Grace Misused and Abused

by William MacDonald

Like every other good thing, grace can be abused. Fire and water can be great blessings, but they can be used wrongly. People can twist the sovereignty of God to teach fatalism: what is going to be is going to be, and there's nothing you can do about it. The doctrine of election is sometimes perverted to suggest that evangelizing is a waste of time and effort.

    Sad to say, it is possible to use the grace of God as an excuse for careless living, for believers to use their freedom as a pretext for launching into all kinds of indulgence. This does not mean that the doctrine is faulty. It simply means that some people are desperate to justify ungodly behavior, and if they can do it by using Scripture, so much the better, or so they think.

    It is true that believers are not under law but under grace. But that does not mean that they have a right to be lawless. They are not under the law, with all the penalty and condemnation that is involved. But they are under law to Christ, that is, they are bound to Christ by cords of love and constrained to do things that are pleasing in His sight. This relationship is well expressed in the verse:

Need I that a law should bind me

Captive unto Thee?

Captive is my heart, rejoicing

Never to be free.

     It is true that when the Lord makes a person free, that person is free indeed. But that does not mean freedom to sin. Liberty is not license. A pilot is free to explore the skies, but he'd better follow the assigned flight path if he wants to reach his destination safely. Paul taught the Galatians (and all believers), "For you, brethren, have been called to liberty, only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh..."

    It has well been said, "Freedom from the law means freedom from sin's bondage and freedom from the law's penalty, not freedom from moral restraint. Grace does not mean we have permission to do as we please, it means we have the power to do what pleases God. The mere suggestion that God's grace gives us license to sin is self-contradictory, for the very purpose of grace is to free us from sin. How can we who are the recipients of grace continue in sin?

    Why do people use grace as a pretext for careless living? It may be that they are not truly saved. Think of the religious people who celebrate Mardi Gras. They engage in drunkenness and licentiousness right up to Tuesday night, planning to see forgiveness on Ash Wednesday and hopefully to abstain from those sins during Lent.

    It may be that others, though believers, are ignorant of the true doctrine of grace. It may be that they don't understand the truth of God's holiness. Or perhaps their idea of sin is too shallow. A person can be saved and yet poorly taught.

    It may be a willful ignorance on the part of some. They know what is required of them, but they are out of fellowship with the Lord. They are in a backslidden condition and are confident that God will overlook their "little" sins, their so-called "peccadillos."

    Or again, it may be that they are apostates. Jude speaks of these unbelievers as "ungodly men, who turn the grace of God into licentiousness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ".

from the book Now That Is Amazing Grace, pages 73-75