Give Them Grace, Introduction

Our fallen human nature always seems to think that everything revolves around us. I think back to the time of Copernicus when the common scientific belief of the whole world was that geocentric model which states that the sun and all of the other planets were in orbit around the earth. When Copernicus challenged this idea and posed the theory that the sun was at the center and that earth, along with the other planets, revolved around it, he was excommunicated from the church! Amazing! Yes, all was created to be centered on God. Yet his love for us is so great that he has included us in His wonderful plan.
The line in this chapter  that most struck me was from The Jesus Storybook Bible quoted on page 20:
..."the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you should be doing. It's about God and what He has done."
How we need reminded of this. I think that even when we hear the Gospel preached nowadays, instead of hearing the beautiful story of God's great love toward us, we automatically begin to think: "Okay, what am I going to have to do to really make this thing work in my life?" Right rom the start we have missed the point. God is telling us what He has done so that we can respond to it and receive it. Of course there will be changes for us to make, new steps to take, etc. but the true Gospel of grace is a message that we simply receive and believe and the glory and focus is upon what God has done not the great lives we are now going to live for him. Oh, Father, help me to realize this Truth. It is not my story, it's Your story and I get to be a  part. When I glory in Your story, it suddenly affects me as well for I am the loved, I am the rescued yet you are always the hero and the story is all about you.

I can't earn my spot in the story, I cannot perform enough or shape myself enough to earn a spot. It is there written for me already. May I never trade the True story for a bath in a "sea of narcissistic moralism"- Yikes! And when I tell the story to my children may they know the true hero is God as He has written it for them to know all about Him.

Response to Give Them Grace, Forward

I had to comment on the opening forward to this book before even attempting a comment on the subsequent chapters because this idea of grace gripped me from the very start along with a keen revelation of my own false views on morality, sin and holiness. When the author of the forward quotes the book Christless Christianity (the name itself is a reproach), I am jerked back by the very tidy and moral picture of Satan taking over a city.
Things are not always as they seem.
The enemy is not so obvious as we are.
This opening forward was so reminiscent of The Screwtape Letters for me where we see the strategies of Satan personified and carried out: make them settle in their view of marriage, make them fall into the sin of pride of not being prideful, make them overindulge in innocent tea cakes, make them faithful to attend a church where the gospel is dead but no one realizes it, etc. In other words, let morality reign and the Gospel be defeated. Let orderliness and decorum dictate our norms and behavior but never let there be radical service and groaning surrender.
I have decided that I prefer the other. I have tasted orderliness and decorum, sweet morality and obedience yet without power..."having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof..?" I ALWAYS thought that scripture was speaking of someone else. Surely not me Lord! In no way do I desire to depart from a life of obedience nor morality. However, I do not wish to use them as my standard but rather a mere by-product of a life being lived full of Grace, Gospel grace. Is there any other kind? I do not merely want my children to obey me but to be compelled in their hearts to shun evil and do good. Yet to shun evil they must first know of its existence and the good which can and must powerfully overthrow it. I want them to be dirty in the fight, sweaty in the battle, waging righteous war for the One, True cause. I desire this over clean uniforms, neat manners and tidy behavior. I want them to be free to ask radical questions, to confront evil face to face and then slam the door on it; not for me to lock the door and tell them never to look behind it. I want them to CHOOSE. I want them to CHOOSE GRACE and GODLINESS, TRUTH and BEAUTY. I still desire Yes ma'am and No ma'am but not as a practiced art but out of the overflow of the heart. With God, all this is possible.

Contribution

I feel a great need to make contribution with my life. Each day there is a beat within me that calls for significance. I believe the natural tendency, and one I have often battled, is to express this through ambition or desire for notoriety, fortune and fame. Doesn't worldly success equal great contribution? As an unregenerate spirit these are the only ways one can define significant things and craft deep meaning out of life. If the whole world knows of it, surely it must be significant and it gives my life meaning. But this is all wrong! The significance I'm searching for will only ever be found in Christ and giving my life for him. My life of significance begins first with death-dying to my will, ambitions, dreams and desires,  and beginning to live now based on an eternal value system. Should I now strive for notoriety in heaven and with God himself or is that also a false path, still one of pride and self? Oh Lord, help me to know what contribution and significance look like today. My life is now hidden with Christ in God. It is not my own. Your word shows me :
1.  To love others

2. To give a cup of cold water in your name
3. To minister to widows and orphans
4. To disciple my children
5.  To love my husband ( This one is easy)
5.  Preach the gospel
6. Give things away

7. Walk in humility and consider others above myself
8.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit .

  This should keep me busy for a while… say, a lifetime ! I

True Sight, Sabbath Rest & Church Work

To lead means to have seen well. “Into the blind world we have now descended” Virgil tells Dante as they start their journey into Hell. If Hell is the blind world then The Church should be the world that is flooded with sight and light. It took me a while to figure that out. We do not need a blind guide but one who can tell us “Let me show you what I see.” I really want to see!!

When Jesus tells us to remove the plank from our eye, He is encouraging us to truly see. When Elijah prays for his servant it is that he may truly see.

So, what are we needing to see that we are missing in our church work today? Isn’t the very point of Redemption that we may enter into a rest? I am not lazy yet I know that I was designed for Rest, God’s kind of rest. How can I reconcile the two? The Bible clearly tells us in Hebrews 4 that God’s children, His people, the only Church He had at the time completely missed out on the promised land because they did not enter His rest. I wonder why God rested on the Sabbath. We know that he cannot be physically tired and need a day of Physical rest. And we are made in his image. Is the Sabbath idea more than a day of physical rest? He said to rest from your labor on that day. Well, I do not do enough physically in a day to really wear myself out. I cannot think of many people who do when you consider what the human body is capable of. Yet I fall into my pillow each night very weary so there must be a different kind of fatigue and a different kind of rest that I am missing. So, why did God rest on the seventh day? He did it to enjoy what he had created!! In Greek the word for “rest” is skolo and in Latin it is scola. It means to think on, to contemplate and enjoy. All of those make me very happy and relaxed just seeing them in print and saying them to myself. The actual translation means leisure and celebration!  Now, this next thought intrigues me and may cause most American, democratic,  industrial-revolutionized, modernist, progressive minds to really go tilt: This word for leisure, scola, is where we get our word for school! Who would have thought? I mean, I don’t think there are too many people who equate the words school and leisure. I happen o be one of them, however, as I am a life-long learner and get great pleasure from the contemplation of ides and learning does indeed mean celebration to me! We need a day, a time, a lifestyle of being able to work very hard but then to contemplate with great joy what has been produced, what we are living in, to rest. It is not a rest where we legalistically sit and twiddle our thumbs so that we can religiously check off, “Yep, I rested. I did not do any work” Maybe great physical exertion on the Sabbath is actually a part of the great contemplation and enjoyment for some. The idea is to experience and emulate God’s example of True rest. Jesus said in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”.  Celebration time.  Enjoying the Journey. I love it!

Yet we are a total world of work. We are creating workers. We prize and esteem great workers and stamp them with success and lure them with money and material goods that they will have to work all the harder just to maintain and keep. We are happy with our Industrial Revolution and the factories we have sullied our land with- the Elementary, the Middle and the High factories. We desire to see numbers, quantitative values and general assessments that are easily measured yet suck the celebration and contemplation out of each product or person. Is this what we have also done to church leadership? Reduced it to a quantitative science? Are we wanting to merely create great church workers who can turn out acts of service, better bulletins, increased numbers of team members and more logged office hours rather than producing pure fruit of quality. I desire Quality over Quantity. I actually believe that one begets the other but we have it the wrong way. There must first be quality cultivated. Love for the individual and not what they can produce or quantify.  Our purpose in equipping people sometimes feels like it is just equipping in order to see what we can get back out of them for the church’s sake rather than simply equipping them for their life. The church as an institution almost seems to trump the individual. Was the saint made for the church or was the church intended for the believer? Are not WE the CHURCH?

What are some enemies of this rest? If the rest is ours, if it belongs to us, then we must possess it and strike down the enemies that have cultivated attacks for years until we believe them to be true. Is the purpose of the individual utilitarian? “What can you do?” “What is your skill set?” What we seem to really be asking is “What are useful for?” And the heart response from the individual is to work harder to measure up so that they can be validated by this new measuring stick we have produced while leaving God’s own standard behind. We have failed to see. I want to look at a person in the church and not care what team they serve on or how well they do it but love them and desire to know them even as the Father desires to know me. I want to shed the scaly skin of quantitatively summing someone up and seeing them as a number or “our people” when they are really God’s treasures that we should gingerly and lovingly handle. I want to see and stop being blind. And I want to be seen by those around me -No planks, no specks, just God and His beautiful Rest.

 

Stewardship

I am a steward of all that God has given me. Nothing is my own. I am not even my own. The Bible has already told me this...why does it seems to be such an epiphany to my soul? In this day and age of human rights, reason, and enlightenment, there is much emphasis on what is mine. As a Christina, if I am not careful, the pleasing notes of the song that Society sings begins to strike a chord within me and I feel justified in demanding what rightfully belongs to me as a human being. Yet the Kingdom of God teaches me opposite. I have been bought with a price. I am not my own.
More and more I have been hearing the word stewardship in my heart. I am a steward of many things, both tangible and intangible that belong to God Himself. My marriage, my children, my home, my finances. They are not might. I merely have been entrusted with the oversight of these costly goods by the Master Himself, the owner of it all. Parable after parable teaches me that I will be called to give account one day of how I have managed my Lord's items. Have I been faithful or have I squandered? I want to not only manage well but show a return on God's investment as I present back to Him all that He has made me steward of.

A Day of Opportunity

A day of opportunity awaits me. To some it might just be another ordinary day but I see change. I see a blank slate on which I can write anything that I desire. It is up to me. It can be a great day or a down day. This is the day that I can recognize areas where I have plateaued and begin to climb again.  I can allow my children to frustrate me or I can see opportunities to disciple them. I will finally read that book that I have been putting off, go for that run, make that phone call, write that note of thanks, buy that gift. It is a great day. I can write a new song, patten a new idea, meet a new friend or lift someone's spirits. I can connect with one of my children, have intimate time worshipping the Lord, send a love email to my husband at work and cook a marvelkous creation for supper. Or...I could complain and rush to get the kids in bed early so that I can do what I want to do. I could go to bed tired and wake up still tired. I could look to escape through food, television or procrastination. But it won't be like that for me. It is a day of opportunity. My neck is outstretched and I am expecting. Anything is possible!

Stuff

I think yard sales are wonderful. My husband despairs when I mention that I am thinking of having a yard sale. The thought of cleaning out my closets and eliminating bins from my attic is an absolutely liberating experience for me. What's even better is to have someone else come alongside you on a cleaning out binge becasue they are even more objective than you are. Someone close who doesn't mind telling you the truth. I rememeber a visit from my older sister once to my home. We must be so weird. We think its fun to get together and clean out closets in our houses. Most girls' outings probably consist of getting mani pedis and a latte at Starbucks. Not us...nooooo. We clean out each other's closets. So, on one of her trips here she began to help me with my linen closet. It is a small narrow closet at the end of my hallway and in my house closets are cherished. We even turn little wall cubbies into closets and cover them with curtained "doors". We need closets! So, in tackling the linen/gift/laundry hamper closet I knew that many things had to go. I would generously lay aside a sheet set and say, "I'll yard sale this" to which she would shake her head, roll her eyes and pull out two more sets and emphatically state: "You only get to keep two sets per bed!" Oh I love it! This was love. This was such a help. We threw out old quilts, old pillows, old pillow cases and, yes, even a few sentimental baby items only because there are sooo many sentimental items in life that we must learn to rank our sentiments and some had to go. My closet looked beautiful. I felt like a better woman. My whole house felt cleaner and all because I got rid of some stuff. The Latin word for "stuff" is impedimentum, where we get our word impediment. That's right! Owning more stuff slows us down, it impedes our progress. This is why we study classical languages, everyope! It opens our eyes to greater truths and helps propel us on our way. This is why I love having yard sales and cleaning things out; I am no longer hindered bu clutter or things that I own. Think about it- the less we own, the less responsibility we have to maintain.  Own less, de-clutter, sell off a few things or give them away and liberate yourself! Throw off those impediments and run a little bit faster than before!

"..Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³ Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."    Hebrews 12:1-3 (NIV)