REALITY: If It’s Not Scandalous, It’s Not Grace
Written by Russ Johnson
Think of this as a short eBook we decided to give away here — minus the fancy design and pages to swipe.
The Parable
of The House Lights
The kingdom of God is like a house you keep trying to break into—only to discover you’ve been living there the whole time.
In a world governed by conditional promises, you were taught to knock on the door. Wait. Bring the right words. Clean yourself up on the porch before you dared step inside.
You were told the door opens if you insert the right coin. Belief. Sincerity. Good behavior over time. So you learned to jingle the change in our pocket and hope it was enough.
But the house lights are already on.
Not because you asked.
Not because you meant it this time.
Not because you finally got the prayer right.
They’re on because someone never left.
You walk the halls like a guest who overstayed. Careful not to touch anything. Waiting for the moment someone clears their throat and asks what you’re doing here.
It never happens.
The furniture is worn where bodies have rested. The fridge hums like it knows your name. There are fingerprints on the glass that look suspiciously like yours.
You keep expecting terms. A lease. A test. A performance review disguised as love. Instead, there’s presence.
Not approval waiting on belief like a coin-operated machine. Just a God who made His home here and never packed a bag.
Grace, it turns out, isn’t a transaction you complete to get inside. It’s the shock of realizing you were never outside — and no one was keeping score of how many times you doubted it.
Religion taught us to live like squatters, constantly justifying our stay. Grace teaches us to sit on the couch, kick off our shoes, and finally exhale.
Why this feels unfamiliar.
We are generations deep into a story about God that slowly became distorted. Which is why, to understand the nature of His grace, we have to back up to the beginning of the story.
You see, before there was a single commandment, there was God. And God was not alone. Father, Son, and Spirit—an eternal circle of love, delight, and laughter (Gen 1–3).
This is the fellowship we were created to share in, known as the Trinity. Wanting to share His life with us, “God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’” (Gen 1:26).
The writers of the Old Testament, like kids picking up breadcrumbs, saw hints of God’s togetherness. But like every human, they kept imagining Him through the only lens they knew: independence. Power. Control.
They thought freedom meant independence, not dependence.
So God did what only love does. He came closer in the person of Jesus, to show us what we’d missed.
Talking to the religious leaders who were certain they knew God, Jesus said: “No one knows the Father except the Son”(Matt. 11:27). What is He like? “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). And the Spirit? He doesn’t live in temples made by human hands. He made His home in people (John 14:17; 1 Cor. 3:16).
That’s what the first Christians believed. But that belief hit a wall when this good news ran into the Greek mind.
By the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the story of Jesus had spread into a world built on the ideas of Plato (428–348 BC)—the man who taught that reality was split in two: the perfect world of spirit “up there,” and the flawed one “down here.”
The Greek mind couldn’t handle mystery. They needed everything to fit neatly on a spreadsheet. And thus, their gods to be untouchable, and unimpressed.
So when Christians came along saying, “God became human—showed up in the person of Jesus, and revealed his kingdom is un us,” Greek thinkers nearly choked on their logic.
Impossible. The perfect cannot mingle with the imperfect.
So in their unwillingness to let mystery have the mic, they reached for management. And the split-God myth was born as church leaders adopted their thinking.
Grace stopped being the nature of who the Father is, and became a loan to unlock and make right on. Spirit and our body got separated. And people stopped seeing Jesus in the dirt and started chasing Him in the clouds.
Why this is hard to grasp.
When you have been taught, or have inherited, the idea that God is holy, distant, and waiting on the other side of a gap you need to cross, hearing you are home sounds like a foreign language.
Because the gap had rules. The right beliefs. The right behavior. Which means you learned to hide well. Not from God. For him.
Getting serious. Getting better.
The problem is you never quite get there. Nobody does. Which is why what Jesus kept saying about the kingdom of God lands the way it does — if you let it.
He compared it to yeast. “A woman took yeast and worked it into sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.” (Matthew 13:33)
Sixty pounds. That's not a home kitchen experiment. That's a professional baker. Which is why the point isn't the scale. It’s what yeast does once it's in the dough.
You can't separate it. You can't point to the corner of the bowl
where the yeast ends and the flour begins. It becomes one with the dough. Inseparable. Indistinguishable. Already working long before the bread rises.
And Jesus said: that's the kingdom of God.
Not something you invite in.
Not something you qualify for.
Yeast already in the dough of the world.
Already doing what it does in everyone.
The person who never went to church. The one who walked away furious and swore they'd never go back. The one who is absolutely convinced God wants nothing to do with them.
All of it already has the yeast in it.
Jesus said it himself when the Pharisees who opposed Him asked him when the kingdom of God would come. His answer stopped them cold.
"The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed… For in fact, the kingdom of God is in your midst." (Luke 17:20-21)
At first glance, this verse doesn’t create a gasp. But that’s because these aren’t the words Jesus spoke that day. The Greek word He used — entos — doesn't mean nearby. It means inside.
The kingdom of God… it’s already inside you.
A guy named Paul discovered this. Standing in Athens, surrounded by philosophers and skeptics had never heard of Jesus. Paul pointed to their statue they had for “the unknown god,” and told them:
"He is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:27-28)
Already. Every one of you standing here.
Paul was speaking from personal experience. He described his own awakening, saying God "was pleased to reveal his Son in me." (Gal 1:15-16) Not to him. As someone who lived in him.
What changed on that road wasn't God's location. And once that string got pulled, everything he thought he knew about God’s grace started to unravel.
Because if Jesus was already in him while he broke the rules, and before he ever believed, then the whole architecture of his religious life was built on a gap that was never there.
Which is exactly what he says when he writes to the people in Ephesus. He doesn't warn them that God is distant and they need to close the gap.
He tells them some people are living "alienated from the life of God... in the futility of their thinking, darkened in their understanding." (Ephesians 4:17-18)
The alienation. The idea of separation Plato made popular, Paul says it exists only in their minds. The same one many of us have been handed and never thought to question.
The good news is God never moved.
The yeast was always in the dough.
Holiness… without religion.
Now, if you are like me, you may be wondering: does this idea of grace undermine God’s holiness?
Not at all.
The Hebrew word for “holy,” qadosh, describes what is set apart, unlike anything else. And what sets God apart is His fullness. He isn’t served “as if He needed anything” (Acts 17:25). The Triune God is whole, complete, lacking nothing and needing nothing. His is holiness isn’t a fragile purity that needs protecting.
And that matters. Because holiness doesn’t mean God can’t touch sin. It means sin can’t survive God’s touch.
Under the Law, the touch should make Jesus unclean. Instead, the leper becomes clean. Jesus doesn’t become unclean.
When the woman with the issue of blood grabs Jesus’ cloak, another clear no-no in the Law, she’s healed. He isn’t defiled.
That’s holiness. Not withdrawal, but invasion. Not purity that separates, but a love that’s so whole it restores.
Which is why the incarnation matters so much: “The Word (Jesus) became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14)
It doesn’t hit us the way it hit the early Christians. The original Scripture says Jesus “dwelt”—literally, tabernacled—en hēmin: in our midst, among us.
God’s holiness doesn’t mean He had to shine His light on the darkness from a safe distance. It means He was able to enter the darkness inside us.
Of course, this gracious God doesn’t fit our instinct for what counts as justice. But in Scripture, God’s wrath isn’t rage. It’s love refusing to abandon us to delusion.
Romans 1 says His wrath is revealed when He “gives people over” to their illusions—letting us experience the emptiness we insist on chasing.
Not because He dislikes us. But because He refuses to make peace with the lies that keep dismantling our lives. And that refusal took Him all the way to a cross to undo our spell.
2 Timothy 1:9–10 tells us that God’s grace “was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
Grace, it says, was given before time had a first page. Neither Jesus’ coming nor the cross made grace possible. Jesus made visible what had always been true.
Which gives us a way to hear Romans 3:25 differently. When Paul says Jesus was “set forth as a propitiation for our sins,” the Greek word he uses—hilastērion—is the word used for the mercy seat: the meeting place where God and humanity meet.
Sin, as we’ll see in the next Reality, is described as a distorted view of God, and expressed as our distrust of Him. “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3).
And since “for our sins” (hyper tōn hamartiōn hēmōn) can carry the sense of because of our sins (i.e., our delusional distrust), we begin to see why we needed Jesus to make grace visible.
In our distorted vision of God, we have been conditioned to define ourselves and defend our righteousness—instead of receiving His.
Jesus’ death wasn’t payment for our sin. It was participation: God entering our blindness, showing us how far He will go to expose the human heart that would rather crucify Love than trust it.
And that’s the scandal.
Due to the story of God we’ve inherited, these verses are often lost or mistranslated. Which is why letting them mean what they say is often met with: “that’s cheap grace.”
But if grace depends on our ability to obtain it or validate it, it is no longer, by definition: grace. It’s credit. And credit always comes with a bill.
That’s why the grace Jesus reveals doesn’t come with a price of admission; it’s what awakens you to the truth that you were already at the party.
In short: grace isn’t soft on the sin dismantling humanity. Grace is God not allowing our sin to define us. Perhaps why Ephesians 2:8 says: “By grace you have been saved through faith.”
“Grace” is what has “saved” you, past tense. “Through faith” is a reference to the pair of glasses that lets you see and recline in what has always been true.
That’s why Paul immediately adds: “This is not from yourselves—it is the gift of God.” (v.9) Because there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to qualify for a gift you already have.
1 John 2:12 couldn’t be more clear. We, “have been forgiven on account of his name.” Jesus didn’t reconcile some things. He “reconciled all things.” (Col 1:20)
The question is:
Will we sit on the couch, kick off our shoes, and finally exhale?
REFLEX