Years ago, I discovered a love for lifting heavy weights. I think I have been doing it regularly now for over fifteen years. For me, it’s a really cool way to start the day, and I always love it when I can set a new personal record on one of the lifts. Although it feels great and can be a healthy hobby, it can really cause major wear and tear on your body. My knees are a weak spot, so they feel it the most. My shoulders are also letting me know I am not as young as I used to be. We cannot rely solely on exercise to be strong and healthy. Rigorous exercise must be supplemented with adequate rest and a healthy diet. When you are trying to build strength and muscle, something like protein powder might help as well. Sometimes a little Advil doesn’t hurt either!
Grace isn’t earned, but we still want to do something for it.
In our relationship with God, we must rely solely upon His grace (Ephesians 2:8-10). We can neither do anything to earn His love and acceptance nor do anything to drive Him away. In Christ, we are completely secure in a relationship with a Father that never let’s us go. He always pursues us, even when we might think we can do life better our way. Patiently, He waits for us to exhaust all efforts to control our lives and let down our guard. At those moments, we let His love wash over us again. His grace, not our efforts, are what we need to experience the freedom for which we hunger.
In our zeal for wanting to do something (this is a human tendency we all have), we seem to create many supplements to this amazing grace that needs no add-on’s. As Christians, we often fear that if we do not work really hard to please him, He will be disappointed and eventually tire of dealing with us. Either that, or we cannot be as close to Him as possible. Although Hebrews 11:6 states very clearly that our trust in Him is the ONLY thing that pleases Him, we develop supplements to our faith: efforts to make us feel like we are working hard for Him. Some of us work so hard on these things, we add so much to our schedules that we wind up exhausted and still feeling like we’ve not done enough. Other of us tire of this method of trying to “be a good Christian” and just give up, accepting that He is just not going to be as happy with us as He might be with Deacon John Doe. It’s painful, but we just cannot stand all the hard work for nothing approach anymore.
Grace needs no supplements, but we often come up with some anyway.
The truth is, we do not need a supplement to grace. Not one. Trusting in that grace is enough. It’s more than enough. Trusting in His grace helps us to experience the truth about who He is and who we are. He is a good Father who loves us like crazy. We are loved, which is a wonderful identity to have bestowed upon us by our Creator. When we are living loved by this wonderful Father, being loved is a reality for us, and amazing things begin to happen. For those of us who struggle with legalism…where all our efforts to sin less failed us, being wrapped up in His arms actually causes us to sin less. Grace does not minimize sin. Instead, it recognizes it as being SO BAD that we can do nothing about it. We need Him! His power is what we need more than another self-help book, an accountability partner who will guilt us to read the Bible more, or another Sunday School teaching position at church that temporarily makes us feel more holy and acceptable to Him.
Experiencing grace is a personal thing for each of us.
Of course, knowing the truthful words in that last paragraph and experiencing them are different. But how do we experience that grace? How do we engage this love He shares so freely with us? This will look different from person to person and from situation to situation. One woman sees it for the first time when she looks into the eyes of her new born child, realizing the love she feels for her offspring is a reflection of the love her Father has for her. A man might become aware of it when he breaks down and tells a close friend about a terrible, hidden thing he did years ago. He is fully expecting to be told he is a jerk and the friendship is over, but then is met with a bear hug, tears, and forgiveness.
To have those kinds of experiences, we sometimes need only to be willing to see them…because they are undeniably right in front of us when we’ve done nothing to bring them on. Many times, though, we must suffer. We must struggle and take a risk. The risk is a step of faith to trust another human being with ourselves. Our real selves. Sometimes we will, no doubt, be met with heartache. However, there will be those times that His grace comes shining through. And those times overpower the rest, drawing us deeper into the reality of us being loved well by a Father who is pleased with us…even when we fail.
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