

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis once reflected that if we were truly totally depraved, we would not know it. God is so good to us that even though we have all gone into a far country he gifts us with the possibility of coming to ourselves. Everything he ever offers enables personal relationship. The concept of his undeserved engagement with our fallen nature has been called, “synergism” (sun ‘together’ + ergon ‘works’).  We never receive his good grace as inert substances, like rocks. He desires to recreate us into the full image in which we were made. What we de-personalized he can re-personalize. The absolute bondage of sin is countered by the personal love of God who bestows a liberating grace so that we might regain our “native freedom” (Wesley, “One Thing Needful”).

That is why the Bible is full of pictures of grace impacting our stony hearts: light in our darkness, water pouring over our dust, life for our death.  No matter how deep our pit, our Savior has gone deeper (Psalms 139:1-12). That astounding fact is brilliantly revealed in the term, “prevenient” (pre ‘before’ + venire ‘come’) grace. Our salvation from beginning to end is sustained by God. At no point do we ever command or earn his life in us. Out of his overwhelming love he gives grace to enable the first inkling of response.

At this point many have said “See, grace is irresistible!” Our response is yes. He does offer grace to us whether we know it or not. But salvation is impossible without a personal reception of saving grace. This “coming-before” grace initiates the possibility of relationship without ever coercing our response. Eternal love, God’s essential nature, pours over our lives in countless ways. He gives, calls, invites, and provides without manipulating one false response.

So how does the Scripture reveal to us this grace which precedes?

Recognition of God in creation – Even though our corrupt lives threaten to keep the barriers up in defiance to our Maker, we are inextricably surrounded by the majesty of Creation. The universe reveals the grandeur of his character traits: beauty, order and goodness (Psalms 145:9; 19:1, Romans 1:19-20, James 1:17). The cosmos is a brilliant portrayal of objective grace. All of us are under the selfless avalanche of loving invitation to know the One who made the stars and formed us for himself.

Conscience – The Creator who spoke the universe into being did so in order that we might have conversation with him. From the glory of the galaxies, God’s gracious self-revelation comes to each of us in the form of our conscience. Each of us has an inner moral capacity when something wrong occurs (Matthew 7:11, Romans 2:15-16). The most anarchic and violent gangs have strict codes for loyalty. He has made us with an indelible sense of the wrongness of lying, abuse, and disrespect. To be immoral is not to be amoral. We are not so depraved that everything goes. Those standards in our conscience point to the Righteous One who made us for righteousness.

Freedom of the Will – To be a person entails freedom. I heard a theologian interviewed who irritably asked why Wesleyans were, as he put it, so in love with freedom. I retorted out loud, because we are created as persons. Without freedom of the will, we are not whole. Sin has shackled our wills to sin. God’s undergirding grace ensures freedom of responsiveness to him. A measure of self-determination is his continued gift (Ezekiel 18:20). Thus, we are given the capacity to hear and respond to him. Scripture itself is proof that God is speaking and empowers us to be able to listen, understand and apply his truth. The Gospel of grace is always personally and restoratively freeing.

Conviction and Believing – Conviction of sin without the preceding grace of the Word who whispers his holiness and mercy does not originate in us. So, the Knower of our hearts has carefully retained a sense of our need for him. Only a fool comes to an insurmountable crisis and refuses to call out to God. Every Christian can testify to a time when they were dead in sin and a glimmer of hope came into their purview. It was a real choice to trust Christ. The precursory working of grace makes turning to and depending on Jesus possible (Romans 2:4, Acts 5:31, Ephesians 2:8-9, 2 Timothy 2:25-26). At every point of our lives his grace-life enables, prepares, strengthens, and bears us.

The Drawing of the Trinity’s Self-Giving – Wesleyanism affirms both the sovereign freedom of God’s self-bestowing grace and the enabled and unforced response of persons made in the image of God. Each person of the Trinity is involved in this marvelous dynamic of relational restoration. The Father is “drawing all humanity” to himself (John 6:44, 65). The Son is calling and drawing to himself all who would be saved (John 10:3, 12:32, 15:5). The Spirit enables every aspect of grace before salvation (John 16:8-9).

The Light of God – John describes this prevenient grace in Jesus as “the true light that gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). John Wesley spoke of “the first dawning of grace in the soul” (Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation”). The Love in God seeks to awaken all by the revealed light needed to make possible the recognition that they are made for Another. But that illumination is only the precursor to meeting and receiving the One who is the Light of the World (John 8:12, 9:5). This light luminates both radical sinner and blind, self-righteously secure religionist who is “asleep in darkness” as a “horrid light” and “awful providence” which shakes one out of sleep. This grace “touches the heart” enabling the “the eyes of understanding to be opened” (“The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption).

The apostles affirmed that God “has not left himself without a witness” (Acts 14:17). He is always there before we are. Every conversation, act of ministry or service in Christ’s name is established, in what Dr. Dennis Kinlaw called, “the law of the second witness” (Preaching in the Spirit). Prevenient grace assures us that the Holy Spirit is working in every person’s heart at all times. What joyful freedom it brings to know that the God who is Love precedes, pervades, enables, draws, awakens, convicts, and saves each of us. He asks us to join his prevenient self-bestowal in offering witness to his personalizing grace in every person’s life.

Finally, the dynamic of grace as God’s self-giving to us means that he has a goal. Prevenient grace has a trajectory which comprises the way of salvation. (Wesley, “Awake, Thou That Sleepest.” Dr. Ken Collins succinctly articulates the distinctiveness of the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace in “Introduction to a Wesleyan Theological Orientation” in Wesley One Volume Commentary).

In the hymn “And Can It Be, That I Should Gain,” Charles Wesley eloquently described this telos or goal-orientation of the Holy One. In the description of a grace which invades our prison-like estate he wrote, “Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night” which is met with grace-filled enabling glory, “Thine eye diffused a quickening ray” and the resultant awakening, “I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.” But note, this must be followed with “I rose, went forth and followed Thee.” Not only alive but clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

There is in the heart of God the unrelenting desire for each of us to be free of the bondage of sin. But prevenient grace points to much more. He wants us to become his children who bear a strong family likeness to him. Grace is not a transaction or a substance. It is the life of the Holy One which is not satisfied until the one who wholly trusts him is made like him in holiness of heart and life.

Bill Ury was raised in Taiwan, the son of United Methodist missionaries. He taught Systematic and Historical Theology at Wesley Biblical Seminary for 24 years. Dr. Ury and his wife, the Rev. Diane Ury, are the National Ambassadors of Holiness for the Salvation Army. Dr. Ury’s books include: Trinitarian Personhood, The Bearer: Forgiveness from the Heart, Christology as Theology, and has co-written with Diane, Conversations on Holiness.