Grace

I remember my first year of becoming a Christian, it was the most romantic year of my life. Clint Crivello was 2701's pastor, and every talk he gave was like a stab at my newly throbbing heart for God. He gave a message about grace, I think for the most part it was the first time I ever really thought about it. I remember him beggining saying "Wow, grace, when asked to talk about this I really did not know what to say but grace is...". He tried to explain it, although everyone knows God and his grace are unexplainable. That first year was full of passion, this crazy desire for God. I ALWAYS relate to the church in Ephesus because they were this church that found God so quickly and just was obsessed with him, then just continued to get lost and bored along the way, forgetting the very reason why the fell in love in the first place (Revelation 2:2-5, all of Ephesians, Acts 20:17-35). So my first year was powerful, I knew it was not I who chose God but he who chose me, and it was all I thought about. I wasn't as aware of my sins, because all of my faults just melted when i thought of how real and how much I loved God. I read my Bible, talked about God, and prayed all the time, much like I do now but it's different. I have this continual battle of becoming obsessed with the sins I am committing, feeling terrible that I love God so much, and fail so much. I always tell my small group girls to not let guilt keep them from God, but that is the very thing I always let antagonize me. I hate the sin that lives in me, I try too follow the bible as much as Jesus did, and just can't, I'm just not him, I'm jut not perfect.(Romans 7). I feel like sometimes I am killing the life that God has stirred up in my heart, stripping beauty, stripping energy. I grow tired, because I think self-discipline will reignite the fire that I had with God in the beggining. But as any relationship, you can't be romantic all the time, I may not always feel in love. What sparked this re-contemplation about grace is me reading "Blue like Jazz" again. It started with Donald saying this "I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the fall, my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love things that kill me...I found myself trying to love the right things with out God's help and it was impossible...My answer to this dilemma was self-discipline. I figured I could just make myself do good things" He then continues to describe a year that he made a pact with a few fundamentalist Christians. they intended to thrive off self-discipline, fasting, not watching tv, no smoking,etc. clearly it didn't work out and Donald wrote "I hated the entire year. Hated it. I felt like a failure every morning...looking back I was too proud to receive free grace from God. I didn't know how to live in a system where nobody owes anybody else anything...thought I understood that God wanted nothing in return, my mind could not communicate this fact to my heart, so my life was torture...It seemed wrong to me to not have to pay for my sin, not to feel guilty about it or kick myself around...grace was too easy. I wanted to feel as though I earned my forgiveness"
Exactly what I feel, sometimes, given not always, I have points of accepting and rejecting grace, and times where I do torture myself and others with correction. Jesus said in John that loving him means following his commandments, and 1John talks a lot about living in the light, not letting anything take place in your heart where God should be, that loving God means following his commandments, that you don't know god if you don't love everyone, and that we ought to live our life for God because of all he has done for us. and I believe all those statements, I believe the bible is always right...but what? Is the key word "Ought"? does that mean I should live my life for Christ, but don't have too? (freewill, I know..) does living my life for Christ mean I am living just as Jesus did? I think that is impossible, I'm far to sinful. Galatians talks about dying to the law to live for God. And in Matthew Jesus talks about coming to fulfill what the law could not do, which was to make us right with God. So grace is hidden in there somewhere. But if you truly love Jesus...you obey his laws? Is that to obey them as best you can, or to really just obey them? Do you not love god if your not perfect? I think you can. My life goal is to store my treasures in heaven and to obtain heaven here on Earth. But I am on Earth, I am living i the wreckage of the fall. So how do I balance trying to be perfect and accepting grace? I don't think the answer would be try as best you can and when you fail accept grace. I can just walk, I just need to walk. Grace is incomprehensible. It's free, it's mine. Jesus already paid the price for me. I can't possibly earn it. I look at some older Christians I have in my life, they seem more at ease with themselves and God then anyone I know. It's not that they are sinless, but it is that they acknowledge they are sinful, and let god deal with it. They just walk and enjoy, they accept the amazing gifts God gives them, they don't feel bad about being imperfect and receiving such perfection from the Lord, they just accept. Isaiah 45 talks about God being a clay maker and us being clay. Clay is sticky and doesn't hold shape, or create shape on its own. It has to be molded, the clay maker has to use his or her hands to form it into the shape it desires. So I know ultimately that I am not the one shaping me, it is God of course. But I almost feel kind of bad just not doing anything, and thats grace. God's grace is like water; it cleanses and purifies, no one is allergic to it although some are scared of it, it never ceases to exist, it always quenches, and it never runs out. And I am a river bed. River beds may dry out for a time, but it doesn't cease to be a place that can hold water. Storms will always fill it up again with new water.