For six years the Okonkwo family bought their water from tankers. Every Thursday, sometimes twice a week in the dry season, the big truck would rumble up their street in Ajah, and Mr Okonkwo would stand at the gate negotiating the price while the driver unrolled a long hose into the overhead tank. The water lasted a few days if everyone was careful. Then the tap would begin to cough and splutter, the children would be told to take bucket baths, and the household would wait anxiously for the next delivery. When fuel prices rose, the tanker prices rose with them. When the driver did not come, the house simply went dry.
The family’s standard never changed. They needed clean water every day for cooking, washing, bathing and drinking. That was not negotiable. The problem was the source. No matter how hard they tried, a supply that had to be trucked in from outside could never keep up with a need that rose every morning.
Then, in the seventh year, Mr Okonkwo saved enough to drill a borehole in the compound. It was expensive. The drillers went deep, past the first layer of brown water, down to a clean aquifer far below. When the pump was connected and the first water came up clear and cold, the children danced in it.
The family still needed exactly the same amount of water every day. The standard had not been lowered at all. But now the water came from within the compound, from a source that did not run dry when the tanker failed to come. The need was the same. The source had changed.
I can think of no better picture of what grace has done to the Christian life.
A misunderstanding that ruins two kinds of people
There is a widespread idea that grace means God has relaxed His expectations. Under the law, the thinking goes, God demanded a high standard of holiness. Then Jesus came and, out of kindness, lowered the bar so that ordinary people could step over it. Grace, in this view, is God saying, “Never mind. It does not matter so much any more.”
That misunderstanding damages two very different kinds of people.
It damages the careless believer, who hears the message of grace and concludes that holiness is optional. He sins freely and quotes verses about forgiveness, as though grace were a licence. Paul met this attitude in his own day and answered it with a horrified “God forbid.”
It also damages the serious believer, who hears that same distorted message and becomes suspicious of grace altogether. He loves holiness and fears that any emphasis on grace will make people lazy. So he retreats into rules, effort and pressure, and he preaches holiness as if it were still a tanker supply that must be trucked in by human determination every week.
Both have misunderstood. Grace did not lower God’s standard. Grace changed the source from which that standard is met.
PunchlineGrace did not lower God’s standard. It changed the source from which the standard is met: from human effort to the life of God within.
Jesus raised the bar
If anyone thinks grace lowers God’s expectations, the Sermon on the Mount should correct them quickly. Jesus did not come to make the law easier. He came to reveal how deep its demands really go:
For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
“Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.” The scribes and Pharisees were the most religiously careful people in Israel. They tithed even their garden herbs. If anyone could have kept the external standard of the law, they could. And Jesus says that the righteousness required for the kingdom must exceed theirs.
Then He shows what He means. The law said, “Thou shalt not kill.” Jesus says that anger and contempt toward your brother bring you under the same judgement. The law said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Jesus says “That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The law regulated outward actions. Jesus goes straight to the heart, where the actions are born.
He continues through oaths, revenge and love for enemies, and then He concludes with a sentence that ought to stop every one of us in our tracks: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
That is not a lowered standard. It is the highest standard imaginable. Jesus is describing the character of God Himself, and calling His followers to share it.
Notice also what Jesus says immediately after His warning about anger. If you bring your gift to the altar and remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there, go and be reconciled first, and then come and offer it (Matthew 5:23-24). Worship does not excuse broken relationships. Jesus cares about the actual state of our hearts toward actual people. Grace does not make that concern disappear. It deepens it.
So the question is not whether God still has a high standard. He does, higher than many of us have ever reckoned with. The question is how anyone could possibly meet it.
The weakness was never in the law
Paul gives us the answer in Romans 8. But first he describes the problem in Romans 7, in some of the most honest words in the Bible. He speaks of a man who agrees that the law is good, who genuinely wants to do right, and who finds himself unable to: “For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not” (Romans 7:18). The chapter ends with a cry of despair: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24).
Many believers know that cry personally. They love God. They want to be holy. They make promises at every altar call and every New Year’s watch-night service. And they keep failing at the same points. They conclude that they must not want it badly enough, or that they need to try even harder.
Then Paul turns the corner:
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
Look carefully at verse 3: “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh.” The law itself was not the problem. Paul has already said that “the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Romans 7:12). The law was a perfect description of righteousness. Its weakness was in the material it had to work with. It was trying to produce righteousness out of the flesh, out of fallen human nature, and the flesh could not deliver.
NuggetIt is like having a perfect architectural drawing for a house and nothing but rotten wood to build it with. The drawing is not at fault. The problem is the material.
So God did what the law could not do. He sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and condemned sin in the flesh. Then comes the purpose: “That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
Read that again. The righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us. Not abolished. Not lowered. Fulfilled. The very righteousness the law described is now produced in believers. But it is produced by a different source: not the flesh straining to obey from the outside, but the Spirit of life working from within.
That is the borehole. The standard of clean water every day has not changed. The source has.
God promised a new source
This was not a new idea that Paul invented. God had promised it centuries earlier through the prophets. Speaking through Ezekiel to a people who had failed again and again under the old covenant, God described what He would one day do:
Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them .
Look at who is acting in this passage. I will sprinkle. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will cause. God does not say, “You must try harder to produce a new heart.” He says, “I will give you a new heart, and I will put my spirit within you.” And the result: “and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.”
The standard is the same. God’s statutes and judgments have not been relaxed. But the source of obedience has moved from outside to inside, from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh, from human resolve to the indwelling Spirit of God.
Jeremiah prophesied the same new covenant: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). Under the old covenant, the law was written on tablets of stone and placed in front of people. Under the new covenant, it is written on the heart and placed inside them.
Jesus described this new source to a Samaritan woman who had come to draw water at a well in the heat of the day:
Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
“Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again.” That is the tanker. It satisfies for a while, and then you need more. “But the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” That is the borehole, a spring inside the believer, rising up continually from a source that does not run dry.
Love fulfils what the law required
If the standard has not changed, what does it look like when the new source starts to produce it? Paul tells us:
Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
“Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Every commandment about how we treat our neighbour, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet, is summed up in a single word: love. A person who truly loves his neighbour will not steal from him, lie about him or sleep with his wife. He does not need a rule to stop him. Love has already gone further than the rule ever could.
And where does that love come from? Paul tells the Galatians: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23). Against such there is no law. No law has ever been written against love or patience or self-control, because these things are exactly what the law was aiming at all along. When the Spirit produces this fruit in a believer, the law has nothing left to say. Its requirement has been met.
This is why Paul can say, “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). Notice the order. He does not say, “Stop fulfilling the lusts of the flesh, and then you will be able to walk in the Spirit.” He says, “Walk in the Spirit,” and the flesh loses its grip as a result. You do not overcome darkness by fighting it. You switch on the light.
It also explains why grace, rightly understood, makes people more holy, not less. Paul says, “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14). That is a remarkable statement. Most people would expect him to say that sin will not have dominion over you because you are under the law. But Paul says the opposite. The law, applied to the flesh, actually stirs sin up. Grace, working through the Spirit, breaks sin’s dominion. The tanker supply could never meet the daily need. The borehole can.
Grace is a teacher
Grace is not only the source of the new life. It is also its teacher. Paul writes to Titus: “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:11-12).
That is a startling sentence for anyone who thinks grace makes holiness optional. Grace teaches us to deny ungodliness. Grace teaches us to say no to worldly lusts. Grace teaches us to live soberly, righteously and godly, not in some distant spiritual future, but “in this present world”: in the office, the market, the marriage, the WhatsApp group and the traffic.
How does grace teach? Partly through the Scriptures, which the Spirit opens to us. Partly through the conviction of the Spirit in our conscience. Partly through the fellowship and correction of other believers. And very largely through what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
We are changed by beholding. As we look at Jesus, in the Gospels, in worship, in prayer, in the teaching of His Word, the Spirit transforms us into His image, step by step, from one degree of glory to another. This is not the frantic self-improvement of a person trying to scrub himself clean. It is the steady transformation of a person who keeps his face turned toward the Lord.
Think of how children pick up the accent, the mannerisms and even the facial expressions of the parents they live with. Nobody sits them down and teaches them. They become like the people they spend their days looking at. Grace forms us in the same way.
Peter is the clearest example in the New Testament. On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter meant every word when he promised to die rather than deny Him. His resolve was sincere, and it collapsed within hours in front of a servant girl by a fire. Seven weeks later, the same Peter stood up in Jerusalem before thousands of people, many of whom had shouted for Jesus’ crucifixion, and preached Christ crucified and risen without fear. Soon afterwards he told the council that had condemned Jesus, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). What had changed? Not the standard. Jesus had always required courageous loyalty. What changed was the source. On the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit had come to live in him. The tanker had failed by the fire in the high priest’s courtyard. The borehole held in front of the Sanhedrin.
Working out what God works in
Does this mean the believer does nothing? Not at all. Paul gives us a wonderfully balanced statement in Philippians:
Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.
Punchline“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”
There is real effort in the Christian life. Paul says work out. He does not say work for. You are not working to obtain salvation; you are working out a salvation you already have, the way a person works out the potential of a new piece of land he has been given. And the effort is taken seriously, “with fear and trembling,” because it matters greatly how we live.
But the very next sentence tells us where the power comes from. “It is God which worketh in you.” God works in, and we work out. He gives both the desire (“to will”) and the ability (“to do”). Our effort is not self-effort. It is cooperation with a God who is already at work inside us.
Paul describes his own ministry in exactly these terms: “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). He laboured more than all the other apostles. That is real effort. Yet he says it was not him but the grace of God with him. Grace did not make Paul lazy. It made him the hardest worker in the early church, and it kept him humble about it.
So there is a kind of effort that belongs to grace and a kind that works against it. The difference lies in what the effort is drawing on. Self-effort draws on the flesh, which is the rotten wood. It tries to produce holiness by willpower, resolutions and pressure, and it either ends in pride when it seems to succeed or despair when it fails. Grace-effort draws on the Spirit. It shows up, it obeys, it disciplines the body, it turns off the television and opens the Bible, it walks away from temptation. But it does all of this leaning on God, expecting Him to supply the strength, and giving Him the glory when fruit appears.
When you fall short
Someone will say, “But I still fail. If grace has changed the source, why do I still sin?” That is an honest question, and the honest answer is that the new source does not instantly remove every old habit. The borehole is in the compound, but the household still has to learn to use it, to maintain the pump, and to stop running out to flag down the tanker every time the tap is slow.
John writes to believers with great tenderness: “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). The aim is that we do not sin. That is the standard, and it has not been lowered. But when we do sin, we are not thrown back onto the old system. We have an Advocate. We confess, we are cleansed, and we return to walking in the Spirit.
What we must not do is go back to the tanker. When a believer fails, the great temptation is to respond with renewed self-effort: “This time I will really try. I will make a vow. I will fast for seven days.” There may be a place for fasting and for firm decisions. But if the response to failure is simply more flesh trying harder, the result will be the same as before. The answer to failure is to return to the source. Confess honestly. Receive forgiveness. Turn your face back toward the Lord. Ask the Spirit to strengthen you. Then take the next step of obedience leaning on Him.
There will also be practical steps. A man who keeps falling into the same sin on his phone late at night may need to leave his phone in another room. A woman who keeps losing her temper when she is exhausted may need to rest. A person struggling with an addiction may need a mature friend to walk with him, or professional help. None of these things contradict grace. They are the ordinary ways in which grace-effort cooperates with what God is doing.
Some months after the borehole was drilled, the Okonkwos’ neighbour asked Mr Okonkwo how he was coping with the latest increase in tanker prices. Mr Okonkwo laughed. “My brother,” he said, “I have forgotten what the tanker man looks like.” The family still used just as much water as before. If anything, they used more, because they were no longer afraid of running out. They watered the plants. They washed the car. They shared water with the neighbours when the tankers did not come.
That is what grace does when it is rightly understood. It does not make people careless about the standard. It makes them generous with it. A believer who has learned to draw on the life of the Spirit does not obey less than the legalist. He obeys more, and more gladly, and with far more love. He is no longer anxiously rationing his holiness, afraid that the supply will run out.
God has not lowered His standard. He has given you a new heart, put His Spirit within you, and opened a well of living water springing up inside you. Stop flagging down the tanker. Draw from the source.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you tended to think of grace as God lowering His expectations? How has that affected either your obedience or your view of grace?
- In Romans 8:3, Paul says the law was “weak through the flesh.” What does that tell you about why your own efforts at holiness have often failed?
- What is the difference between “working out” your salvation and “working for” it? Where do you see each in your own life?
- When you fail, what is your usual response: renewed self-effort, despair, or a return to the source? What would returning to the source look like next time?
This Week
Read Romans 7:14-8:4 on the first day of the week, and Ezekiel 36:25-27 and John 4:13-14 on the second. For the rest of the week, choose one area where you have been struggling to obey. Each morning, before you face it, pray a simple prayer: “Holy Spirit, You are my source today. Give me the will and the power to obey.” Then take one practical step that cooperates with Him. At the end of the week, notice what has changed.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that You have not lowered Your standard but have given me a new source. Thank You for the new heart You have given me and the Spirit You have put within me. Forgive me for the times I have tried to be holy in my own strength, and for the times I have used Your grace as an excuse for carelessness. Teach me by Your grace to deny ungodliness and to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. Let rivers of living water flow from within me. I will work out what You are working in. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.