I’ve written about this issue a couple of times in a couple
of places….. One was last November as I started looking back over the personal revival which God had been working
in my life over the past 11 months. The other is a post I wrote last month (posted a couple days ago) for Thrive80, a website by Moody
Publishing targeted at Millenials. In both of those posts, I focused on what
happened on the day God revolutionized my perspective. In this post, however, I
want to step back and look more at the big picture. So check those out for the
snapshot version/resolution of this issue J
I’ve always been a perfectionist. Partly as a result of
this, I also grew up focused on feeling the need to earn people’s
love/acceptance/approval/whatever. Yes, I knew my parents and other people
loved me no matter what. But I still put pressure on myself to behave in a way
that would impress them and ensure that I kept their love. I still worry far
too much about people’s opinions of me. This approach to my human relationships
affected how I approached God as well.
Sure, I knew I was saved by grace and not by what I did. But
that didn’t keep me from thinking that I needed to make sure I was behaving
myself properly so that He would keep on loving me and approving of me. Looking
back now it seems so simple and rather silly – but it was the trap I was stuck
in.
In Galatians 3:3, Paul asks “Are you so foolish? Having
begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” And in Titus
3:4-5 he writes “But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He
saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His
mercy.” I knew these verses. I had heard the latter one quoted often during a
season of Bible Quizzing.
But somehow, the truth of the former verse did not make its
way from my head to my heart. I tried to have a relationship with God in which
I earned His pleasure. I failed to recognize that Grace extends beyond
salvation, that it is at work in every moment of my life.
I knew I was a miserable failure at keeping myself “good
enough.” What I guess I didn’t realize or want to accept was that even in those
moments when I have messed up, God’s Grace covers that. No, this is not a
license to sin (Rom. 6:1ff). I know that very well. I want to live a life of
holiness, to seek to become more Christlike. My problem is that I often base my
self-acceptance and my idea of whether God is accepting me on my actions alone.
I tried to live by Rom. 6:1, but I forgot about Rom. 8:1.
Yes, there is a delicate balance here. It is easy to go to
either the extreme of pietistic legalism, as I tend to, or to go to the other
extreme of flippant licentiousness. God calls us to neither. We do not earn His
favor by what we do, but we are to constantly seek to draw closer to His will
for our lives.
This summer at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (see my first summer post for more about the church) they had a mini-series from Galatians 3.
It seemed as though every week after that there was some mention about how we
don’t earn God’s favor by our good deeds. Maybe it’s that I was finally at a
place where I believed that, but I don’t remember hearing that truth emphasized
in church very much ever before, if at all.
I’m thankful God spoke that truth over me 21 months ago. I
wish I had learned it sooner…I wish I had been able to hear it from my church.
That would have saved me some heart ache in high school. At the same time, I
know God knows what He is doing. If I had learned it without struggles, I
wouldn’t have the same testimony of God’s work in my life. It was the struggles
I lived through that made the lesson so real and applicable.
It’s the clouds that make the sunset beautiful J
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