Imagine a NBA team that didn’t know the primary functional purpose basketball. I get it, that’s a weird sentence, but stay with me. Sure, everyone on the team would know it uses a ball, and you can do all the things you can do with a ball, like throwing and bouncing it. But, imagine the entire team didn’t know that the primary function of the basketball was to rain threes and destroy rims.

I think it would be hilarious to watch the train-wreck that their first game of the season would be, don’t you? What wouldn’t be fun would be their 82nd game of the season: it would have stopped being funny and turned into a sad display.

I mean, they could probably do some pretty cool things with the ball. Imagine the Harlem Globetrotters without the scoring tricks. Sure, they’d do that trick of spinning the ball on your fingers that every middle schooler aspires to do, maybe do some pretty cool dribble routines, and do some pretty sweet passes. But, none of that matters if they don’t get the ball through the hoop. You don’t get style points in the NBA (unless it’s the post-game press conference).

Now, this was a ridiculous example, because this would never happen in basketball. However, you see this play out Sunday after Sunday after Sunday from your pew or chair or any other sitting apparatus that your church has.

What set me on the course to discover what I’m about to talk about were these two little verses at the beginning and the end of 2 Peter.

Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. 2 Peter 1:2 | NIV

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 3:18a | NIV

I know this sounds strange, but these two scriptures showed me the American Church has absolutely no idea what the functional purpose of grace is, and the Church might as well be a basketball team who doesn’t know how to make a basket.

What is grace? Go ahead and think of the answer. Got it? Watch me be a psychic.

I can almost bet money that you said it’s God’s favor, God’s free gift of salvation, or God’s forgiveness. Now let’s get this out of the way: these are all right answers. But, they’re just like using a basketball for dribbling or passing. They are all functions of the basketball, but they are not the primary function.

Don’t be too hard on yourself for not knowing the primary function: you were never taught better. The fact that you likely don’t know where I’m headed with this is indicative that the Church has failed you. I mean, I grew up in church, and I had never heard this until I stumbled upon it. I was searching for an answer that these two scriptures raised and I happened to stumble on a YouTube video by John Bevere talking about it. Unsponsored plug: go read his book, Extraordinary, if what you read today stirs up something in you to learn more. You can find it on amazon or directly from his site.

Before I go over what grace is, I want to demonstrate how wrong we are about it, just so you can see why it’s so important. The reason these two scriptures show that we have an incomplete definition of grace can be clearly demonstrated with two line graphs.

If the way grace was typically taught was shown on a line graph, here’s what it would look like:

So the blue line on the graph would be how frequently you sin over time, and the green line would represent the frequency of grace given over time. If grace is forgiveness of sin, then the less you sin, the less you would need God’s grace. So the goal of this understanding of grace is to zero everything out because you’ve been made complete.

But what Peter is talking about in these verses would actually look something like this:

Over time, sin should still trend towards being zeroed out, because that’s the natural progression of Christianity. But, in this scenario, grace would actually increase abundantly over time. If grace is just salvation and forgiveness of sin, what would be the point of growing in it?

The three answers that are typically brought up when talking about grace can actually be summed up in another word: mercy. Those answers are not exclusive to God’s grace, but they are a part of it. You could take those three answers, minus the free bit because it used to cost an animal, and apply them to the Old Testament Law and still get a functioning result.

No, when Jesus died, not only did he remove the cost of mercy, he brought something new with him: grace. So, yes, grace is a free gift of salvation. Yes, grace does give you God’s favor. Yes, grace does give you access to forgiveness. But, it’s so much more than that.

The primary function of grace is power. Everything else is secondary.

You could already get forgiveness, favor, and salvation through animal sacrifice. It’s true, the grace we received through his death cut out the middle man (animal) on that. If that’s all it did, then what would even be the purpose? He would have died a needless death for the sake of convenience. And animals’ rights too, I guess.

I hear what you’re probably thinking, where is that in the Bible? When I show you, you’re going to feel silly because this is one of the more popular verses and we just zoom right past it.

9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 2 Corinthians 12:9 | NIV

If you have a red letter bible, then you will see that the part in the quotation marks is Jesus talking. Jesus equates his grace with his power. This is literally the only time in the entire Bible that Jesus directly talks about his grace.

Once you understand that grace is not just salvation or forgiveness, but power, so many scriptures open up and come to life. I challenge you that when you read the New Testament and you come across the word grace, change it for power or empowerment. The same is often true the other way around, exchanging grace for power. You gotta be careful with that one though. Grace always means power; power doesn’t always mean grace.

But what does the power of grace do? Peter explains this right after he tells you to have grace abundantly.

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. 2 Peter 1:3-4 | NIV

The power of grace is to give you access to the divine nature of God. It empowers you to deny yourself and take up your cross. And, just so you know that I’m not applying that out of context, here’s another one from Paul:

11 For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. 12 It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. Titus 2:11-14 | NIV

What else does grace do?

17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! Romans 5:17 | NIV

The empowerment of grace gives you the ability to go beyond your natural ability and allows you to rule in life. Have you ever wondered why you see so many Christians scraping by and so many Churches struggling to reach their communities? It’s because you can’t have faith for something you haven’t heard. If you don’t know grace’s potential, you can never access it.

It’s like having a plane on a deserted island, but never knowing that a plane can fly (if you can imagine such a thing). It’d probably do ok as a shelter, and you can eek out an existence while never knowing its purpose. However, you completely miss your opportunity to get off your desert island and find civilization if no one ever told you that planes can fly.

I’m not going to go through all the verses on grace that are changed by this revelation and that demonstrate that grace is an empowerment, because I think you get the point: the church has been underselling grace for years. I’m not here to necessarily teach you all the right ways to now apply that knowledge, but just to notify you that it’s likely your knowledge has gaps.

Knowing this, it’s easy to see why the church is so absolutely ineffective at everything it does: you’ve got a group of people trying to live godly lives in their own power. This is why you hear phrases like, “Yeah, I’m not living right, but thank God for grace!” No, grace doesn’t just forgive you, it teaches you, and it empowers you. It is the secret sauce of Christianity.

Now I can already hear my Pentecostal friends bringing up that the Church has lost its power because there’s too many Christians that aren’t “Spirit-filled”. This would be referencing what Jesus said in Acts 1:8 that the disciples would receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on them.

I’m not here to argue for or against the baptism of the Holy Sprit. What I am here to tell you is that the power they received is synonymous with grace. How can I say that? Well, the cliff notes version is that the Holy Spirit is the manifestation of grace, and the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Grace (see (1 Corinthians 12:7 and Hebrews 10:29), so the power of the Spirit is for all intents and purposes synonymous with the power of grace. Since this is a supposed argument, that’s all I’ll say for now. I may go in depth on that another day. Or I may not. WILD CARD.

If the church figures this out, you’ll hear sermons begin to change. You won’t hear pastors preaching about just how good god’s grace is, or just how thankful we are for god’s grace that saved us. You wouldn’t just hear Christians talking about grace being their cover up for the sins of the week. You wouldn’t see people treating grace as their golden ticket to heaven.

You would hear pastors teaching us to be desperate for the grace of God, because it is our direct access to the divine nature of God. You know that divine nature that created the galaxies, that set the world in motion, that breathed life into mankind? That divine nature.

You would see Christians living lives that make a difference to everyone around them. They would become rulers in their realms of life, letting their light shine before men, letting others see their good works. You would see a people eternally secure, They wouldn’t be “just another sinner saved by grace”; they would become more and more radically different over time, because they would have direct access to the divine nature of God. You know the divine nature that is so holy no one can look upon it and live? The divine nature that looked upon the broken state of things and decided to give itself up as a ransom for many? That divine nature.

Do you have any idea what you have access to once you understand what grace is? And here we are, peddling it off as mere forgiveness and favor. What a waste.

As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. 2 Corinthians 6:1 | NIV

How could we ever receive the kind of grace the American Church offers in vain? This empty, powerless, one-time injection of grace used like a token that gets us a seat on the bus to heaven. No, while we have wasted our time accepting this neutered grace, there is a real gift of grace and more grace waiting for us to receive it. And, my friends, the world depends on us getting this right. They need to see us walking in the power of Grace, so that they may be drawn by our light.