Activating Your Grace License
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Did you know that you were born with a Grace License?
What? Didn’t they teach you about your Grace License in school, or church? I’ll bet you never even saw it on a PBS documentary: “Frontline: The Grace Influence That Changed the World!”
Of course in American English “grace” is both a noun, a verb and also a feminine name. In this week’s article to activate your Grace License you must learn the requirements of both literal definitions. In this context your Grace License combines who you are with what you do.
By far and away the greatest problem you will face in activating your Grace License is the reality that you have one to begin with. Our evolving world, which began through random events and got us to where we are today; just doesn’t possess the intellectual capacity to give us a reasonable explanation of the concept of any type of grace.
To say that God created us with a Grace License fully answers that origins question, but carries with that acknowledgement, a reality and a responsibility beyond our own individual and collective evolving rationality — or could that be better be defined as folly.
Since we live in a post-modern age in which people who acknowledge a belief in God are stupid, primitive and without the intellectual ability to understand the finer nuances of the rapidly evolving progressive social order, the stage is set for some reality adjustments, or in true scientific terms, “the survival of the fittest.”
For the last few weeks we have been discussing the end of the Industrial Age and the beginning of an Individual Age. However if we look at this transition beginning with the financial collapse and bailouts in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we state this transition by an Individual Age eschewing of the space-time continuum. Put in the true axiom of the age, “If it is all about me, it must be about me now. Didn’t you see my Tweet?”
While not acknowledged as such, there is a developing body of evidence that the slow but increasingly rapid decline of the Industrial Age began in the 1960’s and we were well on our way through Vietnam, Nixon’s closing of the gold window and the stagnation of the Carter Administration.
The popularity of the Reagan Revolution, which we still see being eulogized in conservative Republican Party circles, only slightly prolonged the inevitable, and that was truly accomplished not by Reagan, but through the reign of Alan Greenspan and his “Atlas Shrugged” manipulations of the US Federal Reserve.
Since The Wonder Springs Chronicle bases its philosophy on a “Biblical Creation Worldview” it would be wise to refer readers to the Phylogenesis portion of The Creation Leadership Center. At the very bottom of this brief summary of Business Ecology you will find a graph of the Sin Cosmos. Along the timeline at the bottom of this curve you could insert the identifier “Industrial Age.” You could also do the same for the other curves of Natural Lifestyle developments. Notice the only one of those curves has a successful outcome in what would be called a sustainable ecosystem and that is the Climax Curve.
What this really means is for the last fifty years we really just squandered repeated opportunities to make the world a better place, in a complex human and environmentally sustainable way, and now we are truly beginning to pay lip service to some tacit attempts to pay the bills in a more literal sense than we would like to believe.
To put this in a true earth timeline that both biblical creationists and progressive evolutionists can agree. The meltdown and the financial bailouts that followed were just doomed attempts to keep the dinosaurs alive long past the institutional dinosaur era of human history.
The evolutionary collective elitist however would say we are evolving to a New World Order of collective intellectual freedom. That sort of sounds like swapping deck chairs on the Titanic to me, but then again, I would rather look at the complexity of the intellectual reality involved in this grand design as well as the infrastructure, the ecological energetics, and the unifying leadership abilities to bring this about their New Order. In any cognitive sense of reality of the real world, the resources and the planning are just flat impossible and no leaps of hope and-or faith is going to change that reality.
All of this fits in with Glenn Beck’s theory of the progressives trying to collapse the system. He seems, just like the progressives, to promote a lot of views heavy on the inevitable, which is going to happen on its own and he much travails toward that collapse. To prove this point, I had just written the previous sentence when my electric power went off at the beginning of his show Tuesday afternoon. Power just came back on as I began to write this sentence on laptop battery power some two and a half hours later.
Back on Monday, Beck was talking about the battle between good and evil. This abstract concept really does not advance anything, because historic Christianity teaches us that God, created each individual in his image as good, but through choice, sin and evil became part of our unique personality structure. The battle between the two takes place in what we call conscience and truly defines significantly the parameters of the struggles we face every day. That struggle becomes rapidly easier if we decide to activate our Grace License. These individual choices, while it makes for a grand scheme of things, does not really expand into amorphous good and evil choices or results.
The specific revelation of Christianity states that by the grace of God alone, Jesus the Christ became the propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of mankind. In historic Protestant circles that means that we are justified and adopted into the family of God.
Throughout human history however, common grace is by definition the understanding of the Grace License by which human communities are created and sustained. The major blessings of the Industrial Age were the things that improved our lives. The major problems it created were the a result of specialization; that greatly simplified human individuals into robots on the assembly line, which just became a sunk cost of producing the ever increasing diversity of widgets.
In other words during the Industrial Age, things replaced people as the highest and best fruits of human enterprise. In the Individual Age our widgets will become secondary helpers for us to achieve and ever increasing diversity of human opportunities. This will take place because of the continual increasing activation of individual Grace Licenses.
How will this change in society take place?
My dad was a public education school principal within the small rural communities of eastern Washington. As I grew up he taught me that he used only one management tool in regards to the people and the students under his supervisory control. That one rule was simply support your teachers. That was true when he thought they were doing a good job, it was also true when conflicts arose between him and others on his staff. To the outside world, the teachers were always right, and if they were consistently wrong they were encouraged to seek employment elsewhere.
What I also learned was there was an unspoken rule that was implied also. That was his students were treated as individuals with unique gifts that needed to be developed and encouraged. Many times that came into conflict with authoritarian parents, who sought not so much to educate their children, but rather to keep them in line with predetermined rigid standards of behavior. In other words, kids needed to be kids during that time of life; they would be adults for the rest of their lives. If treated as developing individuals, once outside of school they could and would act in the manner of totally responsible citizens.
During his career we moved from community to community generally every five to seven years. The longest time was nine years in Reardan, where I went through my eight years of elementary school. The shortest period I remember was two years. The spoken reason for moving was that the new job always paid more money, but I always wondered if there was more involved. He died before I got to ask him that question specifically, but recently I think I have developed that understanding. More about that as we close out today’s article.
When I went into the Army, while I didn’t realize it, my dad’s understanding of always supporting your people was fully part of the way I treated others. When you take out time for schooling and reassignment I was blessed to spend my active duty career in what is generally called “command time.” In the communications intelligence area, that was more people time than many officers received in a twenty-year career.
These two instances as well as many more teach a fundamental truth of activating your Grace License, that is leadership, is really the empowerment of others to do their job. These results will always surpass the results by those who attempt to keep people in their place within an artificial hierarchy.
The goal of leadership is to accomplish the mission, however and wherever that may be defined. By definition leadership gives the authority to accomplish the task at hand, however the power to achieve those goals comes from those you have been chosen to lead.
In the military that basically means, support your NCOs and your NCOs will support you. In education that means if you support your teachers, they will support you. What that means in essence is that you need to activate your Grace License and use it wherever you may be.
However many times those who can’t lead are threatened by those who think power and authority have some indivisible unity. Sometimes those authority-power battles to prove the obvious are not worth fighting, because any rewards will produce significant chaos, and are best left with God to rectify the situation.
There is a song that was recorded by Kathy Mattea entitled “Give It Away.” The essence of the song is that I had it all in the world’s view, but by circumstances essentially beyond my control, that all was lost. However in place of that all, we are given a gift, but we quickly learn that the only way we can keep that gift, is to “give it away.”
In this context and in the world in its increasing ugly whole; that gift is the gift of grace. In the context of this article, when you lost it all that meant so much to you before, God activated your Grace License and that activation truly changes your life. It also makes you a citizen of the Individual Age. When the Individual Age becomes more pronounced, beyond the current stupendous times, it will no longer be about me, but graceful opportunities I have to share with everyone that I am blessed to come in contact.
What is happening around the world is the process to allow each person to understand the reality we only hear at Christmas, “It is better to give than receive.” But in true passing Industrial Age context, today we still define that giving in material rather than graceful terms.
Now there is a prerequisite for activating your Grace License and that is to realize that grace is not conforming others into your likeness, but rather providing others with your resources to truly become Individual Age participants. If you are struggling with your own Individual uniqueness it will be impossible to activate your Grace License.
This will be particularly difficult for those people who have had an understanding of Christian doctrines, but have for some reasons decided that they have become too enlightened, sophisticated, or evolved, to believe that it isn’t human fortitude that made this world, but rather God’s grace alone that matters.
The analogy is your Grace License allows you to wear your individuality on your forehead or on your sleeve, where others can take it and abuse you. If you currently are not comfortable with your individuality, the only secure thing to do to protect your individuality and your Grace License is to hide them deep within your soul.
Outwardly, just as in the song, you are in the process of losing what you thought were your gifts to yourself and to mankind. The more you try to protect that insecurity the more obnoxious you become, yet you think you are only trying to help.
What this points to is that there are a lot of disciples of their specific revelation of religious grace. However in the Industrial Age that was really just the application of religious law, generally at the expense of natural law. In other words the Christian religion has become just another of the world’s religions. To be a Christian all it took was to respond to application of a conversion means, and repeat that revival as oft as necessary, until it stuck, or you gave up.
The activation of your Grace License is really just, “Mere Christianity” to quote C. S. Lewis, or “Religionless Christianity” to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is not for those who are righteous in their own eyes, it has never been so, however even in its uncommon commonness, it is the power of God unto salvation, and also the power of grace the maintains the world.