Grace and Truth Relationship: Finding Authenticity With God and Others

By Douglass R. Palmeter

How we think we grow in relationships is not always how we do grow. We grow in Grace and Truth Relationships. Grace and Truth relationships are authentic and life changing. We often perform for others, isolate ourselves, or just try not to care. It is only as we experience grace and truth from both God and Others that we grow as a person. Sometimes we think, "Heck no, I don't need you, I've got God. We need to be connected both to God and Others. A relational Grid is introduced that helps people understand where they are in relationships and what they need to do to move to authentic ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781329994751

Book preview

Grace and Truth Relationship: Finding Authenticity With God and Others

Grace and Truth Relationships

Finding Authenticity

with God and Others

Douglass R. Palmeter

Copyright 2015 by Douglass R. Palmeter.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

ISBN978-0-692-65911-3

Unless otherwise noted:

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Contents

Grace and Truth Relationships

Copyright 2015 by Douglass R. Palmeter.

Preface

Chapter 1 - Back to the Garden

Chapter 2 - Giving and Receiving Grace

Chapter 3 - The Grid

Isolation

Performance

Total Excess

Grace and Truth

Chapter 4 - Is it Safe?

Chapter 5 - It Takes Two to Tango

Chapter 6 – Relationships and the Grid

Chapter 7 - The Grid in Review

Chapter 8 - The Way it Used to Be

Chapter 9 - There are no Limits?

Chapter 10 - Who’s Guilty Judged and Forgiven?

Chapter 11 - Believing Lies

Chapter 12 - Shooting a Sitting Duck

Chapter 13 - I Can’t Lift a Car

Chapter 14 - Will the Real You please stand up

Chapter 15 - I’m not What I Do

Chapter 16 - Desire in a Fox Hole

Chapter 17 - God Doesn’t Admire Trash

Chapter 18 - Her Story, My Story, Your Story

Appendix A - The Pharisee + the Tax Collector

Appendix B - The Grid, Questions for Discussion and Thought

Appendix C – Questions on Boundaries and Limits

Appendix D - Earning Grace Never Happens

Appendix E - More on The Grid

Appendix F - Sayings

About The Author

Preface

It is embarrassing that in two decades of ministry I never really had a theology of growth. I taught hundreds of students that to grow we need to read the Bible, pray, fellowship, and share our faith. Through this a lot of students matured. But I never really understood how and why these activities or disciplines cause growth.

In fact, it was even worse. There were many times when a student would do all those things and even more, yet four years later when he graduated he was no more mature than the first day I met him. What was going on?

I taught hundreds to walk in the Spirit and live by faith, and have seen many lives change. For years, I taught students to claim the promises of God as revealed in His word, I even taught that we could live by faith if we so chose. My theology of sanctification was a hodgepodge. If students did the right things, why were they not growing? Fortunately, we did a lot of right things but we didn’t really understand why they worked.

About 15 years ago, I became acquainted with Changes that Heal by Dr. Henry Cloud. He proposed a theology of growth without calling it that. Later he wrote another book, How People Grow, that dealt specifically with growth. But the seeds were planted. And for the first time we started to understand not what to do to help people grow, but to understand why they grew. People grow in the context of healthy relationships with both God and people. The first part of this book fleshes that out.

The second part of the book addresses barriers to relationship. One day, a few years ago, I was thinking about how guilty I felt. Nevertheless, I thought If Christ has forgiven me, why do I still experience guilt? If you knew me, you would know I admit to teaching some kind of heresy every year. You know, something I have always believed but wasn’t true. So this was my first thought. I must have stumbled onto yet another heresy. It could not be right that I need not experience guilt. I mean everyone did. Guilt was a result of God’s conviction, right? Guilt was good, because it helped us not to sin. Guilt let us know what sin was and so on. The strange thought wouldn’t go away: if God died to forgive us all our sin, make us alive and pure, then why was I feeling guilty?

This was not my only problem; was I in fact guilty? What should I feel if anything? If I was not guilty, then was I judged? If not judged, was I convicted? And how about those commands of Christ and even those that came through Paul which I had no hope of fulfilling? Would I dismiss them and adopt antinomianism and reject the law of God? As you can see, I was disrobed. Slowly, I tried out my thoughts on students; after all, I am a campus minister. It was really interesting, most Christian students fought me, but nonbelievers saw what I was saying as a breath of fresh air. Maybe I had something, or maybe I was really going wrong. Anyway, what do students know? So I tried my thoughts out on professional Christians: pastors, evangelists, and other ministers. What a mistake. Most of the time they would not even entertain the thought long enough to try to understand me. Guess I was barking up the wrong tree.

If I am anything, I am a learner and a fighter, so I didn’t give up easily. After one rather heated discussion with several pastors, (I’ll tell you about it later) I was so shaken I arranged to visit a rather scholarly pastor and laid it all out. He said, I wish I could say you are wrong, but maybe this is the Grace Reformation. (You can tell his theological bent.) 

Now, about what is called hyper-grace.  There are some today who teach grace but fail to see how God’s law, confession, and repentance apply today.  I don’t think I belong to that camp.  Their problem is not that they over emphasize grace but that they fail to see that Jesus came full of grace and truth.  While this book, in a large part, focuses on grace rather than truth it is because most of us today are missing out on grace.  This book attempts to bring us into the Grace and Truth relationships that we were designed for. 

The Grace Reformation continues in my life and in many I work with. I warned them to be careful who they tell about this. Those seeking grace tend to run in the same circles. They are fairly easy to identify. A couple years ago, I was at a coworkers wedding. I had led the groom to the Lord. It was really exciting. Anyway, I was seated with a pastor, you know, a Christian who is paid to be good. As usual I was becoming annoyed at shallow, polite conversation, so I said, Let’s talk about something deep. Do you think it appropriate for a Christian to feel guilt? To my surprise, he said no. I asked my usual follow up question, What happened to you? He unfolded the story of his life, and I understood.

So let’s get it out in the open and make it clear. First, I suggest it’s immature for a Christian to experience guilt. In fact, guilt encourages us to sin. Second, I propose a Christian is not judged when they fail and sin. Third, I hold that the Holy Spirit does not convict Christians of sin. Fourth, our conscience is unreliable, and therefore, not to be counted on for revealing sin in our lives. Fifth, we grow through relationships. Well, there it is.

I want you to think about it. Sometimes times I expect you to disagree, well, only at first, I hope.

Thanks,

Douglass R. Palmeter

Orono, Maine June 1, 2016

Chapter 1 - Back to the Garden

Life is Relationship

People often tell me to grow you need to read the Bible, pray, fellowship, and witness. Now, if this caused growth then seminary graduates would be mature, monks would walk on water, most churchgoers would be like Paul, and televangelists would never cheat and steal. The fact is these don’t cause growth. Relationship causes growth, but doing things to grow benefits only the believer as they are done in, and related to, relationship. The disciple John tells us eternal life is relationship (John 17:3). Growth is relationship. The Christian life is relationship. All of life is relationship. Outside of relationship, we live in darkness, and stuff in darkness stinks.

I remember when I was in fifth grade. My Mom sent an orange with me for lunch. Not much of one for oranges, I left it in my desk. With all the clutter and the top down it was nice and dark. It must have been about three weeks later when Mrs. Larson, from the front, no less, asked what smelled. She proceeded to walk the isles opening each desk. When she found the moldy and stinky orange, I was embarrassed. And that, by the way is exactly what happens when stuff is in the dark; it smells until it comes to light and then can be terribly embarrassing.

Eternal life is relationship. And if the Christian life is relationship, and growth happens through relationship it seems to follow that maturity is relationship.

Eternal life is to know God

I would not bet my life on this, but it seems to me the closer you are to Christ the more mature you will be. This introduces another thought. If closeness to Christ in relationship is maturity, then can a new believer be mature? Maybe so, I have seen a lot of new believers in their naïve enthusiasm live more in a way I desire than some who have walked with Christ over a lifetime.

Garden to Grace

God created us to have a relationship with Him. He created us with a relational need to be connected with Him and each other. But before long a significant problem entered the scene, or, as it may be, the Garden. Satan falsely promised Adam and Eve they could be like God (sounds pretty good) and operate independently from God (not good). They chose this sad alternative and sought to meet their needs and seek love for themselves.

The relationship with God was broken. This was signified by Adam and Eve attempting to hide from God in the Garden. Really, hide from God? Come on, how big can the Garden be? Anyway, they tried to hide. God and people were separated. In a way, the rest of history is defined by this act. All the wars, all the divorces, all the murder, rape and crime, all the manipulation, all the relational failures and evil are a result of people attempting to meet their needs and feel better by substituting human effort for love and relationship with God.

Sometimes Fran and I have an altercation, fight. The issue is usually so small we can’t even remember it the next morning. You can imagine, we don’t have a lot of relational intimacy in the evening.

Eternal life is relationship

Now, something else happened in the Garden: marital disharmony. God asked Adam what the scoop was, Did you eat the fruit…? Here it is, the first fight in all of history, Adam in his infinite stupidity says, It was the woman you gave me who… It’s always her fault. Relationship with Eve was broken. This broken relationship represents all the alienation between people since then. People became separated from each other, and thus, forfeited love in all its facets.

God asked Adam, Are you playing the blame game? What did you do? Eat the fruit I commanded you not to eat? Adam, the fool he was, without a thought said to God, "Eve, the woman you gave me, gave me the fruit to eat. In between the lines, it must have gone like this: I see, said God. It’s all my fault. Had I not given you Eve everything would have been alright. Eve said, Wow, slow down Adam boy, you were plenty ready to eat a little while ago, and now you are blaming me! No, you don’t. I didn’t shove it down your throat. You were ready and willing." Do you think Eve and Adam had much marital harmony in their relationship? I doubt it.

There was a separation in Adam and Eve’s relationship. Divorce is like death, so too is an intimate relationship broken like death. After the Fall, they failed to experience the same intimacy. They failed to have their needs met through their relationship. So they, as we, attempted to meet their needs on their own. We fantasize about others, we spend money to feel good, we play with big boy’s toys to experience fullness, and we judge and compare ourselves so we come out on top. These efforts promise good stuff, like Satan promised, but attempts to be fulfilled through ourselves ends in death.

There is an insidious aspect of how Adam answered God. "It was the woman you gave me. You see, it was God’s fault. Sounds like Adam was trying to justify himself in front of God. I’m not really too bad God. How contemporary this sounds! The blame game: You never told me, if you had…; Why didn’t you call?; He hit me first; and You never do the dishes."

Then there was a separation with themselves. Now, I know this may sound corny, but they lost touch with who they were. First, if they thought they were like God, they lost touch with the fact that they were created, finite human beings. Growing up, I always saw those pictures, in church, of these two people in the Garden. They were naked except for this big leaf. Do you think it was just a leaf. And was it big? Anyway, what does the leaf thing signify? They had started to feel uncomfortable with who they were. This was illustrated physically; they were too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too something. They did not like or accept who they were physically. This insults God, because it was God who created us the way we are.

People became separated from God and from each other, but also from themselves. Aren’t there areas of your life you really don’t like? I mean, there is actually nothing wrong with those areas, but you judge them? Don’t you wish you were different than you are? So, in a sense, the person we think, portray, and hope we are, is really separated from the truth.

Furthermore, we are separated from creation. We fight the soil for food, and we fight fire because the forests have been manipulated. We have to work to keep the skies clean and the rivers running. Nature itself groans for the day it will be made new and reunited. We have become alienated from God’s creation.

Last, we became separated from truth. Our basis for truth became ourselves. Looking to a finite, limited self for absolute truth is unreasonable, especially where there is an infinite all-knowing God. Maybe this is why philosophy has given up the pursuit of truth and settled for relativity and definitions.

In the Garden, we were separated. Separation is always the result of judgment. We do wrong, evil, and society judges us, then physically separates us in prison. We do evil in our family and become relationally and sometimes physically separated. Guilt is a normal experience when judged rightly.

Sometimes we are judged illegitimately by our self or others. This judgment produces false guilt, which we allow to relationally distance us from others and God. We hide and blame. And very often we think it’s God who judges us. We think this is appropriate and the resulting guilt is good and helpful. Isn’t it? The separation resulting from guilt and judgment only serves to separate us from each other and God; thus, forfeiting the love that could be ours.

God has made provision for forgiveness. This was first promised in the Garden. God said to Eve, her offspring would deliver people from their predicament. When Jesus came, He died so we could be forgiven. When we trust Him and respond to His love, He forgives us and starts a relationship with us. He enables us to have an authentic relationship with others.

Because those who have received forgiveness have been forgiven for all they have done and all they will ever do, there is no room for guilt. Colossians 2:13 teaches that God has forgiven all our sins: past, present, and future. Guilt results from judgment and judgment results from evil, but God stops the sequence by forgiving the evil. Christians are forgiven, so there is no judgment. If we are not judged, then where is the room for guilt?

Maturity is relationship

Guilt and judgment keep people separated. Because we grow in relationship with God and each other, judgment thwarts maturity. Think about how close you feel when you feel guilty around another person. You really would rather not be there, right?

Grace comes from God directly and through people indirectly. But, because it comes through people, it by no means makes people secondary to God in receiving grace to live. The opposite of grace is judgment. Judgment means no relationship, and grace is relationship. We grow in grace as we receive grace from God and others. Grace keeps us in relationship, which is maturity and eternal life (John 17:3). We get life through our dependence on Jesus. Adam and Eve lost life because of independence.

The Garden and our Design

What happened in the Garden? Fran and I work at a university campus mentoring students and leading them to Christ. We talk with people from many walks of life; pretty people and people like me, 4.0 students and those ready to drop out, dopers, homosexuals, athletes, atheists, Buddhists, fraternity men, nice people and not so nice ones (why do I sometimes like them better?), and many others. As you can imagine, we entertain a variety of questions. One day, a student caught me off guard, and that’s hard to do, after all, I went to cemetery, oops, I mean seminary.

He said to me, If there is a God, He has needs, so He can’t be God because God doesn’t have needs. Hum, I thought, I might be out of my league. He went on, If God is loving, then He needed to create us so as to have someone or something to love. Therefore, God has needs. Is that all, I thought. You see, God is a trinity of persons; three persons, one God. If there are really three persons and God is perfectly loving, He is able to express His love perfectly in the godhead so He does not need to create people. He argued something else I am sure. Sometimes students want an excuse not to face, or maybe admit, their evil and their need. Some students blow smoke, others have real questions on what God is like, but attack the question from the faulty wisdom of humans.

God is known by his attributes; love, grace, power, patience, justice, and others. Some attributes belong only to God and are not communicable to man; omnipotence, omniscience, life in Himself. People are capable of emulating other attributes, such as love, patience, and grace. We can’t love or grace like God, but we can love in our own way. Being contingent requires us to be dependent or be dysfunctional.

God worked in creation and He expects us to work. God created in creation and He expects us to recreate in the Garden. One attribute I want to pay special attention to is relationship. The relational nature of God is one of those attributes He has allowed us to participate in.

In Genesis 1:26 God says, let us make man in our image. God is relational and He made us relational. Genesis 3:8 indicates God Himself would have friendship with lowly man. They could walk in the Garden together. A little earlier we saw God’s perspective on being alone (Genesis 2:18). God