The question that follows any genuine encounter with grace is the same one that followed Paul’s. He’d met the risen Christ on a road. His whole frame of reference had been reorganized. And now what? Justifying grace changes you. But change isn’t the end of the story — it’s the beginning of a life. The question is what kind. Wesley had a phrase for this that has made people uncomfortable for three centuries: going on to perfection. It sounds like a performance standard impossi

The week we just spent with prevenient grace established something important: grace was already there before we were looking for it. The father watching the horizon. The love poured out while we were still sinners. The Word present in the beginning. But “already there” isn’t the whole story. At some point, the father runs. At some point, grace stops being background and becomes encounter. That’s justifying grace. Not the grace that precedes us — the grace that meets us. Jes

Most of us have this backwards. We imagine that at some point in our lives we turned in the right direction, looked up, and there God was. The search ended when we finally found the searcher. But here’s what the prophet Jeremiah would like us to sit with for a minute: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” — Jeremiah 1:5 Not I will come to know you when you seek me. Not I will recogni