Extravagant Grace Is Extravagantly Good

Review of Extravagant Grace by Barbara Duguid

We’ve all heard the testimonies at church:

I was a terrible sinner headed straight for hell until someone shared the Gospel with me, and now I’m a Christian!

One problem with many modern Christians is that we hear this narrative and assume that “now I’m a Christian” means that the “I was a terrible sinner” part no longer applies. We assume that once we come to the faith, the “sin” business is over and done with and all we have to worry about is whether we’re as fully happy as we should be. Which in turn means that when we sin as Christians—and we will sin as Christians, let there be absolutely no doubt about that—we can be devastated. To help Christians think well about their post-conversion sin, Barbra Duguid has written the excellent little book Extravagant Grace.

There are three reasons (at least) you ought to read this book. First, Duguid does an excellent job of helping us think about just how sinful we are. Sin is not a thing we do occasionally. It is not something that we stumble into from time to time. Sin is rooted in human nature itself and touches everything we do. The fact that we don’t want to hear this just proves how sinful we are—we’d prefer to hear pleasing fictions about our inner morality and how much God loves us because we are inherently awesome rather than the truth about our wretched moral standing before a perfect God. Extravagant Grace encourages us to be honest about ourselves and so be better able to properly confess, repent, and grow in faith.

Second, Duguid points us towards the solution to the problem of our sin. Our sin will never be resolved by our own effort, intense emotions, or proper theology. While each of these have their place in the Christian life, at the end of the day if we try to build our hopes on any of them we are going to be perpetually disappointed. Instead we must turn to Christ, through whose life, death, and resurrection alone our sin is dealt with. As we mature as Christians, we should see both how deep our sin truly runs through our natures, and how much has been done by Christ to pay for that sin on the cross. Extravagant Grace reminds us to rest on this action outside of ourselves through confession, repentance, and faith rather than looking within ourselves for sinlessness.

Third, and the major merit of this book, Duguid offers much needed encouragement for those of us who will never not sin in this life—which of course is absolutely every Christian. You, me, our brothers and sisters in Christ both now and in the past, the Apostles, absolutely every single Christian is not just a former sinner—every Christian is an ongoing sinner. And although we have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and called to live holy lives, these lives will never be perfectly holy but will be shot through with sin. The Bible is so emphatic about this that it says if we deny the truth of sin in believers, we are liars and not truly believers at all. (I John 1:8) The more we mature as Christians the more we should see how deep our sin runs. As I’ve already mentioned, this fact can be devastating to believers who think that, in terms of morality, life will be smooth sailing once we have embraced the faith. Extravagant Grace offers counsel on how to continue as believers in the face of this ongoing cycle of sin-confess-repeat.

There’s probably an aside to be made about Duguid’s source material. Much of what she has to say is drawn from the letters of John Newton. The problem is that lazy, ignorant Americans (my words, not hers) simply refuse to take up and read old books. And I’m happy to include myself in that number to some extent. While I do try read the books of faithful men of the past from time to time, it’s always with a certain grudging wishfulness that I were reading something easier to read. But that’s a different rant for a different day…

The rant for today is that if you are a Christian who keeps sinning, and you are, you should read Extravagant Grace.

Dr. Coyle Neal lives as a chronic—but forgiven—sinner in Bolivar, Missouri.