...Until...I began to know Him.
Until I began to know Him for myself, in the quiet of being alone with Him and not leaving until I experienced His real and present presence and heard a word from His Word speaking directly to my life.
Grace is difficult to receive and apply until we come to the end of our ropes and just sit and let our Heavenly Father do all the work. Until we cease the laundry list of prayers and shut up – to put it bluntly and let Him whisper truth into our hearts. Until the Bible is less a homework manual – whoever liked homework? – and more a love-letter. It’s the last thing we want to do and it seems counter-intuitive, but we must give up our efforts to live the Christian life and cease from our labor and let the Holy Spirit – the great Paraklete* – live it through us instead. We need to stop falling from grace and start living in it.
O foolish Galatians!
Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth,
before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?
This only I want to learn from you:
Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law,
or by the hearing of faith?
Are you so foolish?
Having begun in the Spirit,
are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
Galatians 3:1-3 NKJV
You may still be struggling in the dark but now realize that you are not alone in the struggle. Jesus is right there with you in the pit of that gloom and His grace is more than enough to inch you up out of the slimy walls that once looked so daunting. What a relief.
In Christ Jesus there is grace in the dark. Not paltry, flimsy, or fleeting grace but substantial, riches-of-heaven’s-glory grace, favor, acceptance, and her sister mercy – pity, action to help, clemency – for each of us in the midst of life’s personal struggles. The only part we play is to move from the sandy shore of hearing about God’s grace and mercy and run headlong into a running dive into its enveloping waves.
{This is the end of Chapter #1, First Draft. Thank you soooo much for joining me on this journey as we head into Chapter #2, next week! The Reasons why we struggle….}