Grace-filled Life

The last couple of weeks in church, we've been discussing grace, which is just awesome with me.  I love the topic of grace, and though we often pay lip-service to it, I feel like it's something Christians don't necessarily discuss in-depth a lot.  Which is a shame, because some of the New Testament writings on grace make for some of the most fascinating apologetics in the New Testament.  This really appeals to me because, while emotion is all fine and good, I really love me some logic in my religion.

Grace is one of my favorite topics to really study and get deep into because of my tortured history with its opposite, legalism.  The churches I grew up in were incredibly hypocritical and legalistic, teaching that the smallest infractions (i.e. "listening to secular music") could cause you to "backslide" and lose your salvation.  "Grace" was mentioned once or twice, but the emphasis was really on keeping your salvation through works and following an endless series of rules.  (Ironically, whenever the leaders were caught in really big sins, the blame was almost always placed on the Devil.)

When I left and rejected the teachings of the Pentecostal Holiness church, I found myself untethered, and drifting.  Because I had been under the weight of "the law" for so long, and all of the guilt and shame I had felt had come from outside influences, I had little in the way of a moral compass of my own.  This resulted in me making lots and lots of mistakes.  I finally realized that what I had been taught my whole life was bunk, but instead of keeping the good and throwing out the bad, I just tossed all of it.  I began sinning, kidding myself that, as long as I was the only person I was hurting through my actions, I was still being a "good" person.

Of course, when you self-destruct, it's never just you who you hurt.  You take out everyone who cares about you in a supernova of selfishness.

Fortunately, I got sick of living for myself pretty quickly.  I didn't want to be a screw-up.  I wanted to be a good person.  But I was still afraid of "organized religion", and all its (to me) inherent hypocrisies.

Getting back into the Bible has helped.  I always loved studying the Bible, even as a child, and re-reading it as an adult has helped me get closer to God.  Getting closer to God has helped me develop something I desperately needed:  a sense of conviction.  Not "guilt" from cultural and societal pressures, but an honest sense of what I feel God (through the Holy Spirit and the Bible) is telling me is right and wrong.

To give you an idea, here are some of the things about which I feel convicted, and some of the things I have never felt that God was condemning me for.

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Once saved, always saved? I'm gonna go with the Bible on this one...

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one. ~ John 10:28-30

I was raised in a church that very fervently believed you could lose your salvation if you "backslid", a term I have come to despise.  Basically, the concept was that, even if you had priorly asked Jesus for forgiveness and dedicated your life to him, if you sinned badly enough or for long enough, you could lose your salvation.  If you died within this time period, you would go to hell.

Now, for this church, "backslid" could mean everything from listening to secular music to hanging out with non-Christian kids.  (You were allowed to witness to them, but not to be friends with them.  Yeah, it doesn't make any more sense to me as an adult than it did to me then.)  Basically, if you weren't, as they often termed it, "100% on-fire sold-out for Jesus", you were worse than a sinner, you were a lukewarm Christian, and Jesus would spit you out of his mouth.

You could even sin through your emotions.  If you didn't wake up every morning filled with energy from the joy of the Holy Spirit, you must be in sin.  The same thing was true if you didn't witness to every single stranger you met in your day-to-day life.  You were expected to be on that "just-got-back-from-a-missions-trip" high, 24-7.  If you didn't feel it, the problem was you.  A popular saying was that, "If you feel far from God, it must be you; He didn't move."

So the pattern was, you go to a youth rally, you get pumped up, you leave, you have that emotional (I now no longer believe it was spiritual) high for a while, you lose it, you feel guilt over having "backslid", you go crying and crawling down to an altar call to rededicate your life, or you go on another (often expensive) trip or rally, get that high again, rinse, repeat.

In an insecure, obsessive-compulsive youth, this sort of thinking led me down paths of paranoia and depression.  I constantly confessed every little sin, every unhappy thought, the second it happened, terrified of falling dead and being condemned to hell.  This grew into a festering hate for myself, and hate for the hypocrites I was surrounded with in my youth group.

As an adult, I can now realize that the doctrine of "conditional salvation" has no biblical basis, and was a tool of manipulation wielded by a controlling church.  However, I still run into a lot of people who very strongly believe that a person can lose their salvation.  Here are some of the arguments I hear most frequently, and why I believe they are not scripturally sound.

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