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.
Now, for what grace isn’t.
Make no mistake about it, grace does not equal lawlessness, or an unabated attitude of the heart of - I am gonna do what I am gonna do!
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Romans 6:1-2
Grace is not license to willfully – without conscience – cast restraint to the wind and indulge in every harmful or sinful whim that tempts or trespasses our thoughts. Rather, to revel in God’s grace states, “I am a sinner, I need freedom in this area of my life but instead of hiding in the dark of my struggle I am now willing to expose it to Jesus’ touch, His Word, and His healing – I can’t lick this behavior without Him or His grace to empower me even when it seems I am at my worst.
{To be continued in next post with examples…}