It is a common phrase, and I am sure you have heard it many times over.
It acknowledges that only God’s grace keeps me from experiencing the deepest, ugliest scandal. But I don’t much like the phrase.
I grant that there is a sense in which I am completely dependent upon the grace of God so that if God does not continually extend His gospel grace to me, I will go completely off the rails. It is all of God’s grace.
But the sanctifying grace that God gives is not a standing-still kind of grace. I am not to passively rely upon the grace of God, as if that grace alone, without any action on my part, will protect me from all sin. God calls upon me to receive his grace and to be obedient to his Word. He gives the grace to obey.
I don’t want to model my life after a ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ kind of person. I want to model my life after a man who battles hard against every appearance and manifestation of sin. I want to model my life after a man who receives and revels in the grace of God and then exerts every effort in actively, tenaciously putting sin to death. I want to model my life after the kind of man who can humbly say, ‘That sin is unthinkable to me.’
I know that the root of that sin, whatever the sin, is somewhere within me. I know that without God’s grace I could not only fall into it, but dive headlong. And yet I am not intimidated by the sin because I am fleeing from it, I am putting the very first traces of it to death, I am acting on God’s grace as He so kindly extends it. I am calling out for His help and joining Him in this battle, in this war.
— adapted from Tim Challies