August: Living Under Grace

Every August has a particular texture. The long light of early summer has begun to shorten. School supplies appear in the stores while it is still too hot to think about school. Vacations are ending or already over. There is a sense of one thing finishing and another about to begin, which makes it a fitting month to take up the theme that runs through Romans 5 to 8: what it means to live under grace rather than under sin and law.

Paul puts the theme in a single sentence at the end of Romans 5. Sin reigned in death, but grace now reigns through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Two reigns. Two kings. The question of the month is which one is actually governing your ordinary days, not which one you affirm in principle.

This matters because many Christians believe in grace and live under law. We know we are saved by what Christ did, and then we get out of bed and try to earn God's approval all over again through our performance. We tie our sense of standing before God to how the morning devotion went, whether we lost our temper, how the diet is going. We call this being serious about holiness. Paul would call it forgetting the therefore of Romans 5:1. Justification is settled. Peace with God has been made. Everything else grows out of that ground or it does not grow at all.

The opposite error is just as real. Some hear that grace has increased where sin increased and quietly conclude that sin does not matter much anymore. Paul anticipates that reaction at the start of Romans 6 and answers it bluntly. Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means. We died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? Grace does not lower the standard; it changes the person. Living under grace does not mean living carelessly. It means living from a new identity rather than toward one.

So through this month, the daily pieces will walk through Romans 5 to 8 and keep returning to a few questions. What does it mean to be united with Christ in his death and resurrection, so that sin's claim on you has been broken? What does it mean to be led by the Spirit rather than driven by the flesh? What does it mean to be adopted, to call God Father, to be an heir? And what does it mean that nothing in all creation can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus?

None of these are abstract. They bear on how you handle a bad habit, how you speak to your children, how you recover from a failure, how you face illness or loss. Grace is not a doctrine to be filed. It is a reign to be lived under, and August is a good month to learn its laws.

A suggested practice for the month: each morning, before anything else, say aloud one sentence from Romans 5 to 8 that names what is true of you in Christ. There is now no condemnation. You are not under law but under grace. You have received the Spirit of adoption. Say it before you have done anything to deserve it, because that is the whole point. Then go and live the day as someone for whom it is already true.