The Ordinary Means of Grace
Last week I flew from Nashville to Edinburgh (I’ll tell you more about that trip another time). My destination was Edinburgh — that was my end. I got to that destination by car, then by plane from Nashville to London, and another plane from London to Edinburgh. Those were the means to my end.
The Christian life is often thought of as a journey. And we have both an end and means as well. Our end is communion with God — ultimately, in the resurrection and now, in this life. Fully enjoying God for all that he is and having loving fellowship and union with him — that’s our destination.
the Bible teaches us that, as fallen humans affected by sin and sinfulness, we can never earn or attain communion with God. It is possible, certainly! But only as a gift from God. We call that “grace.”
If the grace of communion with God is our end, what are the means? Or, to use another metaphor, what are the channels and conduits through which the living waters of Union with Christ flow?
We call these “the ordinary means of grace.”
God is a God of grace and can communicate his grace to us through any means he likes. You might see a beautiful flower in a meadow and be suddenly taken up in your heart into the heavenly places and experience something of God’s love and fellowship. But when we say “ordinary means of grace,” we’re talking about the common and regular means by which God has ordained to regularly communicate his grace to his church.
Just as I took a car and two planes to Edinburgh, here are the three means of grace that God has ordained for his people:
The Bible
Prayer
The Sacraments
I would not have arrived in Edinburgh if I had abandoned one of the three legs of my journey. Likewise, we should not abandon these three means of grace in our communion with God.
The ordinary means of grace are sometimes confused with the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic tradition. But the means of grace are a particularly Protestant and Reformational idea — a retrieval of biblical teaching and practice that happened when the Reformers recovered for the Church the authority of Scripture (over-and-above the authority of popes, bishops, cardinals, and councils). So don’t hear “means of grace” as a Roman Catholic idea; it’s a Protestant, Reformed heritage that flows directly from Scripture.
Embracing the ordinary means of grace means setting aside (as primary) a mystical approach to spirituality. The medieval mystics also saw the “beatific vision” (our summum bonum, our highest good) as a journey. For them, it began as we love God for our own sake. That is, we find that in the worship and service of God, we get joy and pleasure. Then they sought to grow from that to love God for his own sake, not ours — they would suggest that even our enjoyment of God is tainted with self-focused sinfulness, and we must die even to that pleasure. (To read more about that, look into Bernard of Clairvaux.)
But when the Reformation retrieved a more profound biblical theology and Scripture’s teachings on salvation (soteriology) and teleology (the study of “the ends”), here’s the summum bonum that we articulated:
(Question) What is the chief end of man?
(Answer) Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
This Reformed idea of our chief end marries God's glory and our joy as two inseparable and God-designed realities. (To read more about that, look into John Piper.)
Rather than “looking within” through contemplation, Reformed Protestants “look without” to the justifying and substitutionary work of Jesus.
Rather than pitting “learning” against “piety,” Reformed Protestants embrace being “transformed by the renewal of our minds” (Romans 12:2) and the reality that we have “the mind of Christ” (Philippians 2), which leads us by God’s grace to a life of piety (an inner communion with God that leads to an outward holiness).
Rather than waiting on an inner or audible word from the Holy Spirit, Reformed Protestants pick up the Bible and read the very words of God, as the Holy Spirit illuminates them in our hearts and shines a light on Jesus Christ so that we might love him, worship him, and be transformed into his image (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Rather than retreating to desert monasteries, Reformed Protestants stay in their vocations (in the world, but not of the world) and glorify and enjoy God in and through their work.
“Thomas à Kempis [a late medieval mystic] exclaimed, ‘How undisturbed a conscience we would have if we never went searching after ephemeral joys nor concerned ourselves with the world's affairs! What great peace and tranquility would be ours if we had severed ourselves from useless preoccupations, put our trust in God, and thought only of divine things and our salvation!’ [Martin] Luther disagreed. Enter the world, he said to the average layman, with every confidence that your vocation—from farmer to clerk to nursing mother—is not some ‘useless preoccupation’ but just as worthy of God’s pleasure and just as useful in God’s kingdom as the priest in the cathedral or the monk in the monastery.” (The Reformation as Renewal, Matthew Barrett, p. 61)
Rather than an exhaustive treatment, I will leave aside the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) for another article, and here I will focus on Scripture and prayer.
The Bible as an Ordinary Means of Grace
One of the chief was that we receive God’s grace of communion with him is through the Bible (or “Scripture,” which means “writings”; also, “the word of God,” with a lower-case “w”).
God the Holy Spirit uses the Bible to show us Jesus and so to make us holy:
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. (Jesus, in John 17:17)
All the Scriptures are for and about Jesus (Luke 24:27), and Jesus is the final Word (capital “W”) spoken by God — therefore, we cannot know Jesus apart from Scripture, which bears witness to him:
You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people. (Jesus, in John 5:39–40)
Examining these Scriptures, therefore, is a means of grace, by which — when we search for Christ in them — we are led to faith by the Holy Spirit. So writes Luke about the Berean Christians:
Now these Jews [Bereans] were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.
In his second letter to Timothy, the Apostle Paul teaches us all that the Bible is intended to make us complete and well-equipped for the work of ministry — i.e., it is a means of grace:
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:14–17)
Let us not neglect this great gift of God! Through the Bible, we commune with God himself, by his Spirit, as we are made holy (sanctified), as we more clearly see, enjoy, and worship Jesus, and as we are equipped to follow Jesus on mission in this world.
Prayer as an Ordinary Means of Grace
The Apostle Paul says in Romans 10:13,
For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Salvation is the entrance into redeemed, justified, faith-filled communion with God. It’s our end. And the means here is prayer — “calling on the name of the Lord.” Salvation is available for us; Christ has purchased it for us and is ready to apply it through his Holy Spirit. But we must call on him to do so. We must be people of prayer. Not just once, a “sinner’s prayer”; again and again. We were not only saved 2,000 years ago when Christ died for our sins but through his work in our lives, we are being saved now, in real-time. And we will be saved finally when he returns. It’s God’s work, from start to finish. But our duty is to pray. And through those prayers, we commune with God himself and receive grace upon grace.
Jesus himself taught prayer as means of grace (gift) in Matthew 7:7–11.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
B.B. Warfield, a theologian from Princeton Seminary in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries) put it this way:
Well, is not the mental attitude assumed in prayer, at least, an humble attitude, a softening attitude, a beneficial attitude? Do we not see that thus the very act of prayer by its reflex influence alone—could we believe in no more—will tend to quiet the soul, break down its pride and resistance, and fit it for a humble walk in the world? In its very nature, prayer is a confession of weakness, a confession of need, of dependence, a cry for help, a reaching out for something stronger, better, more stable and trustworthy than ourselves, on which to rest and depend and draw. No one can take this attitude once without an effect on his character; no one can take it in a crisis of his life without his whole subsequent life feeling the influence in its sweeter, humbler, more devout and restful course; no one can take it habitually without being made, merely by its natural, reflex influence, a different man, in a very profound sense, from what he otherwise would have been. Prayer, thus, in its very nature, because it is an act of self-abnegation, a throwing of ourselves at the feet of One recognized as higher and greater than we, and as One on whom we depend and in whom we trust, is a most beneficial influence in this hard life of ours. It places the soul in an attitude of less self-assertion and predisposes it to walk simply and humbly in the world.
The Gathered Worship of the Church
This all leads us to consider a related question: what is a church?
A local church is not a building; it’s a gathering of Jesus-followers who commune with God and each other through the ordinary means of grace.
In every Bible-believing, Jesus-worshiping church you’ll find three things:
Scripture (read aloud, preached, sung, and prayed)
Prayer (from Scripture, in response to Scripture, either spoken or sung)
The Sacraments (the Lord’s Supper and Baptism rightly administered according to Scripture and attended by Prayer)
These ordinary means of grace are Christ’s way of communing with his body — both individually, as we do our morning reading and head to our prayer closets, and corporately (a word that actually means “as a body” from its original latin root, corpus) as we gather on Sundays to hear the word read and preached, as we pray, sing, baptize, and come to the Lord’s Table together. Communion with God flows into and creates union with one another.
Conclusion
We believe the Bible’s teaching on both the “transcendence” of God and the “immanence” of God. His transcendence is his complete otherness. He is unlike us; he is unreachable and untouchable by us and is far above us in every way. His immanence is his profound nearness. He is close at hand, he lives within his people by his Spirit and is near to all who draw near to him.
The prophet Isaiah captures both realities together in Isaiah 57:15.
For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place [transcendence], and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite [immanence].
Mystical spirituality over-emphasizes his transcendence and searches for communion with God through acts of penance, inner contemplation, and renouncing worldly things. Mystics must experience and feel God.
Rationalist spirituality over-emphasizes his immanence and searches for communion with God through intellectual exercises, scientific advancement, and even theological learning and acumen. Rationalists must understand and think God.
Only a robust, biblical spirituality acknowledges transcendence and immanence together and uses the ordinary means of grace to commune with God through Jesus by his Spirit. This is both contemplative and earthy. It rests on the sheer fact of communion with God even when we don’t experience it. Christians will have both experience and intellectual understanding rooted in a truth outside of themselves, submitted to Scripture, and trusting God to be God even when our subjective reality fails to reflect absolute truth.
As we embark on this journey of biblical spirituality together, one last caution: do not confuse the means with the end. Prayer for prayer’s sake is fleshly and worldly. Scripture reading and study for its own sake is likewise just an exercise in puffing ourselves up with head knowledge.
But if our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever (and it is!), then the ordinary means of grace — and indeed, all things! — must be done for his glory, with our summum bonum in mind. He is our greatest good, and we have no real and lasting joy outside of his gory.
So take up your Bibles for his glory! Seek the Lord in prayer for his glory! Meditate — not by emptying your mind and looking within, but by filling your mind and looking without, to Christ — for his glory! And listen for the voice of God as you read and study his word, the Bible. This is how he speaks, and he speaks a better word than we can imagine: he speaks to us Jesus.
