Charis and Pistos

As many of you may know, or may not know, we lived in Colorado for many, many years, and we always made the drive back here — back here meaning Granby, Missouri, southwest Missouri. It's an interesting drive, to be sure. For those who haven't made this drive before: take the scenery you have here, and go one hundred eighty degrees the other way — flat, no trees, swept plains. I-70 between Kansas City and Denver is pretty flat, and there's not a whole lot out there. Occasionally you have a little community here and there, a farming community, which is always good to see.

When we first started doing this, I noticed something — going both ways, but more coming back, because we were working people, and once we'd started our jobs, you couldn't really take the day off. So you'd leave after hours and make that drive. Coming back, you'd get to central Kansas, and you had these signs everywhere that said, "Jesus loves you. You are saved." Interesting, but okay — none of that's surprising. And you'd see these little cards everywhere. Basically it says, "Jesus is my Savior," and supposedly — I looked it up — if you read this card and say it, you're saved, and you'll go to heaven when you die.

To digress just a little bit — there's one community, I can't remember if it was Oakley, or Colby, or WaKeeney, one of those along the highway — where about every hundred feet they had a sign for one of all the churches in their town. There were probably ten or twelve different types, but the one that struck me the most was the "Drunkard Brethren." Really — Drunkard Brethren? Next time we made the trip, I looked again, and it was the Dunkard Brethren. But when you've been driving for eight, nine, ten hours straight, your mind does all kinds of things.

We see this online now, too, even more so. I don't know if you watch TV, but early Sunday mornings you'll have preachers on saying, "All you need to do is just accept Jesus, and His grace will cover you, and you will be saved — that's all you need to do." Is this what is written in the Bible? Does the Bible actually say this? What is the intent of grace as defined in the Bible?

So, a couple of definitions — we'll start with a couple from so-called Christian sources. From Christianity.com, they define grace as "God's favor toward the unworthy." That doesn't sound too bad. A second definition: "God's benevolence toward the undeserving." Doesn't sound too bad either. Merriam-Webster defines it as "unmerited divine assistance granted to humans for their regeneration or sanctification; approval or favor." To sum it up — if you take those and boil them down, grace is love that cares, and stoops, and rescues. Another way to put it: grace is God reaching downward toward people who are in rebellion against Him. I don't think that's too far from the truth, but a lot of these definitions tend to stop there. They don't go into detail about what it actually is. So many preachers say that if you say the words, "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior," you will be saved by God's grace.

Is this the understanding the New Testament writers actually had in mind when they wrote about grace? The title of this sermonette is "Charis and Pistos." In it, we will briefly explore grace from a first-century cultural lens, to help us understand how the apostles, and the early members of the church, understood grace. This is a huge and important topic for understanding God's true doctrine — we can't cover all of it here, but I would encourage you to do your own research, read the Bible, and make use of the material on the church's website if there's any confusion.

The word "grace" — the Greek word is generally "charis," c-h-a-r-i-s. It occurs 156 times in the New Testament, and it's common in Paul's letters as a greeting: "Grace and peace be unto you." Paul used it as an expression of the divine act of God's goodness. This greeting would sound foreign to secular society today, especially from the context of modern thinking. However, back in the first century, it would not have been foreign — the Greek-speaking people of that time would have understood exactly what "grace and peace be upon you" meant.

Languages change. Perceptions change. Deception gets introduced. In secular religion, or mainstream religion generally, the term "grace" has kind of been hijacked from what it actually meant in its original intent. From a first-century perspective, it implies and demonstrates a powerful relationship between a giver of gifts and the recipient of those gifts. To really understand grace, we need to go back to the culture and context of the first century, and use that as our lens for understanding what is meant by the word.

In the Roman world of the first century, only about four percent of Roman citizens held wealth. These were known as patricians. Most other citizens were known as plebeians — and that was still just a small minority of people who were actually citizens within the Roman Empire. Most of the empire consisted of conquered peoples, who were not citizens but were subjects of the Roman emperor. So four percent of citizens actually had wealth — it wasn't like it is in the United States and other places in the world today, where you have the wealthy, you have people who don't have much wealth, and you have a middle class in between that gets to enjoy a fair share of it.

Back in Roman times, specifically the first century, banks did not exist — at least not in the form they exist today. If an individual needed to borrow money to start a business, to do something in terms of an occupation, you couldn't just go down the road and say, "Hey, Mr. Banker, can I borrow ten thousand dollars to start my business?" And if you did find somebody who would loan it to you, it would be at incredibly high interest, and it would probably involve some form of slavery. If you defaulted, and they could find you, you paid with your life. They took it very seriously.

So there was an alternative in the first century — an unwritten relationship mechanism people could use to help one another. This was known as charis. This system was a patronage-client relationship. So what do we mean by this? An element of this relationship: you had somebody known as a benefactor, who could be exceedingly rich or influential, and if they saw value in something you could provide for them, they would offer you a loan, or sponsor you into whatever you wanted to do — into your specific skill. When you were sponsored, both parties knew there was no real way of paying it back. Someone might say, "Hey, you're a really good carpenter. I think you could grow your business. I'm going to sponsor you and get you connected to all the right people, and this will improve your business — but I'm going to want something back."

So when you were sponsored, you knew you could never pay it back — much like when God calls us. When God the Father calls us, and we receive the application of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no way we could ever pay that back. That is the form of grace that was understood in the first century. It was a two-way relationship: you had the benefactor, and you had the client who benefited from that relationship. However, the benefactor expected certain behavior in return — loyalty, for instance. They expected you not to badmouth them, and to abide by their rules and conditions.

There's a good book on this subject, and I'll take a couple of quotes from it, though we can't go into full detail here. It's called Relational Grace: The Reciprocal and Binding Covenant of Charis, by Brent Schmidt. A couple of key points: when a new client entered into a relationship of dependency with a Roman patron, they entered an agreement based on mutual trust and loyalty. The client was expected to show gratitude to the patron, and to render certain services to him, supporting his political, economic, and social activities. So you had this grace — they gave you favor — and there was an expectation that you would reciprocate it. In short, the new client might receive, to continue the quote, "needed funding or other important benefits," but he was now in a lifelong relationship with the patron, who expected a certain mindset from his clients, as well as acts of gratitude in return.

The second part of grace is faith, or pistos. It was understood that the patron would not be repaid; however, the expectation was that the client would remain loyal and grateful toward the patron. So when God calls us, and we are offered grace through Jesus Christ's sacrifice, there is an expectation that we will respond with loyalty. And how are we loyal? By keeping God's commandments — not just the physical part of it, but the spiritual intent behind them. So instead of just not physically committing murder, which I don't think any of us would do, there's also the murder that happens in God's eyes: "Well, I wish that person was dead," for whatever reason. That's murder — that's intent. It comes from the heart, even when the physical act isn't there.

Just as the patron expected loyalty from the client, God expects loyalty from us. And how do we show that loyalty? We keep His laws. We live by the statutes outlined in the word of God. And it's not a "once saved, always saved" — say a couple of words and you're saved and don't have to worry about it ever again. God knows that we're all human. We're frail. We're weak. We can be heavily influenced by Satan if we're not careful. So He put a mechanism in place: knowing this about us, we can come before Him, ask for forgiveness, and be forgiven of sin. It's a journey — we may not get from point A to point B in a day. It may be a lifelong process, given some of the things that hold us back. But the trend line should be going up, meaning we should be making improvement, even if it's a little at a time. Improvement is improvement.

So a Christian is expected to commit to becoming a new person when God calls them. We've all made that commitment — we chose to be baptized, and said, "I don't want this old way of life, Satan's way of life. I want to be like my Father in heaven, as His child," casting off the old sinful ways. A new relationship is formed through this process of grace.

In Romans 12:1 — I'll be reading from the NIV — it states: "Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship." We, as fallible humans, will fail. The application of grace saves us. Jesus, our patron, pays the penalty of sin, which we could never pay Him back. It would be impossible. When we repent, we are cleansed of sin and restored to a right relationship with God, our divine patron, through Jesus Christ — reciprocating the divine grace given to us, with trusting belief and faithfulness in God toward our patron. We do His will, and we are now indeed His slaves — not in a negative sense, but in the sense that when we wake up, our first question is, "How do we please our Father? What do we need to do to please Him? How do I live my life in a way that's pleasing to Him?" As Paul mentions in Romans 6:14, we are truly not under the law — meaning its penalty — but under grace, because He paid with His life for us. Our life is no longer our own; it's His.

To summarize and conclude: when reading and interpreting the Bible, we often need to understand the culture and context in which it was written, not simply impose our modern interpretation of how things should be — as we see so often in mainstream Christianity. The first-century audience would have understood this concept of grace. We understand it, here in the church, but the world does not, because their perception of grace has been skewed. If we don't understand the context, we miss the point.

We have a patron, Jesus, the giver of everlasting gifts, whom we cannot possibly repay. We, His clients, are to be faithful and honor Him by living according to the standard He laid out in His law. Being human, we will fail — and upon heartfelt repentance, He extends His grace, His charis, to us as we strive to be like Him. Our patron provides us an annual reminder of His grace. We are to examine ourselves daily, finding areas where we can improve. We are to go to Him daily, seeking His forgiveness. He will extend His charis to us. His word is true, and God does not lie.