Hi friend,
This past week I’ve been reflecting on the word grace. Grace is a word we hear a lot as christians. It’s also a word that is used out of context in christianity, too. Grace doesn’t make it okay for you to live for you and I think that’s where the confusion starts. We believe that just because we sin, it means okay because God will give us grace. It’s not okay to take advantage of the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross for us like that. Grace frees you to experience the joy of living for the one greater than you. Grace is to empower you to live and strive to be more like our Creator.
When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they stepped outside of God’s boundaries. They didn’t step into freedom, they stepped into toil, temptation, suffering, sin and bondage. When we are ignoring his rules, his existence, and determined to make it on our own, they might seem like pathways freedom, but they never, ever are.
We weren’t designed to live life on our own, through our own strength, and our own wisdom. We were not created to live by ourselves or for ourselves, and to attempt to do so never leads to anywhere good.
God’s grace changes us. His grace isn’t to give us greater ability to live on our own. His grace doesn’t free us to live for us. His grace doesn’t make your kingdom work out anymore. The purpose of his grace is to free you from you own slavery so that you live for a much better kingdom.
“And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised”
2 Corinthians 5:15
Real freedom isn’t found in putting yourself at the center, with your choices and behavior shaped by your allegiance to you. Only real freedom can be found in God’s grace that liberates you to live for him and only him.
The doorway to freedom is submission. It will contradict our normal thinking, but we need to acknowledge that we are a danger to ourselves if we’re not submitting our authority and wisdom to God. Humbly admitting and submitting to God that we need him, open us up to the freest of lives.
We were created to worship, to live in obedience, and be dependent upon God. When grace restores us, it restores us to that place and gives us back our freedom. At times it may seem constricting always riding the train on those tracks, but try driving it in a meadow and all motion stops. Grace puts us back on the tracks and leads up back on track to real freedom, in forward motion, which you can have no other way.
- Brittany