GRACE AS WEED KILLER

GRACE IS WORKING AS A WEED EATER!

Weeds: I have weeds in my backyard, and I am free to have them.
Picture: I am free to disobey; I am completely free.

Weeds: Those weeds in my yard are ugly, but no one is going to arrest me because I am free to have them. I am also free to experience the ugliness of those weeds.

Picture: While I am free to disobey, I am also free to experience suffering this life of Sin.
Weeds: I could go out and mow those weeds down, but they would come back since the root has not been dealt with.

Picture: The same thing applies to sins versus Sin — sins are the individual weeds that come up, and Sin is the root that produces all sins.

Grace, The Weed eater: Grace kills weeds in our life as a weed eater. Grace moves constantly over our lives, knocking those weeds of sins off. In fact, grace works so quickly, that as soon as one sin pops up, before it can even pop up, grace knocks it off. That is a picture of grace forgiving us for our sins. So for a Christian—for the rest of his life—every sin, before it even surfaces, is forgiven and washed. It is grace working as a weed eater on our sins.

That is the grace with which we are familiar, and that is the grace that people think we can abuse. In fact, Christians can abuse grace. But when we preach grace, we proclaim grace in its two aspects:

1. Grace is the weed eater knocking those weeds of sins off all of time, and
2. Grace is, simultaneously, God sending His grace to kill off the root of Sin if we let Him.

That is the process of sanctification—
q Saving grace is keeping us clean on the top.
q Sanctifying grace is the same grace; it is accessed by faith too. It is going underneath and killing off the roots.

There will still be a lot of weeds of sins, but the underlying problem, which is Sin, has been addressed—those roots are being killed.
By Johnny Tatum