Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept the Grace
| Hopefully some of you film fans out there got the reference… When I was a young child, we didn’t go to church. For the most part, I thought of myself as a good kid. I tried not to lie, I never stole, I did my homework, listened to my teachers, I rarely talked back to my parents (that I can remember), and tried to be friendly with everyone. Because we didn’t go to church, I had no one telling me that I was a fundamentally sinful being. I went to Catholic school for kindergarten and first grade, so I had a passing knowledge of the Ten Commandments at least. I figured I was doing fine, since the only one that I really had any notable struggle with might be the whole “Honor thy father and mother” thing. That all changed when we started going to church… It began with me feeling a need for something more in my life around 7th grade. I started going to church with my grandparents and soon my parents started coming with us. It became a regular practice, we became members of the church, and I was enrolled in confirmation class. This is a story all about how my life got flipped – turned upside down… (Sorry, another pop culture reference there). It was in confirmation class and Sunday school and during the sermons that I learned just how evil I was. All my sin was shoved in my face; I was forced to finally look in a pristine mirror at all the flaws and blemishes that I had been wearing so proudly and blissfully unaware. For the first time in my life, I began to feel the full weight of my sinful nature and, rather than the church lifting me up, my newfound faith dragged me down. Causation is a difficult thing to nail down sometimes…did I become depressed because of this revelation that I was a “bad person” or did my brain chemistry cause me to react the way I did to this news? Whatever the reason, I began to suffer from a low grade depression that haunted me through most of my life. Had other factors in my life not led me ultimately to get my depression treated, I likely never would’ve come to know my God and his gift of Grace the way I do today. Depression being one tripping hazard on the way to accepting God’s Grace, another was the way the church lectured at me. The church that I grew up in and that my family still attends is Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and I like to refer to them as “Catholic Lite.” While they say the words about Grace and Faith, the subtext of their preaching and teaching was always and remains, “Get your act together or else.” When I asked questions about the seeming contradictory nature of their statements, the answer I got back was apparently a common one in most churches: that my sinning is not likely to affect my salvation, but it will definitely affect my relationship with my God. He will never fully love and accept me until I stop sinning. I carried this heaviness in my heart until I met Melissa and she introduced me to Aaron Budjen’s sermons. In particular, Aaron’s programs on the scale between law and grace, understanding forgiveness, and your identity in Christ pointed out to me that God’s laws had done exactly what they were intended to do in my life: they drove me to the point of despair where I realized there was no hope within myself or this world for my salvation. I could only turn to God himself for the hope, life, love, and acceptance that I sought. What had been missing before in the church’s teachings was the clarity of what God had already done for me because he already loved and accepted me. All my life I had been wrestling with the conflicting notion that there was nothing I could do to earn God’s love, yet I was required to do just that if I ever wanted to have a good relationship with him. Satan was winning the long war for my soul…he had convinced me to spend all my time thinking about myself and how wretched I am instead of focusing my attention on the one true source of joy in this world, our Heavenly Father. So many of Aaron’s metaphors for the true message of Grace finally rang true for me, but this one in particular: trying to earn salvation is like trying to jump to the Moon – you might jump higher and higher every day, but you will never reach the Moon no matter how hard you try. I was finally able to understand that the purpose of the Law was not to show me a way to reach God, but to show me how impossible it would be to do so. Only then was I able to understand the true nature of Grace – that God had already done all good things for me. Before I even knew I was a sinner, God had seen me in my sinful wretched state, loved and accepted me regardless, and blessed me with salvation and eternal life in Him. I had not done anything, nor could I have done anything, to earn this from Him…I could only accept his free gift and be thankful. |