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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How to be a better Christian (than everyone else)

Being a good Christian is hard.  You're supposed to read your Bible, and pray, and probably some other stuff, too.  And all those things take time away from the most important part of being a Christian . . . impressing other people with how good a Christian you are.

Fortunately, like all Americans, God loves a shortcut.  That's why there's a super-easy way to look like a great man or woman of God:  Make everyone else look really bad.

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Personal Ads: Goldilocks seeking church.

If you're a churchgoer, unless you've gone to the same church your whole life, you've been in this boat.  Maybe you've moved, or just had a falling-out with your old church, but for whatever reason, you're looking for a new church home.  So you visit different places every Sunday, trying on churches like you would a prom dress, looking for that "perfect fit".  A lucky few find that right place right away, maybe in the first month of searching.

A few less lucky (or just pickier) people do like me, and half a decade passes before you join anywhere for good.

For the most part, I'm very glad for how things worked out.  I love my church and feel lucky to have found it.  But I don't think I should have spent 5 years barely going anywhere because nowhere was "juuust right".

Here's some of the reasons, good, and not so good, why myself and others cross prospective churches off our lists:

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