Before I dive into a biblical exposition on grace, I thought I might first give some background. I have found that it sometimes helps to explain things by using personal experience. There are other times when it helps to explain something by explaining what it’s not. In the next few articles, I’m going to do both. Today I’ll be using personal experience to describe what grace is not.
So what is the grace of God? Why is it so important? And why should I live by God’s grace over everything else? These are the questions we will explore together. For me it starts with my childhood.
I grew up in a church tradition that was very legalistic. As with most people who are born into it, I learned the Ten Commandments as a kid. I could recite the “You shall not’s” with the best of them. And I can still recall the guilt I felt whenever I broke one. I mean, come on. What child on the face of the earth has honored their father and mother 100% of the time?
But the church provided a remedy for those days when you broke some of the big ones. It was called confession. Sit yourself inside a booth, tell your priest what you’ve done, and he would tell you what you needed to do to obtain God’s forgiveness. It usually included a lot of prayer. And I suppose it was also supposed to get you over the guilt you felt too for having broken God’s rules in the first place.
So I felt fine — for a while. Time would pass and I would find myself breaking some more of His rules. Not always one of the big Ten per se but at least the spirit of some them. Talk about feeling trapped. It just seemed to happen some how. Just living life, going to school, hanging out with friends, etc., and you find yourself doing things that violated God’s high expectations again. Back to the booth I went.
And it wasn’t just the live-sin-confess merry-go-round caused by the “Play by God’s rules” emphasis that made it legalistic. There was also going to church itself. My church tradition taught that you had to go to church every Sunday in order to be under grace. There were even other special days in which you were obliged to be at church. Talk about an oxymoron. To be under God’s grace (which brings freedom) you were obligated to attend. So you were made to feel guilty if you missed church on those days. Now that’s grace. (Not!)
Even church service was very legalistic. There were rules and traditions that governed everything. And nearly everything was scripted out, from what the priest said to how the people were supposed to respond. That’s what is called a liturgical style of worship. I’ll never forget the first time I went to Jenni’s church before we got married. Talk about a contrast. It certainly wasn’t scripted there, at least not in the very formalized way I was accustomed to. You can only imagine what Jenni thought when she first attended mine.
Through the first six years of our marriage, Jenni and I would go back and forth between our respective churches. One week we would attend hers, the next week would be mine. That continued even after we had our first two children. It was probably some time after our second child turned one that Jenni and I decided that this back and forth stuff had to end. It was time to find a single church that we both could agree on and one that we could raise our children in.
Coming from two fairly different church backgrounds meant that it would require quite a bit of searching, but search we did. We checked out a wide variety of churches in different denominations. The ones we liked we checked out again. The ones we didn’t never saw us again. (If this sounds like we were shopping, we were.) We finally narrowed our search down to one and started attending a Christian church regularly. We ultimately placed our membership there and were baptized in 1995 as we were expecting child #3. We had now found a church home and it was the home for our children all the way up to adulthood.
So that is the story of our first brush with God’s grace. Through the Holy Spirit, He used our desire to find a family church to remove me from a legalistic way of relating to Him. Of course, that is not the way I saw it at the time, but there is no question about it looking back at it in my mind.
In our new church, He would start to slowly reveal His true nature to me. Over the years, I would come to know Him as a loving Father and God of grace. He doesn’t want us to relate to Him through legalistic rituals and fear-based living. That is not the heart of our Father. Instead, He wants us to have a relationship with Him in which we experience His love in deeply penetrating ways. It’s His love that opens our eyes to His grace and begins the transformation that allows us to live and flourish in it. That’s what I pray others will come to know.
In my next post, I will explain more about legalism and how it gets in the way of experiencing grace. But for now, may you and your family have a very Happy Thanksgiving.
Essential Grace 