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March 23, 2026

The Risk of Grace

By Jason Neill

Scripture reading: Luke 7:36-50

Last year, I mapped out a plan to share a different parable of Jesus for every Monday of the year. This week’s scheduled parable, "The Debt We Can’t Repay," is one I wrote about previously on October 20, 2025. I would encourage you to revisit that post if you have the chance.

For this week, however, I want to pivot slightly to share some reflections and a powerful quote on the broader topic of grace.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite sermon series is The Grace Awakening by Charles (Chuck) Swindoll. It was truly refreshing to hear him describe how God’s gift of eternal life is absolutely free and how risky that message is. To illustrate this, I want to share a passage from Swindoll’s book that discusses the "dangerous" nature of true grace.

It is a bit lengthy, but it is well worth reading:

“…Martyn Lloyd-Jones (of all people) states that preaching grace is not only risky, but the fact that some take it to an unwise extreme is proof that a minister is indeed preaching the true grace of God. Hold on to your surfboards as you read his remarks concerning Paul’s question at the beginning of Romans 6: ‘Are we to continue in sin that grace may increase?’

If it is true that where sin abounded grace has much more abounded, well then, ‘shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound yet further?’

First of all let me make a comment, to me a very important and vital comment. The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. That is a very good test of gospel preaching. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel. Let me show you what I mean.

If a man preaches justification by works, no one would ever raise this question. If a man’s preaching is, ‘If you want to be Christians, and if you want to go to heaven, you must stop committing sins, you must take up good works, and if you do so regularly and constantly, and do not fail to keep on at it, you will make yourselves Christians, you will reconcile yourselves to God, and you will go to heaven.’ Obviously a man who preaches in that strain would never be liable to this misunderstanding. Nobody would say to such a man, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?,’ because the man’s whole emphasis is just this, that if you go on sinning you are certain to be damned, and only if you stop sinning can you save yourselves. So that misunderstanding could never arise…

…Nobody has ever brought this charge against the Church of Rome, but it was brought frequently against Martin Luther; indeed that was precisely what the Church of Rome said about the preaching of Martin Luther. They said, ‘This man who was a priest has changed the doctrine in order to justify his own marriage and his own lust,’ and so on. ‘This man,’ they said, ‘is an antinomian; and that is heresy.’ That is the very charge they brought against him. It was also brought against George Whitefield two hundred years ago. It is the charge that formal dead Christianity – if there is such a thing – has always brought against this startling, staggering message, that God ‘justifies the ungodly’….

That is my comment; and it is a very important comment for preachers. I would say to all preachers: If your preaching of salvation has not been misunderstood in that way, then you had better examine your sermons again, and you had better make sure that you really are preaching the salvation that is offered in the New Testament to the ungodly, to the sinner, to those who are dead in trespasses and sins, to those who are enemies of God. There is this kind of dangerous element about the true presentation of the doctrine of salvation” (The Grace Awakening, pp. 34-35).

If you have never read The Grace Awakening by Charles Swindoll, I highly recommend it.

The Lure of "Justification by Works": The quote suggests that people naturally prefer a message of "stop committing sins... and you will make yourselves Christians." Why do you think it is often easier for us to tell people how to behave rather than telling them that God "justifies the ungodly"?

Reflecting the Parable: Thinking back to the scripture reading in Luke 7:36-50, how does the story of the woman with the alabaster jar demonstrate the "dangerous" and "startling" nature of grace that Swindoll and Lloyd-Jones are describing?