A tough old cowhand swaggered into a saloon and began drinking whiskey straight from the bottle. The more he drank, the more unruly he became. Before long, he was firing his six-shooter into the ceiling and the floor, terrifying everyone in sight.
Nobody dared confront him.
Finally, the town’s short, mild-mannered storekeeper walked up to the troublemaker, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “I’m giving you five minutes to get out of town.”
Without a word, the old cowhand holstered his gun, pushed his whiskey aside, hurried out of the saloon, climbed onto his horse, and rode out of town. The townspeople were astonished.
After he was gone, someone asked the storekeeper, “What would you have done if he hadn’t left in five minutes?”
The storekeeper shrugged and replied, “I’d have given him another five minutes.”
We laugh at the story, but there is something painfully familiar about it. We live in a world where life-threatening deadlines are announced with great seriousness, only to be extended, postponed, and extended again. What was urgent yesterday becomes negotiable today. Eventually, we begin to wonder whether life-threatening deadlines mean anything at all.
Unfortunately, many Christians approach God in much the same way. They assume that if they miss a deadline, God will simply extend it. They take God’s mercy for granted and God’s judgment far too lightly.
“I sin. God forgives me. That’s God’s job.” And so they go on living as though nothing really needs to change.
The great Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a name for this attitude: “cheap grace.” Cheap grace is forgiveness without repentance, mercy without conversion, and discipleship without sacrifice. It is wanting the blessings of Christianity without accepting the demands of Christ. But grace is not cheap.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer found this out personally. Adolph Hitler executed him at Buchenwald in July, 1944 at the age of 39.
In fact, we can never fully appreciate the wonder of God’s grace until we recognize the seriousness of our sins and the reality of God’s judgment.
Jesus makes this unmistakably clear in His Parable of the Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1–14). A king prepares a magnificent wedding banquet and invites his guests. But when he enters the banquet hall, he notices a man who is not wearing the proper wedding garment.
“Friend,” the king asks, “how did you get in here without a wedding garment?”
The man is speechless. The king then orders him bound and cast into the outer darkness, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
These are unsettling words. They are meant to be. Jesus is reminding us that God’s invitation is generous, but it is not meaningless. We cannot accept the invitation while refusing to prepare our hearts for the feast.
The wedding garment is more than a piece of clothing. It represents the transformed life of someone who has taken God’s invitation seriously.
And that brings us back to the old cowhand and the storekeeper.
We cannot spend our lives assuming that every deadline will be extended. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road, promising to change tomorrow what we know we should change today. Our sins are serious business.
The wars, the suffering, and the tragic loss of innocent lives in places like Ukraine and Iran are serious business. So are the smaller acts of selfishness, dishonesty, indifference, and cruelty that wound the people closest to us.
Sin matters because people matter. And people matter because they are loved by God.
But here is the beautiful truth.
God does not warn us about judgment because He wants to condemn us. He warns us because He wants to save us.
His mercy is greater than our sins, but His mercy is never an excuse to continue sinning. Grace is free to us, but it was never cheap.
It cost Jesus His suffering, His blood, and His life upon the cross. And because He loves us so deeply, He offers us something extraordinary: not simply forgiveness for yesterday, but the grace to become different people tomorrow.
God wants every one of us at His heavenly banquet. He invites us. He welcomes us. He even offers to clothe us in the garments of His love, mercy, and righteousness.
But we must be willing to put them on. The greatest danger is not that God will refuse to forgive us.
It is that we will keep postponing our response to His forgiveness until there are no tomorrows left. The door to God’s mercy is open today.
By Medard Laz
“I sin. God forgives me. That’s God’s job.” And so we go on living as though nothing really needs to change. Have YOU ever said that and felt that way in YOUR life?
SAD? Pray! OVER-THINKING? Pray! GIVING UP? Pray! HURTING? Pray! DEPRESSED? Pray! STRUGGLING? Pray! WORRIED? Pray!
