When I Understood Grace...or at least began to

 

"I seemed to understand that I was SAVED by grace through faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, but for some reason seemed to think I needed to earn the rest of my sanctification in my own strength."

I was born into a wonderful Christian family and chose at an early age to accept Jesus as my Saviour. I’m what they call in the biz, “A Lifer”.  It was and remains the best decision I ever made. And as blessed as I was to have be born into a Christian family and become a Christian ( of my own free and voluntary will I might add) , there remains a unique set of challenges to the Lifer.

It is a wonderful blessing to be steeped in the things of God from an early age but of course this inevitably leads to other struggles as you grow older and mature as a human being. There are indeed intellectual questions that come up and must be answered  to some satisfaction – and I have been through this, but that is not what this particular part of my testimony is about.  This part of my testimony is about a simple word with a massive concept behind it – Grace. Its also about the opposite of grace – what we in the Christian world often refer to as legalism ( if you want to find out more about this, read the book of Galatians).

You see, its my experience that there are often 2 distinct ways that the enemy of our souls would try to lead the Lifer astray. 

One, we are a bit more familiar with and much more ready to judge – that could be called rebellion ( or for a really interesting word, “licentiousness” ). Acting out against authority, missing church,  hitting the party scene etc.  This is much more recognizable to parents and fellow Christians and often quite haughtily judged by the Lifers who stay on the straight and narrow.

Here is where the second one comes in – and I think it might actually be worse than the first – in a word, its pride. It is insidious and disguised in many outward appearances of righteousness. One of these outward appearances (stress the word “appearance”)  of righteousness is legalism. 

In Christian terms, legalism can be defined in a few ways but its root is always pride and its flower is often guised as stoic dedication and fierce intensity. Dedication and intensity are not bad of course but anything can be bad when the wrong motive is pushing it.

Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall. Pro 16:18

But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: "God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble." James 4:6


So I was a Lifer that appeared to be on the straight and narrow. A goody-goody according to many friends and family. But somewhere along the line I steered ever so slightly off the straight and narrow. I must explain that my experience with legalism was inextricably linked with what I would later discover as mental illness – specifically clinical depression and a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder  ( sometimes called “religiosity” when it affects your belief system).  To read that part of my testimony please read an article I wrote called  “A Beautiful Mind” here:  A Beautiful Mind


Because of this connection, my experiences perhaps seemed a bit more extreme than your average person – but do not be mistaken, pride was in the middle of it all. I guess this legalism stuff begins when you start to think that you need to earn God’s favour , that His love for you is based on how hard you work for Him and how precisely you obey His commands ( including the ones you have added “just to be safe”).

I seemed to understand that I was SAVED by grace through faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, but for some reason seemed to think I needed to earn the rest of my sanctification in my own strength. 

Its almost scary how exactly this matches a verse Paul wrote to the Church in Galatia:

Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? Galatians 3:3


Now don’t get all huffy here – I am in no way saying we are not responsible to choose to obey God and try to please Him with all of our lives. It’s all in HOW we do it though.

As JBN Jr. once so fittingly put it :

 

“The price of our retraining (i.e. sanctification) was included in the cross.”

The Christian life is first about surrendering to God – then , and only then, can we really fight for God.

Back to some of my personal experiences with legalism. It begins with what is motivating you ( love? or just fear and guilt and pride?) and ends in extremism – not extreme in the sense that “you can’t love God too much” – but extreme in the sense that “you can indeed over react in your attempts to do what you think is pleasing to God ( and hurt people in the process)”.

My friends and I used to think that the word “balance” was for the weak. An excuse made by Christians who didn’t want to step up to the plate. I know, that somewhere in the back of mind my mind, I somehow thought I was just a bit better than these other Christians – what a disgusting form of pride! I now realize that the Bible is full of the balance of Christian living ( "Turn not to the right hand nor to the left" Proverbs 4:25-27). Its not that we can’t be “hardcore” but we also have to be humble and use wisdom . 

Am I making sense? I hope so.


It may start small but for me it ended pretty big. It often involves taking a good thing and twisting it – I would hand out Gospel literature to people on George street in Prince George,BC, not a bad thing but looking back I had the wrong motivations. This later propelled into bizarre behaviour where I would force myself to fast for long periods of time ( again not out of love for God but some sort of punishing of myself), I would force myself to go out and knock on peoples doors in my neighbourhood and talk to them about God – the problem was that I was so confused about who God was, I wasn’t helping anybody. Eventually I would force myself to go out and knock on doors without a jacket on in the middle of winter because for some reason this made me more holy, more repentant.

I’m not proud to admit that this particular time in my life ended with me coming back to my apartment in the middle of  a Prince George winter with no coat… and no shoes or socks… to find my Uncle looking for me. My mom had called him because earlier that day I was acting so strangely, I made her cry( which I had only heard her do once before)  over the phone while she was living in Valemount. I will never forget making my mother cry and I will never forget the look of utter disbelief on the face of my Uncle at the sight of his nephew in bare feet , standing in 2 feet of snow... trying to somehow earn righteousness on my own.

My uncle took me to his house that day and we had a talk in his office. I began to talk about what I was doing and why I was doing it – how fear drove me, and guilt riddled me and one more thing I will never forget happened next. He looked me in the eye and said to me “Whatever god you are talking about – that is not the God I serve.”  And I began to realize what I had turned my God into …

Now I know , at this point, some of you are saying to yourselves,   “Well this is all about your mental condition, it was a disease and you needed professional help.” Yes, that is all true – but what is also true is that as far as my spiritual battle went  -pride was the root of the problem. Pride that would suggest that what Jesus had done on the cross was not enough, I had to do more.

It was some time after this experience that a very distinct and powerful spiritual thing happened to me. I remember, clearly , sitting on my bed in my apartment on Spruce Street and reading a book by a beloved Christian author named Andrew Murray. I don’t even remember which book it was or the chapter –but he was talking about the difference between the “Old Covenant” ( i.e. the Law) and the New Covenant (i.e. the Gospel) and how imperative it was for the believer to understand the difference….

How the New Covenant had no conditions to fulfill but to believe and receive what Jesus had done on the cross. That He had fulfilled the conditions for the entry point we called “salvation” but also made all the provision for the rest of the journey we call “sanctification”. How He had given the gift of the Holy Spirit in our hearts to change our hearts.

It slowly began to sink into my heart how this provision was also for my sanctification ( i.e. becoming more like Jesus, striving for holiness, evangelism and living the Christian life more and more effectively).

I kid you not, as this truth slowly saturated my heart and mind, I felt  a powerful force was lifted off of me… chains of bondage were shattered.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. Galatians 5:1

Its not easy for me to recount this to you . It was a dark time and it makes me look like a bit of a nut job. But it happened and I know it was for a reason. One of those reasons is so that I could maybe help others going through similar things. The 2 main lessons God taught me  out of this whole thing were:

1) the reality of mental illness and how to properly treat it ( which includes separating it from spiritual things) and

 2) that the pride and legalism I harboured in my heart was not only extremely sinful and damaging and frustrating – but completely unnecessary  - because there was another option in living for God, in pleasing Him – and this was through His grace and by the power of His Holy Spirit.

I have had a very hard time putting into words what Grace means to me – or means at all. Simply put it is God’s unmerited or unearned favour.

Another handy example is the saying that “Mercy is not getting what we deserve while Grace is getting what we do not deserve.”

However, I recently read a quote from a book called “Surprised by Grace” that has perhaps put the idea of grace ( not just being saved by grace but also living by it)  more concisely than I’ve heard it anywhere else:

"The irony of gospel-based sanctification is that those who end up obeying more are those who increasingly realize that their standing with God is not based on their obedience, but Christ’s.

 The people who actually end up performing better are those who understand that their relationship with God doesn’t depend on their performance for Jesus, but Jesus’ performance for us."

Adapted from Tullian Tchividjian's book

At the end of the day , I believe that to truly understand the concept of God’s grace – we need to experience it, not just read about it. The Holy Spirit has to reveal it to us.

As they say, 

"The Longest Distance in the World Is From the Head to the Heart"

By the way, I am merely one of many Christians (including many “lifers”) who have had this epiphany of grace in some sort or another… Hudson Taylor, H.A. Ironside, John Bunyan and many others have stories along the same lines.

If you haven’t already, I hope you will too.


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One more passage from “Surprised by Grace”….


“People need to hear less about what we need to do for God and more about all that God has already done for us, because imperatives minus indicatives equal impossibilities. If you’re a preacher and you’re assuming that people understand the radical nature of gospel indicatives, so your ministry is focused primarily on gospel imperatives, you’re making a huge mistake.”


Imperative – “Indicating authority or command; urgent, necessary” (Webster’s). An imperative is a statement of what one must do.


Indicative – “Designating that mood of a verb used to express an act” (Webster’s). An indicative explains what is true. It is not a command but expresses the rationale behind the command.