The Cycle of Grace at Work

Every day around 2:00 PM, I am done. My nervous system is fried to the point that I am irritable and edgy. But in my marketplace job, providing IT services for hundreds of end-users across multiple industries, I cannot just stop working for the day.

Have you ever been at a place in your life where you feel the same way? Maybe you are there now. Perhaps you hit a wall weekly instead of daily. Maybe the wall you hit arrives just before you pull into the driveway, and your family catches the edge of your personality instead of the depth of your heart.

Whether this is for you or for someone you know and minister to, I want to introduce you to The Cycle of Grace. It is a framework developed by Trevor Hudson and Jerry Haas, and I believe it will help you learn how to replenish the well of your soul, whether it is at the start of your day or at the edge of your capacity to stay present.

So, those are the elements: acceptance, sustenance, significance, and fruitfulness. Jesus filled up on his beloved identity and poured himself out by signifying who he was through fruitful labor, ministry, and service.

The Cycle of Grace is based on research conducted in the 1960s with an important question in mind: “Why are missionaries burning out on the field after only a few years?” Instead of spending countless hours surveying missionaries and sorting and coding data, the researchers decided to address the question with a question: “Well, how did Jesus sustain his own spiritual life in ministry in order to avoid burnout himself?” The research from that question led to what we have today: The Cycle of Grace.

Hudson and Haas claim that you can see a pattern, beginning at Jesus’s baptism and continuing into his early ministry. The pattern starts with the affirmation Jesus hears in the Jordan River, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” This declaration of acceptance and belovedness comes before Jesus has done any public ministry. It inaugurates his ministry out of a deep truth about his identity.

We then begin to see Jesus sustaining this sense of acceptance through various spiritual practices. You can call them “disciplines,” if you will, but Hudson and Haas see these as engagements with God that sustain Christ’s awareness of his belovedness. By sustaining his sense of identity as “beloved,” Jesus then signifies who he is through his ministry. His ministry’s significance flows from his sustained practice of embracing his beloved identity.

From these acts of ministry based on his identity, we see the fruitfulness of his life of service.

But there is more. Hudson and Haas point out that we are tempted, as was Jesus, to reverse the cycle – to try to be fruitful in order to gain significance, which we hope will sustain our attempts to gain acceptance. This, they call, “The Cycle of Works.” Instead of filling up with the input of a beloved identity in Christ, we try to pour out from the output of service so that we can receive what is already on offer: the love of the Father poured out through the Son and made constantly available through the Holy Spirit.

So, the time is 2:05 PM, and I have more than a dozen issues on my list. What can I do to keep from “rage quitting” or exhausting all emotional energy and becoming a zombie before I get home? Well, I could care less about my job and “do the least.”

But what if I close my eyes, and I hear again what I imagined Jesus saying to me this morning, “I am with you, Wesley. I am a mighty warrior who saves. I am not here to judge you harshly, but I will quiet you with my love and rejoice over you with singing. I see you. I love you, and I understand what you are going through. My grace is enough to get you to 5:00 and beyond.”

Could five minutes of Imaginative Prayer, a contemplative practice, really make a difference? If Hudson and Haas are right, then it will reconnect me to the identity I have in Christ, which will be the kind of input that will sustain me as I try to signify to others in the last three hours of the day that I am not simply a systems engineer, but I am a beloved child of the Father. The fruit of my labor may not be the kind that preaches a sermon or leads a worship service, but it is the kind of fruitfulness that I need in order to finish the day well and have the capacity to extend all the love I possibly can to the people on the other side of the drive home.

What about you? What if you sought out a spiritual practice that was rooted in engaging you with the truth of how much God loves and accepts you? How might that be the way to begin and sustain each day, each difficult conversation, each sermon you craft, or each line of code you need to write? Are you living in the Cycle of Grace, or are you toiling in the Cycle of Works? Fresh grace awaits to turn things around.