So why is it so difficult for me to accept grace and mercy in my own life? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past month. After two weeks on the mission field I still didn't understand it. I don't understand why it took me coming home from my missions trip and away from so much spiritual warfare for God to grow me this way, but this week, He allowed me to put my feet, my heart and my soul into a refining fire and to get my first glimpse of why I've never fully understood grace in a tangible, personal way.
My entire adult life, or really since I've moved to DC and actively begun to seek out what my faith means to me, I've been trying to accomplish something. I've been trying to find my way, make friends, plan my future. I've been trying to live life the way I thought God wanted me to live it. I've been trying to do this or that or the other thing. Are you seeing the common theme here yet? It's easier probably for you to see than it has been for me. That these sentences are loaded down with two things: the word 'I' and the idea that by some measure of my own effort I can become the new creation Christ demands me to be in 2 Corinthians. Never before has it struck me how imbedded this striving, self-reliant nature is in me, nor have I realized how crippling it has been to my faith.
This astonishing, sudden awareness that I can do NOTHING to earn grace is the most basic tenant of being a Christ-follower, but it's a concept that my type-A, I need to make-something-out-of-myself personality has prevented me from embracing for 20 years. It's something I've had an incredible amount of head knowledge about, but very little soul knowledge about.
It's only by God's grace that he's finally revealed to me the measure of his forgiveness and the extent of his grace towards me. I have been trying (and failing miserably) to understand grace for a long time. What I didn't realize before that God has made so evident to me the past few days, is that only by the power of the Holy Spirit living inside of me can I actually understand grace. That's such a freeing idea. So freeing that as I walk through the midst of brokenness and heartache I am strangely able to rejoice. I am able to rejoice as I suffer. I am able to rejoice because I suffer. I COULD NOT DO THIS ON MY OWN. I can't. I've tried and I've failed many many times over, which is what convinces me all the more of the authenticity and reality of my faith. Because contrary to every human and worldly notion, I am joyful today when I should be anything but joyful. Because by any way I try to spin it rationally, I can't. It's crazy. The only explanation for this is God's grace.
Grace is something I've known for a long time in my head but never fully experienced in my heart. What about you? Do you have soul knowledge of grace? Real soul knowledge? Knowledge that only comes by the power of the Holy Spirit? If not, get on your knees and start praying expectantly for God to reveal it to you. He's waiting for you to ask. He'll answer.
"But he said to me 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more glady of my weakness so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong." 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
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