One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World by Tullian Tchividjian
Authors: Tullian Tchividjian
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your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience. We will explore this at more length in the coming chapter’s discussion of self-forgetfulness.
ANY LASTING CHANGE
This entire chapter can be summed up in the following way: Grace inspires what the Law demands. The Law prescribes good works, but only grace can produce them. While the Law directs, the Gospel alone delivers. Gratitude, generosity, honesty, compassion, acts of mercy and self-sacrifice, these things spring unsummoned from a forgiven heart. When Paul Zahl writes that “the one-way love … is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience,” 5 he is 100 percent right.
Think about it for a moment in your own life: beneath your happiest moments and closest relationships inevitably lies some instance of being loved in midst of weakness and/or deserved judgment. It could be something as small as a kind word when you were feeling particularly vulnerable, or something as significant as a friend publicly advocating for you despite your obvious guilt. But whatever it was, it made all the difference. These things may not happen every day—indeed, one-way love is both rare and surprising—but when they do, they are indelible. We can trace our patience with our children back to those times when our parents were patient with us, our commitment to our spouses back to a moment of forgiveness, the likes of which we had never experienced before (or sometimes, since). Our confidence in our work dates back to the afternoon our Little League coach decided not to take us out of the game after we’d made a grievous error. We volunteer at a suicide hotline because someone once listened to us, really listened to us, when we were depressed, and it was the beginning of a new lease on life. The list goes on. Grace bears fruit.
Again, this is not to say grace requires an outcome—it is one-way! It does not speak the language of results or consequences, which is precisely why such wonderful and exciting things often happen when it is in the mix. In other words, one-way love cannot be mandated, thank God; it can only be experienced. My friend Justin Holcomb tells a story about just such a life-altering instance of grace, one that changed his life forever:
My understanding of unconditional love and its implications germinated when I was ten years old and flooded our next-door neighbor’s home. Our neighbors had moved and were trying to sell their house. One day, I broke in through the back door and closed the drains in all of the sinks and tubs and turned on all the faucets. Then, I just sat and watched water flood the entire house. I let the water run while I went home for dinner, returning a few hours later to turn it off.
I knew what I had done was wrong, and I was even shocked that I had wanted to do something so destructive. When our neighbors found the damage the following day while showing the home to prospective buyers, they came to our house and asked my family if we had seen anyone around their place recently. On top of what I had already done, I lied to my neighbors and my parents.
I felt completely messed up. I was destroying stuff for the sake of destroying and then lying blatantly to everyone. I had heard about asking God’s forgiveness (my dad had taught me the Lord’s Prayer), so I begged God to forgive. I was worried that He wouldn’t. Surely something so deliberate and cruel was just too much to forgive.
After a month with an uneasy conscience, I was finally found out. Another neighbor had seen me sneaking around and told my parents. My father called me in from playing outside with my friends and asked me if I remembered anything important about the flooding incident. I knew something was up, but I felt I had to stick with the lie at this point. Finally, my dad told me that I was busted. I experienced an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt for my sins, as well as an
ANY LASTING CHANGE
This entire chapter can be summed up in the following way: Grace inspires what the Law demands. The Law prescribes good works, but only grace can produce them. While the Law directs, the Gospel alone delivers. Gratitude, generosity, honesty, compassion, acts of mercy and self-sacrifice, these things spring unsummoned from a forgiven heart. When Paul Zahl writes that “the one-way love … is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience,” 5 he is 100 percent right.
Think about it for a moment in your own life: beneath your happiest moments and closest relationships inevitably lies some instance of being loved in midst of weakness and/or deserved judgment. It could be something as small as a kind word when you were feeling particularly vulnerable, or something as significant as a friend publicly advocating for you despite your obvious guilt. But whatever it was, it made all the difference. These things may not happen every day—indeed, one-way love is both rare and surprising—but when they do, they are indelible. We can trace our patience with our children back to those times when our parents were patient with us, our commitment to our spouses back to a moment of forgiveness, the likes of which we had never experienced before (or sometimes, since). Our confidence in our work dates back to the afternoon our Little League coach decided not to take us out of the game after we’d made a grievous error. We volunteer at a suicide hotline because someone once listened to us, really listened to us, when we were depressed, and it was the beginning of a new lease on life. The list goes on. Grace bears fruit.
Again, this is not to say grace requires an outcome—it is one-way! It does not speak the language of results or consequences, which is precisely why such wonderful and exciting things often happen when it is in the mix. In other words, one-way love cannot be mandated, thank God; it can only be experienced. My friend Justin Holcomb tells a story about just such a life-altering instance of grace, one that changed his life forever:
My understanding of unconditional love and its implications germinated when I was ten years old and flooded our next-door neighbor’s home. Our neighbors had moved and were trying to sell their house. One day, I broke in through the back door and closed the drains in all of the sinks and tubs and turned on all the faucets. Then, I just sat and watched water flood the entire house. I let the water run while I went home for dinner, returning a few hours later to turn it off.
I knew what I had done was wrong, and I was even shocked that I had wanted to do something so destructive. When our neighbors found the damage the following day while showing the home to prospective buyers, they came to our house and asked my family if we had seen anyone around their place recently. On top of what I had already done, I lied to my neighbors and my parents.
I felt completely messed up. I was destroying stuff for the sake of destroying and then lying blatantly to everyone. I had heard about asking God’s forgiveness (my dad had taught me the Lord’s Prayer), so I begged God to forgive. I was worried that He wouldn’t. Surely something so deliberate and cruel was just too much to forgive.
After a month with an uneasy conscience, I was finally found out. Another neighbor had seen me sneaking around and told my parents. My father called me in from playing outside with my friends and asked me if I remembered anything important about the flooding incident. I knew something was up, but I felt I had to stick with the lie at this point. Finally, my dad told me that I was busted. I experienced an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt for my sins, as well as an
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