Experiencing God’s Grace…pt. 2

In part one of this series I discussed the saving grace of God.  That grace that changes my eternal destination from hell to heaven.  Saving grace is a gift, one that I cannot ever earn.  If I was able to earn it, it would no longer be grace.

I grew up in a Christian home and as a child I experienced God’s grace quite often.  I made my faith my own when I was thirteen years old.  From that day, I knew what I needed to do in order to live for God.  I could not work for my salvation, but I knew that there were things that He expected me to do in order to live a victorious Christian life for him.

I knew what I needed to do…

Saved people have a love for God’s Word, (Psalm 119) so I needed to love God’s Word.  I needed to follow the Ten Commandments.  Giving should be done joyfully.  Never let the sun go down on my anger. Completely trust in the Lord for everything.  Never give the devil a foothold in my life.  In everything, I should be perfect.  (Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. -Matthew 5:48)

     I needed to love His Word. 

I knew the Bible, having studied it in school, home, and church since before I learned to read.  But because it was so familiar to me, my attitude was a “been there, done that” attitude.  However, the Bible says that a saved person loves the Word of God, so I needed to fall in love with God’s Word. 

So I would be motivated for a few days, maybe a week or two, to really get into the Word and read it.  But, inevitably, my motivation would wane and I would stop reading for a day, days, weeks, months.  As a result, the incredible guilt of not spending time in His Word would overwhelm me. I would pray and ask God to forgive me for not reading His Word for so long.  I always felt that God liked me better when I was reading His Word.  But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself love the Bible.

     Be perfect.

For years I struggled with perfectionism without really knowing it. I fought a constant cycle of motivation, ambivalence, guilt, and recommitment.  God called me to be perfect, and He told me that He would give me the strength to follow His commands.  So somehow I needed to tap into His strength. The only problem was I didn’t know how.  But I tried to work at it with everything that I had.  Be perfect.  I ran through this cycle for years, trying to be perfect, even though I knew I was nowhere near it. But my thought process was this:

     1. I am no longer a slave to sin.

     2. Since #1 is true, then I can make the choice to not sin.

     3.  God will give me the strength to not sin. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

     4. Therefore, it is possible for me to not sin.

     Logically, I should be able to refrain from sinning.

After going through this thought process, the logic of this is inescapable.  However, living this logic out was impossible.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not do it.  I could not be perfect.  And I know that God loved me, but I pictured Him as that frustrated parent, just watching and waiting for me to mess up.  He was always up there, disappointed in me, wondering how I could have messed up again.   Every time I sinned, I felt the need to “make it up” to Him.  How many times was He going to forgive me for that same sin?

And then, I read this verse:

No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.  -1 John 3:6

As a result, my fear multiplied hundreds of times.  I keep on sinning, even when I don’t want to.  Does that mean that I don’t really know Him?  And since nobody can stop sinning, how is anybody really saved?  Was I really saved, or did I just pray a prayer and fool myself?  Or did I finally commit that one sin that caused me to lose my salvation?  So many times I prayed and asked God to save me again.  

God needed to break me

Then, twenty years ago, I prayed to God that He would teach me how to truly trust in Him.  Little did I know back then how much He needed to break me in order to answer that prayer.  He needed to strip all of my self sufficiency away from me.  Since that day twenty years ago I have learned so much, but I have also discovered that I still have so far to go.  But I believe that this was my first step in understanding God’s grace.

During that prayer, deep in my soul, I knew that I would have to lose everything in order for me to fully trust God.  But that thought scared me, so I dismissed it as irrational.  I believed that if each day ended well, then those days would  add up to good years.  I used whatever strategies I could to make sure that my marriage and my job went well.  However, they did not work.  Within the space of five years, I lost two good jobs, and my husband left me twice before finally divorcing me after a third separation.  

The first time he left, I turned to the Lord.  I dug into the Scriptures and worked hard on learning how to trust Him.  I memorized lots of Bible verses and journaled my story.  We reunited within one week and I believed that God had brought us back together.  So the second and third time that he left, I just repeated what I had done before, trusting that God would reunite us once again.  However, in the end, my strategies to please God did not work.

     I started losing everything I trusted in

In the middle of my divorce heartbreak, God pulled away the wonderful job that I had and most of my friends.  I caused serious damage to my relationship with my best friend as well.   At this lowest point in my life, I half heartedly tried to end it.  But I was ultimately too scared to do any serious damage, because I was afraid that God wouldn’t forgive that ultimate sin.

During this period, I found any self help book that I could find that would make me feel better.  I devoured these books, trying to find easy to apply tips to make me a better person so that someone would like me. The loss of my husband and my job I believed was a result of my own personality flaws.  I knew that God was trying to teach me something by all this heartache, and I worked hard to become who He wanted me to be.  

Desperately I tried to find an answer to my heartache.  One of my friends suggested to me that I should move somewhere and start over.  That suggestion changed my life, and it made so much sense to move.  Within the space of three months, I moved halfway across the country with nothing but a place to live.  Everyone told me that I was brave to move, but I felt like a coward.  It seemed as if I was running away from my life.  I knew that God brought me out to this new life, and I had high hopes that this would finally heal my broken heart.

     The start of a new life

It did not take me long to settle into this new life.  I found a job and a church and connected with others.  That in itself should have shown me that God blessed me with His grace, but I did not see it.  All I saw were the mistakes that I made, and that I felt so alone.  

I wanted to find someone to share my life with.  I lived my life focusing on that goal, and I felt that God needed my help in order to find someone.  So I looked online, I looked around my acquaintances and friends, and put myself in some situations that could have been extremely dangerous, all in the pursuit of true love.  In the middle of that I committed that ultimate sin that I didn’t know if God could ever forgive me for.  The worst thing about it – I committed it knowingly and repeatedly.  

     God’s grace is not dependent on my actions

Looking back on it, I can still see God’s grace in the middle of my sin.  The Holy Spirit would not let me be comfortable in it, and I did try to drown out His voice with music and activity, but He would not let me go.  My sin had trapped me and I could not let go of it, but the Holy Spirit removed it forcefully from my life.  The pain was intense, but it drove me back into the arms of my Father.  But I still had to work hard to “make it up” to Him.  He had saved me from myself again, but I had to regain His favor.  Only then would I be able to receive my dream of a husband and a family. 

Up until this point, I had academic knowledge of the grace of God, but I did not really know what it meant.  I really had no idea who He is.  

In the third post of this series, I will continue my story of God’s grace and how He continues to show Himself strong, even in the middle of my weakness.