The Ragamuffin Gospel By Brennan ManningSample

Free to Trust

We don’t comprehend the love of Jesus Christ. Oh, we see a movie and resonate to what a young man and woman will endure for romantic love. We know that when the chips are down, if we love wildly enough we’ll fling life and caution to the winds for the one we love. But when it comes to God’s love in the broken, blood-drenched body of Jesus Christ, we get antsy and start to talk about theology, divine justice, God’s wrath, and the heresy of universalism.

The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace.

But many of us don’t know our God and don’t understand His gospel of grace. For many, God sits up there like a Buddha, impassive, unmoving, hard as flint. Calvary cries out more clearly than any theology textbook: We do not know our God. We have not grasped the truth in the First Letter of John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The cross reveals the depth of the Father’s love for us: “For greater love than this no one has than that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

The disciple living by grace rather than law has undergone a decisive conversion—a turning from mistrust to trust. The foremost characteristic of living by grace is trust in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

To believe deeply, as Jesus did, that God is present and at work in human life is to understand that I am a beloved child of this Father and, hence, free to trust. That makes a profound difference in the way I relate to myself and others; it makes an enormous difference in the way I live. To trust Abba, both in prayer and life, is to stand in childlike openness before a mystery of gracious love and acceptance.

Today, where do you stand in your ability to trust God in a childlike way and open yourself up to His love?