Jul 10, 2025 5 min read justice and mercy

Grace and Law

We find within a new motivation and a desire to want to become all that God hopes us to be. We begin to understand that His yoke is easy and his burden is light, because our inner affections are being transformed to love what God loves. The law we hated now becomes the life we have always wanted.

Grace and the Law Coexist in Jesus

What is the relationship then between grace and law? Is the law nullified by grace? Do we not have to concern ourselves with the commandments this side of grace?

To echo Paul, “Absolutely not.” Dallas Willard states the connection between grace and law.

“The presence of the Spirit and of grace is not meant to set the law aside, but to enable conformity to it from an inwardly transformed personality …. Law comes with grace in the renewed soul. There is no such thing as grace without law. The law is the structure of the life of grace in the kingdom of God.”

This is worth pondering. Is Willard right? The law is still in force but now has a different role in a grace transformed heart. The same law that exposes our sinful hearts in the light of grace guides our steps.

Jesus’ command to love God with all we’ve got and treat our neighbor with the same regard as we do ourselves is meant to bring us to the end of ourselves. We hear this expectation and we say, “There is no way in the world, that in myself, I will ever be able to live up to this standard.”

We cast ourselves unreservedly on the grace of God and repent of our sin sick soul. Then we are flooded with the light of God’s accepting grace. Our hearts of stone are massaged alive to a heart of flesh that begins to beat within.

Transformation of the Will

Again it was Dallas Willard who led me to this breakthrough. In his very helpful article Spiritual Formation: What It Is, and How It is Done, he writes that to be fully formed in Christ is to come to that place where our natural impulses come to reflect the feelings, thinking and actions of Jesus’ Himself.

Willard states that the “will” is to the primary locus of this formation, the executive center of our being. Based on this premise, Willard identifies three dimensions or conditions of the will (He equates will and heart as we shall later see more fully).

The first dimension of the will he calls the impulsive will. The impulsive will is “directed or moved by or toward things that are simply attractive”. This is where a baby begins. A baby simply is drawn to what is enticing in their environment. Adults who don’t outgrow this impulse to simply do “what is pleasing to them” are driven by immediacy and are enslaved by their own desires.

This appears to be the cultural norm. Robert Bellah and a team of fellow sociologists went in search of the distinguishing characteristics of Americans. They published the results of this study in their classic work, Habits of the Heart. They found one quality that sets Americans apart from those of other cultures.

It is freedom, but unfortunately a rather skewed view of freedom. It is the freedom from obligation. This view of freedom can be summarized as follows, “I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it, and no one better tell me otherwise.” Bellah makes the point that this view of freedom as radical independence does not provide the basis for any long-term covenantal relationships, such as marriage nor even a relationship with God.

Willard goes on to say that as a follower of Christ, a person must adopt the practice of a reflective will. We begin to set up a dialogical process where the good that God intends is examined against our thinking, feeling and acting. We regularly reflect on our life in light of God’s revealed truth. For example, almost every day I begin my time of prayer with the ancient spiritual practice of The Examen.

My simplified version of this prayer is to ask the Lord through His Spirit to take me back through the previous day in order to review what He would have me pay attention to. I call this “praying backwards.”

My reflective questions are,

“Lord, in what way were You present in the interactions and events of the day?”
More specifically, “How were you at work?"
"What did I miss?"
"For what can I give thanks?”
Very specifically, “As a result of Your life in me, how can I be formed to respond and act more like You?”

I both celebrate God’s presence and my being in concert with his purposes while also carefully making note of the missed opportunities, a misspoken word, etc.

But the reflective will is on the way to a deeper goal, and that is what Willard calls the embodied will. This was where my “ah-ha” came. Willard, echoing Jesus, says it is possible to become so aligned with Jesus’ heart that our automatic responses, that is our embodied will, can be in tune with God’s heart so that His responses become our responses.

This is how I apply this to myself. Suppose someone were to come to me and say something like, “I don’t get why you want to be teacher or a pastor. You show no evidence of having that gift. What were you thinking when you went into this profession?”

Is it possible that the presence of Jesus could have so engulfed my inner and bodily reactions, that my first response would be to want to do good to this person who was insulting me, and that I would want only the best for their life?

To be formed in Christ is to say, “Yes, it is possible. Yes, this is what I would want my inner world to become. I want to be so in tune with Jesus’ life in me, that His embodied will becomes mine.