More of Your Grace, Dear Lord

Grace.

It’s such a simple word, and yet it is so very deep. I started realizing its vast importance less than two years ago, and yet it is beginning to define my life.

Grace: God riches at Christ’s expense, God giving us what we do not deserve – statements that try to explain an immeasurable divine attribute in an understandable way. And yet until Jan. 25, 2011, I knew the right answers but not the trueness of God’s Grace in my life.

I’ve written about this a couple of other times earlier this semester (here and here). But I’m writing about it again because it’s still a lesson God is teaching me.

This morning, the sermon at my church in Dallas came from Romans 8:1-13, one of my favorite passages of Scripture. The teaching focused on the fact that we *can* have victory in the battles of our lives, reflective of the victory that Christ has *already won* in the war. Our victory is already AND not yet. And we can choose whether to live and walk according to the flesh or according to the Spirit.

Mr. Wright focused in on the fact that positionally, our fate as children of God is sealed: We are declared righteous in God’s sight through justification. But in our daily lives, we have a choice to make: Practically, we can choose to be slaves of God, sold out to Him, being sanctified – or we can choose to continue trying to live in this world on our own.

God’s Grace does not change one iota either way. And yet my decision of which man (old, fleshly man or new, spiritual man) to feed and encourage makes a huge difference in my outlook on life. Learning to let go of my attempts to improve myself and of the belief that I had to meet God’s expectations of me before He would continue loving me has been, in some ways, a slow process. God’s faithfulness throughout this time has been a huge testimony to His continued Grace.

A couple of other comments Mr. Wright made that stood out to me…

• Christ *has already* fulfilled the requirements of the law. I do deserve condemnation under the law – but He has fully removed that.
• The Holy Spirit comes to indwell us so that we may more fully reflect God’s character, NOT so that we can then fulfill the law.
• The newness of our spiritual life is to be defined by Spirit-walking, not Law-keeping.
• Our walk and our mindset are closely connected. What is it that I focus on? That heavily impacts how I will act.

Thanks for reading this rambly rant. I hope and pray that you too may learn to experience the Grace of God, even in your moments of personal failure and weakness. Seek to grow and to make choices that are pleasing to God, YES. But never forget that there is nothing you can ever ever do to earn God’s love. Through His Grace, His Love is constant – regardless of how you feel about yourself.

Living in His Shadow

This morning I read another section from 31 Days of Power: Learning to Live in Spiritual Victory by Ruth Myers that I wanted to share. This is definitely something I need to be working on - but God is faithful to point me toward Him!

"Glory and Shadow"

Father, help me not to give Satan any advantage or delight by seeking my own glory in people's eyes. Instead let me constantly give glory to You in new ways. May I keep You at center stage as I speak of Your perfections and let You manifest Your presence through me.

Cause me to dwell day by day in Your shadow. I long to live my whole life there, with You in the bright foreground in every situation, in every opportunity. When You work through me, may be praise be Yours. May You be in the limelight as I give all the glory to You and remain in Your shadow. (Psalm 91:1, 86:12; Matthew 5:16)

Enable me to glorify You as I pass through each situation in my life—each time of blessing or progress, as well as each river I must cross, each desert I must pass through, each season of flood or drought, of pain or pleasure. May my responses honor You, not me. Deliver me from drawing attention to myself either by moaning and complaining or by subtle boasting and trying to impress. Not ot me, O Lord, not to me, but to Your name give glory. This prayer is according to Your will, so I can count on You to answer it! (Psalm 115:1; 1 John 5:14-15)

O my awesome God, I worship You for Your glory—glory that excels all others—a radiant outshining that makes all other glories fade and ultimately flicker out in oblivion. Thank You that no one has ever been able to rob You of Your glory or share it with You. I shout for joy that Lucifer lost out when he rebelled against Your rule and aspired to steal Your glory and be like the Most High. How he and his legions cringe at the thought of Your glory! How they resent it when we ascribe to You the honor and glory due Your name and refuse to seek glory for ourselves. How the devil hates it when we enthrone You as Lord of our lives and situations, and when we learn to give You the recognition You rightfully deserve. (Isaiah 48:11; Daniel 4:37)

I worship You for Your Majesty as the Most High God, exalted far above all. I worship You for Your brilliance that causes people to fall on their faces before You. I praise Your mighty dignity and awesome beauty as King of all. yours is a splendor not limited to majestic parades but one that rides forth and wins battles. You're the awesome, glorious Champion, the all-powerful Warrior who prevails against Your enemies. (Psalm 86:9; Isaiah 42:15; Psalm 45:3-4)

To You be the glory, both now and forever, Amen! (Romans 11:36, Jude 24-25)

Weeping may endure for a night...

...but joy comes in the morning (Ps. 30:5).

"Anointed with Power" - from 31 Days of Power: Learning to Live in Spiritual Victory by Ruth Myers that I "just happened" to read this morning.

Father, I praise You that Christ, anointed with Your Holy Spirit and power, continues to conquer new territory within me, filling me afresh with Your fullness, Your love, Your power. (Acts 10:38)
Thank You that Christ is my risen and victorious Lord and that in Him I've been anointed with Your Spirit to reign in life—to triumph over sin and over the evil one with his lies and deceptions. How wonderful to know Father, that right now Your Spirit intermingles with my spirit in a permanent oneness. I look to Him to continually fill me and to keep me under His influence so that His gracious and immeasurable power will be at work in me, overcoming my flesh and the world and the devil. (2 Cor. 1:21-22, 1 John 2:20)
I rejoice that Your Spirit is here to convict me of sin, to protect me from Satan, and to strengthen me with might. Thank you that this anointing I've received from You abides in me and continues to teach me—and His  teaching is true, and not a lie. And through His truth I've been set free—free from the mastery of sin and the snares of Satan, free to reign in the realm of Real Life. I rejoice that the truth counters Satan's lies. It cancels out his subtle deceptions. (1 John 2:27, John 8:52)
I'm especially grateful to You for giving me power to be effective in serving You. I praise You that I can serve by Your Spirit's power mightily at work within me, rather than having to depend on my own strngth and abilities. (Acts 1:8, Col. 1:29)
I pray for myself and for the many Christians I know, both individually and in various groups, that we'll be enriched through a growing knowledge of You. And may it dawn on us afresh that You have been made rich because we belong to You—we are Your inheritance! Encourage us through Your Word and the enlightening of Your Spirit. Make us more aware of the tremendous power available to us, to assure victory over all the evil powers we encounter. (Eph. 1:17-19)
And Father, I praise You that this close relationship with You can also knit me together with other believers by strong ties of love. I realize that loving, harmonious unity with other believers is always one of the great needs in our lives as Your children, and we can count on You to accomplish it. I praise You for the great protection this provides against the attacks and deceptions of our enemy. May I—and those I pray for—increasingly understand and experience the rich fullness and oneness that is ours in Christ. Col. 2:1-2

"You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; You have put off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, to the end that my glory may sing praise to You and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to You forever" (Ps. 30:11-12).

God is Good - I'm still broken

God is good. I believe this with all of my mind. He is still teaching me to trust in that truth with all of my heart. My Savior is beautiful, and He loves me – regardless of anything. Because this was never about me. It’s about Him and His glorious, amazing character.

If you haven’t read my post about brokenness from this summer, you should go read it before you keep reading this…

I was in a dark place this evening…darker than any I’ve been in before. I’ve been in dark places before, but not for a while. This one caught me off guard and dragged me under deeper than I expected. And I felt stuck.

I was praying, I was begging God for His mercy and His grace. My head knew nothing had changed in Him – but my heart refused to accept it.

God knew I was getting a big head I guess. I felt as though I’d come a long way from high school, that I knew the truth and that the truth had freed me. But I was and am still holding on to that idea that I can make myself good, that I can make my life look like I expect it to. And when I fail, I still hesitate to accept His grace.

I can’t dig myself out. I can’t make my life “work.” He calls me to let go, to lose myself in Him.

Sarah pointed me toward this song, and it fit my situation perfectly. And since this post is still focusing way too much on me, we’re just going to end it here.

Lord God, You are grace. You are peace. Father, You see me. You know me more deeply than I will ever do. Break my selfishness, my self-sufficiency. God, You alone have the words – You alone are the way.

He gave me the rest of the post!

My Lord God is victorious. He has already overcome ALL THINGS. There is nothing I or anyone can do that has not already been dealt with and answered to by the sacrifice of Christ.

Tonight at the scholarship dinner, one of the speakers mentioned three things. I don’t remember quite the exact context…but she said that God looks at us and says three things about us:
1. I created you.
2. I love you.
3. I died for you, so that someday you shall live with Me.

And that someday isn’t now. It isn’t yet. “In this world you will have tribulation – but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world” (John 16:33)

We are not left here to earn our way. We’re not left until we deserve anything. We are left to learn trust, to learn grace.

Grace: I can’t even begin to define it. God is gracious. He has overwhelmed us with His grace, freeing us from our earthly guilt. He knows. He sees. And yet He loves just the same. Because of Grace. Because His sufferings wipe us clean. Because when He looks at us, He sees the beautiful end result of His plan – not the just-begun reconstruction.

Grace. Contentment. Trust. Giving up the control I think I have.

Love – undeserved, unearned, a free gift.

Who's in Control? Pt. 7: Earning vs. Grace

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

Who's in Control? Pt. 6

Well…..that was over a month ago now…but I am finally enough into the swing of my semester that I am going to take some time off from school work and try to finish this up.

On our way back from D.C., my parents and I visited a church in Virginia. We literally went to the town’s visitor center and asked the lady there where a church was located. You can’t get much more random than that, right?? But guess what? The God who created the Universe can orchestrate even seemingly chance happenings. And the church we visited “just happened” to be doing a sermon that relates to this same topic which has been the theme of my summer.

The pastor used Matthew 6:24 as his jumping off point. His sermon centered around the question of “Who is Your Master?” which tied in well with both this summer’s main idea and the Spiritual Emphasis speaker from last year (this post talks some about that).

Now, I have naturally heard about the whole idea of not being able to serve two masters before. But God knows I can always use a reminder! This pastor made a point of saying that there is no middle ground. “You are not free,” he said. “You are owned by someone—either God OR Satan/Sin/Self.” The question is not whether I will be a slave, but rather who I will be a slave for.

Christ redeemed us from our enslavement to the world, the flesh and the devil. The word redemption, he said, refers to purchasing a slave out of the market. God is not an evil Master. He redeems so that we can have a relationship with Him, not only so that He can benefit from our slave labor.

At the same time, the natural reaction of someone purchased out of slavery to an evil master is to want to serve the giver of freedom, the pastor said. We should be eager and willing to serve God because of everything which He has done for us!

When we do not choose to put Christ first and above all else, that means that there is something else to which we are giving that priority. He pointed to Deut. 6:4-5 as a call that we cannot simply coast through life. The choice to serve God must be an active choice throughout our days, months, years.

He did also make a point of saying that what we receive from Christ (salvation plus!) is many times more valuable than anything we can ever bring to Him. This ties into another topic (the focus of my next post) which has been an issue for me and which I have finally heard this summer explicitly stated from a church pulpit for the first time that I can remember.

Who's in Control? Pt. 5

It’s a good thing I put at the end of my last post where I was intending to take this series, because as you can see my month got away from me! Now I am in the car in the middle if hilly Tennessee as my dad drives us back to Dallas, through a rainstorm at the moment.

As I stated previously, this post will cover the sermon I heard my first Sunday in the DC/Maryland area, which was June 10. The pastor was finishing a series about Samson, and his focus was on Strength and Weakness – the fact that our Failure can lead to Opportunities. Anyone who knows the story of Samson knows he messed up plenty. (Sounds familiar to my life!) As the pastor pointed out, Samson broke every part of the Nazarite vow that he was supposed to live by.

Rather than conquering the Philistines, he ended up as their slave. Rather than being a moral leader for the Israelites, he engaged in almost every type of detrimental behavior possible. I can’t imagine how disappointed and confused his parents were about all of this. Samson was a failure because he did what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it rather than following God’s leadership.

And so as a consequence of his failures and his focus on himself, Samson found himself at the bottom, in a position of forced humility and servitude. Samson had chosen not to submit to God, and as a result he became enslaved and in a position of submission to the morally depraved Philistines.* They naturally saw their sudden victory over him as a sign that their god was more powerful than Yahweh.

BUT God was not done with Samson. Even though he had decided to depend on himself (and to some extent on his hair perhaps?), God did not write him off as useless. Yes, Samson’s actions had serious consequences, which God did not save him from. He lost his eyes – he lost the freedom he thought he had. During those long days circling around and around grinding the Philistines’ corn, Samson evidently came to a clearer understanding of how he should relate to God.

What happened next was proof that God doesn’t force us to be defined by our failures. Yes, failure impacts our relationship with God and with other people – but it doesn’t confine us to fail forever. Instead, God provides forgiveness and grace for those times when we depend on ourselves and as a result fail. As the pastor said, “We cannot undo the bad things we have done, but we can choose to be faithful from this point on” – though I would add that choice cannot be something that we drum up based only on our own strength.

The whole point of this sermon was that depending on ourselves leads only to disappointment. But at the end of the day, it is still so very easy to look at ourselves as the solution! In reality, only God’s strength and indwelling Paraclete Holy Spirit can save us from the failure into which we so easily stumble. But that does take action on our part: We must recognize our deep need of God and actively choose to submit – as contradictory as that sounds sometimes.

At the end of Samson’s story, God got the glory. As the pastor pointed out, Samson’s self-sacrificial choice to bring down the temple on himself and the Philistines was a heavy blow to that nation. The Philistines are not mentioned another single time in Judges. Through Samson, God brought an end of an era to a people who had turned their backs on Him. Out of Samson’s initial failure came an opportunity for God to be glorified. When Samson chose to give up his faith in himself, God used him to bring about His plans and purposes.

God can do the same for every one of us, and for anyone who surrenders.

*This ties in perfectly to the sermon I heard today, which is what I will talk about next!