Grace is not a spiritual currency

 By personifying grace, {John Newton's hymn} “Amazing Grace” can be somewhat misleading to modern readers. It is certainly not wrong to put verbs after grace (e.g., Titus 2:11). Grace saves wretches. Grace searches out lost sinners. Grace removes spiritual blindness and gives spiritual sight. Grace teaches us to fear God. Grace relieves fear. But in our modern culture, where grace has become a synonym for kindness, “Amazing Grace” becomes a sort of hymn to the transforming power of niceness or, a little better, grace becomes abstracted divine benevolence. In either case, grace is depersonalized.

This misunderstanding of grace has led Sinclair Ferguson to go so far as to say there actually is no such thing as grace.(a) It has led Michael Horton to declare that grace is “not a third thing or substance mediating between God and sinners, but is Jesus Christ in redeeming action.”(b) Their point is the same. We must resist the temptation to morph grace into spiritual currency or some abstracted spiritual power that mysteriously ebbs and flows. Grace is not dished out in spiritual gold coins of merit (a serious medieval Roman Catholic error confronted in the Reformation). No. Thinking of grace as spiritual currency is mistaken. To say there is no such thing as grace means that all the grace we have and can ever hope to have—all the sovereign grace, all the all-sufficient grace—is bound up in the favor of the Father and in our union with the Son.

If you have Christ, you have all of Christ, and to have all of Christ is to have free access to Christ’s all-sufficient grace. Grace is not a gate to fence us back from Christ. Grace is not a substitute for Christ. Grace does not stand between me and Christ. Rather, says Calvin, “All graces are bestowed on us through Christ.”(c) Grace is shorthand for the full and free access we have to all the merits and power and promises to be found in the person of our Savior (John 1:16–17; Eph. 2:7; 1Cor. 1:4; 2Cor. 8:9; 2Tim. 2:1). Repeatedly, John Newton accents “the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” Grace is a stream from Christ, the fountain of all grace, he writes.(d) The “water of life” (Rev. 22:17) “stands for the communication of every grace from Jesus Christ. He is the fountain (John 7:37–39). [The outpouring of grace] is compared to water, for it is plenty. There is abundance of grace—a fountain, a river, an ocean (Isa. 44:3).”(e) “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace”, writes the apostle John (John 1:16). “All the streams of grace flow from Christ, the fountain,” Newton concludes.(f) 

In a letter to his eminent friend Hannah More, Newton wrote:

When we understand what the Scripture teaches of the person, love, and offices of Christ, the necessity and final causes of his humiliation unto death, and feel our own need of such a Savior, we then know him to be the light, the sun of the world and of the soul, the source of all spiritual light, life, comfort and influence; having access to God by him, and receiving out of his fullness grace for grace.(g) 

thus, “we are gradually prepared to live more out of ourselves, and to derive all our sufficiency of every kind from Jesus, the fountain of grace.” (h) 

(from "Newton on the Christian Life") 

(a)

Grace is not a ‘thing.’ It is not a substance that can be measured or a commodity to be distributed. It is ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 13:14) . In essence, it is Jesus Himself” (Sinclair B. Ferguson, By Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me [Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust, 2010], xv)

(b)

Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 267–68. 

(c)

John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, trans. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1853), 357. 

(d)

W, 1:417; 2:574; 3:20; 6:253.

(e)

John Newton, 365 Days with Newton, ed. Marylynn Rouse (Leominster, UK: Day One, 2006), 122. Here I use the Logos software pagination.

(f)

W, 1:417. To be fair, Paul sometimes speaks of grace (χάρις) without mentioning Christ. In these cases he appears to be speaking of grace as a mobilizing force or a spiritual gift for certain tasks (see Rom. 1:5; 12:3; 15:15; 1 Cor. 3:10; 15:10; 2 Cor. 9:8; Gal. 2:9; Eph. 3:7–8; Phil. 1:7). But ultimately, all the grace that gifts or mobilizes is a grace purchased in Christ and distributed by him (Eph. 4:7–8). 

(g)

Letters (Bull 1869), 350. 

(h)

W, 1:430–31 

source : Desiring God