Transcript
I was sitting in traffic the other day. It was sort of one of those city scenes where the traffic is inching and it hit me that the scene that I was in was a powerful argument for the restraining grace of God because you have every automobile filled with a selfish, self-focused, self-oriented human being who knows what he wants and the cars around him are in the way of what he wants. Yet people weren't shooting at one another. They weren't bumping into one another. There was order. People were actually choosing to obey the laws of the traffic around them.
An Argument for the Grandeur of Grace
Well, that's not an argument for the purity of the heart of the humanity in those cars. That's an argument for the grandeur of the grace of God. God is working to restrain sin in the world that He made so it does not reach the level of horror that it could reach without His restraint. Now, why do I use a traffic example? God does that in everybody's mouth. God is restraining everyone. It's incredible to think if that restraint was removed, the horror of what would happen in every one of our relationships.
Now the fact of the matter is the Bible tells me that restraint is not enough. Restoration is what is needed. Transformation is what is needed. So everybody somehow, someway, receives the restraining grace of God, but restraining grace and redeeming grace are different things.
What I actually need is not just restraint. I did it. Let me say it again. What I actually need is not restraint. What I need is redemption. I need transformation. I need, not just my sin to be held back, I need my heart to be transformed so I don't sin in those ways anymore.
God at Work on Both Sides of Our Words
And so, you have God working on both sides in words. He's restraining humanity so we're not as evil as we would potentially be. And then in the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, He offers us the possibility of transformation, where my heart once only under the control of evil and particularly the evil of self, is now freed from that control, brought under the control of the Lord Jesus Christ, and is progressively transformed, so that my speech progressively becomes what it was designed to be.
Now, here's what I think we need to do with our words. We need to celebrate restraint - praise God for that - but we need to cry out for redemption. I'm not satisfied with restraint. I'm not satisfied with ending the conversation saying, "Well, that was good because it wasn't as bad as it could have been." I want to be delivered.
