Category: law

In an otherwise good sermon, the recent talk at a large evangelical church once again misuses the word “grace” in a way that undermines the very scripture on which the sermon was based, Galatians.
(Oct. 13, 2025, Own Your Freedom | BE FREE | Week 2, Flatirons Community Church)

The same problem has been discussed clearly in Evangelical Misuse of “Grace” and “Truth”. The reason this sermon merits attention is because it uses Galatians as its primary text.

Galatians is Paul’s letter that warns believers in Jesus to remain free from the law. It is the letter in which Paul is so concerned about those who require circumcision that he wishes they’d go ahead and castrate themselves. The reason he went to such great lengths is not because cutting off the foreskin is necessarily a bad thing but because circumcision was being used to replace the grace of God with one more act of human effort.

The verse the sermon uses is, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). It’s a wonderful verse, and, as the sermon illustrated, can be applied to our being set free from many things, including anger, fear, and lust. Of course, if one is set free from those things (or anything), one should not allow him- or herself to be enslaved once again (although we do from time to time).

Those sinful things, though, are not what Paul is addressing in Galatians. They are, in fact, the result of what he’s addressing, but not the root cause.

The root cause of all persistent sin is what Paul called the law—the moral demand on humans to be good (for starters) and acceptable to God (for the grand prize). However, as Paul points out in another letter, 1 Corinthians, the law is the strength of sin. The law puts demands on us. We attempt to meet those demands and instantly are relying on ourselves, discovering eventually that as we try to be good we become slaves to sin. If we happen to win the battles against common sins such as anger or lust, we fall prey to pride. We were never intended to be good by effort, only by faith.

When the sermon mentioned Galatians my first thought was, “Finally, correcting the false dichotomy between grace and truth!” Soon, however, the dichotomy gets repeated as this quote illustrates:

That that’s why Jesus came full of both grace and truth. Both of them. Grace and truth. Here’s what Jesus says is true and we’ve all fallen short of it, but it’s still true and it leads to freedom. Which is why we’re dependent on grace because we fall short of it all the time. But we continue to pursue truth. We don’t have grace so we can continue to sin. We have grace so we don’t have to worry about condemnation coming back online chaining us back up as we’re trying to align our lives with Jesus. We’re what Jesus says is true and we’re saved by grace when we when we fall short and we all do. (just after minute 33)

The dichotomy is that truth tells us what to do, while grace pardons us when we fall short. Both “truth” and “grace” are undermined by this dichotomy.

If “truth” means being told the right thing to do, any moralist or Buddhist could tell us more truth than we could master in a lifetime. Moses’ law did that just fine, and it never achieved true freedom or righteousness. When Jesus uses the word “truth,” he refers to the illumination of who he is as the complete savior. Truth, in Jesus’ mouth, sets us free. It’s not a hoop to jump through; it’s the revelation that Jesus has already become our wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30). When Jesus says he’s the truth, once again he’s using truth in the elevated sense, as the revelation of the way and the life (John 14:6).

If, as the sermon suggests, “grace” kicks in only after “we fall short,” then grace is no more than mercy. We all need mercy, and it’s forever ours in Christ. But grace is much more than mercy. It is the power of God forming Christ in us. Whereas the law puts demands on us (do this, be like that), grace makes promises (I give you my life and my name). Grace is not the cleanup crew after we lose our struggle with the law. Grace is the way out of the struggle altogether. Only when we accept the grace of God can we trust instead of try. The life of the little self trying to be good is over. The life of Christ in us has begun.

One could re-read the quote above, but replace “law” for every instance of “truth” and “mercy” for every instance of “grace.” That highlights both the fact that “law” and “mercy” are being described and that the sermon never explains how truth differs from and is superior to the law.

Any sermon that uses Galatians as the primary text should stress the fact that if we do anything in order to be right with God we nullify Christ’s death (Galatians 2:21). The church has never fully accepted what Paul stresses: we are dead to the law and alive to God. We don’t do things to be right with God; we appreciate what Jesus already did to make us right, to make us his brothers and sisters.

If what is written above seems too fine a distinction, just remember that the law makes demands and is the strength of sin; the truth sets us free (John 8:31-32). Mercy allows us to get fresh starts; grace keeps us going. Never pit “truth” against “grace,” as if truth is no more than a set of moral demands and grace is no more than forgiveness.

Certain evangelicals contrast grace and truth because they think grace is only mercy and truth is an updated version of the law.
The apostles John and Paul, however, teach that Grace is Jesus living through us, and Truth is the revelation of Jesus living through us.

Life and death distinctions for the follower of Jesus:

1. The fundamental definition for this post (and for life): the law makes us conscious of sin, while grace makes us conscious of the gift of Jesus’ redemption (forgiveness and deliverance… both being free gifts received by faith)
2. The Gospel of John clearly and happily differentiates between “law” and “truth”
   • When John writes, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” John makes it explicit: the law shows us we need grace because we always eventually fail to keep the law, and truth reveals to us that Jesus is the giver of grace
3. Christians, and perhaps especially evangelicals, being nervous about “cheap grace” (i.e. license to sin), redefine truth as the law (i.e. a moral standard)—and this redefinition essentially ends the truth about Jesus
4. This dilution of truth as merely a moral standard undermines the gospel badly
5. Truth reveals the complete redemption Jesus gives us through himself, forever freeing us from the law, which, by comparison, is just a shadow of the reality of trusting in Christ
6. Truth shifts all the emphasis toward the success and sufficiency of Jesus and away from our futile efforts at self-improvement

I do not know how widespread the grace-truth misunderstanding is among evangelicals.^[1] I do know two of the largest and, for many good reasons, most popular, evangelical churches in the Denver area have propagated a serious misreading of the Gospel of John’s “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1).

Little is more beautiful to me than that scripture. It replaces the bad news (the law) with the good news (grace and truth).

Before contrasting the bad news with the good, I present an example of the muddled version that some evangelicals circulate. If it doesn’t seem muddled at first, it might appear so when we look at the way the Gospel of John uses the word “truth.”

From the Aug 13, 2023 Red Rocks sermon, we hear the highly articulate Doug Wekenman:

And this is the question we are asking in this series: is it this or is it that?

For instance, when we hear two words like grace and truth, we cannot help but place them on a pendulum: is God more about grace or more about truth? But of course the answer to that question is “yes,” and as Christians we’re called to a double major. In other words, you don’t just get to swing the pendulum to the side of grace, because then you lower the standard of truth. And in the same way, you don’t get to swing the pendulum to the side of truth because then you crush people in the process by refusing to give them the same grace that you’re also going to need.

Similarly, we hear the following from Ben Foote (perhaps my favorite speaker at Flatirons Community Church) in an otherwise engaging sermon on May 1, 2022:

You’re trying to earn, earn, earn a passing grade from Principal Jesus. There are a ton of us, myself included, who we were sold the Principal Jesus in our churches growing up. He is all truth and he is no grace.
….
So yes, Jesus is grace. But when he is all grace and no truth, you get another cheap, superstore version of Jesus. This one is called “get-out-of-jail-free Jesus.^[2]

Both quotations rely on a false dichotomy between grace and truth, a cardinal error. And then they inadvertently suggest believers need their version of truth, which has been reduced to a moral standard (another name for the law). And this conflation is the very thing that outraged the apostle Paul, who said of those who muddle grace and law: “I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!”

From other sermons, I know Doug and Ben understand grace better than their false dichotomy between grace and truth suggests…so let’s put the castration tools away. But language is important, so I must persist in the analysis.

From Doug we hear that grace is balanced by truth. This reduces grace to mercy (i.e. forgiveness) and reduces truth to the law (i.e. rigor). From Ben we hear that truth makes us perform harder, which is exactly what the law does, and if you don’t believe me, read Romans 7, the apostolic statement on the law. Far from making us work harder, the truth sets us free because the truth is the truth of redemption. Ben also refers to getting a Jesus who is all grace but no truth, which is impossible if we are referring to divine grace. As with Doug, the false dichotomy reduces grace to mercy (get out of jail free), and truth to law (don’t abuse mercy).

Beneath the false dichotomy of grace or truth lurks the pernicious and perpetual bad news that humans need to try to be better. This emphasis on human effort is something the apostle Paul never recommends. In addition to distorting the meaning of “truth,” this line of thinking ignores the power of grace to fulfill the moral law in us, and this ignorance has kept Christians both unhappy and powerless for millennia.

The bad news: the law (the moral demands that Paul calls “the strength of sin”) rightly shows humans how they should live, even demands it, but in no way assists. The result? Sin increases. The more the person tries, the more the person relies on his or her self—the very self that was never intended to operate in isolation and independence from the loving provision of God.

Religion, including much of Christianity, groans beneath the joyless weight of the law. To the moral (and sometimes immoral) demands of religion, the person seems to rise to the occasion only to be blindsided by pride, or the person sinks to failure only to be depressed by guilt. Pride in one’s success, of course, leads to judging others. Failure, of course, makes one resolve to try harder next time, putting the person on a treadmill of anxiety, fear, and disappointment.

The good news: grace and truth. They are a pair not a polarity. They are two sides of the same coin, not two coins one must flip, as if to say, “Today do I follow grace or do I follow truth?” They are an and, not a but, a true identity not a false dichotomy.

“Grace” refers to the divine aid to do and be what we in our own strength and moral makeup could never achieve. By grace, we are healed, delivered, adopted, and righteous. Grace is divine life assisting us and can never “lower the standard of truth” as was suggested in the Red Rocks sermon.

“Truth,” as in Jesus’ “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14), is a revelation of Jesus, of his descent into hell and his exaltation at God’s right hand. Truth leads to revelations about our being in Christ, seated in Christ, animated by Christ. It’s the truth that provides the grace.

This truth that is infinitely superior to the law occurs again when Jesus says we must “worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4). He is juxtaposing “truth” with “the law”—one law says worship in Jerusalem, another law says worship on the mountain, but truth says worship in the spirit.

Truth, then, is the means to grace and the way to spirit. The more of Jesus’ truth we receive, the more grace we receive. The more of Jesus’ truth we receive, the more our worship is spiritual, not forced and fleshly. And it is faith, as always, that makes these things real to us.

So where do certain evangelicals go wrong? First they define grace as mercy (i.e. forgiveness). Then they worry that people will use forgiveness as a kind of fire insurance that gives them license to sin. To correct that, they redefine truth as… yes, you may have guessed it, the law. The license provided by grace-misunderstood-as-mercy is held in check by truth-redefined-as-law, browbeating us to behave correctly.

It’s amazing how historically the church in general and also in this case in particular resists full-fledged grace, which by definition includes freedom from the law. It’s amazing how the law keeps getting invited to enter through the back door. We simply cannot trust Jesus but instead want to replace him with our efforts and obedience.

Grace understood through the truth in Jesus establishes us in a new life. We are dead to sin (crucified with Christ), dead to the law (crucified with Christ), and alive to righteousness (risen, with Christ, and sitting in him in heavenly places). We are new people—new creations—and are motivated by the love of God working in our hearts, comforted by our Father in heaven. Sin, Paul says, will not be our master, because we are not under law but under grace. Note that Paul does not say the law will keep us from sin. On the contrary, whether we call it the law or truth, if it demands our compliance instead of promising our deliverance, it is the law and it will never give us the life that the grace and truth that comes through Jesus will give us.

How do we know we’ve moved away from the law and into grace and truth? We know it from the road signs that say we are on the right path: peace, love, and joy. I see the signs increasingly. When I used to confuse truth with law, I used to see only my struggling self.

 

____Footnotes for “Grace and Truth”____

^[1] Apparently, one the sources of this evangelical confusion is this book: The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance (2003). When one reads “balance” one is close to hearing that we have two elements that, if not kept in check, will tip the scale unfairly to one side or the other. Thus people think they must balance grace and the law (or truth, the new Evangelical name for the law), while in reality, they must die to the law altogether in order to walk in truth. The good news offers no balance, but instead promises a new identity that leaves behind the fallen, old, natural humanity and its insufficient remedies.

The description of the book, at it appears on amazon.com, reads: “Grace without truth deceives people, and ceases to be grace. Truth without grace crushes people, and ceases to be truth. Alcorn shows the reader how to show the world Jesus — offering grace instead of the world’s apathy and tolerance, offering truth instead of the world’s relativism and deception.” The “crush” of course echoes the sermon from Red Rocks that I cite. And the statement that truth counters “relativism” strongly insists that the author is using grace as a moral standard (i.e. as the law). If this second distinction isn’t clear to a reader, I strongly suggest reading the Book of Romans, particularly chapters 6 and 7.

^[2] There’s a bit of irony in Ben’s sermon. He is earnestly railing against the abuse of mercy (which he calls grace) and legalism (which he calls truth), yet earlier in the sermon he makes a strong pitch against being against things (“Because it’s easy to be against something” [28:30]). If he followed his own good advice, he’d stop focusing on the downside of bad-faith Christianity and focus instead on the gospel of grace: we have been crucified with Christ, buried with Christ, and risen with Christ, seated in heavenly places. Perhaps this gospel is not practical enough to be appreciated by the majority of the members—but how will they ever appreciate it if they don’t see it elevated to its proper place?

 

Publishing Info
First published Sept. 30, 2023. Last revision: June. 10, 2024.