Timothy's Thoughts

O ne of my cousins sent me a link to a video as an example of how grace isn’t fair. The video is of a woman who had been out of church for many years talking about going to church and hearing the parable of the vineyard workers. She also tells how she taught this parable to VBS kids that you might find useful if you ever have the opportunity to teach this parable. For some reason, I watched this video several times. I’m not sure why. I think it might be because some of what the woman says doesn’t seem to sit right with me. I’m not sure that I agree with her take on the parable. Before I go into that, I’ll let you watch the video: Grace Is Not Attractive from The Work Of The People on Vimeo . One of the things I see here is the difference between what we often think of as fair and what true justice is. By definition, to be fair and to be just are essentially the same thing, but when we teach fairness to kids we often do so in terms of equal treatment. We might ask little Billy, “...

“…If you were the only sinner in human history, nothing about Calvary would have changed.” – Denison I saw this quote on Facebook. It looks about like what you might see on a church sign. I tend to pick church sign sayings apart. This particular saying looks good, but it is true? In a word, no. What I believe this person was trying to say is that if you were the only sinner, Christ would have died for you anyway. There’s actually strong Biblical basis for that. II Peter 3:9 says, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” It’s really a hypothetical situation we’re talking about, so since it isn’t God’s will that any perish, we could say that he would have sent his Son to die for one sinner, if that’s all there was. But that’s not what the quote says. The quote says that “nothing about Calvary would have changed.” There is a great deal about ...