The Discovery of Grace
THE DISCOVERY OF GRACE
PART 1
I woke up one August morning realizing that I was now the pastor of the Baptist church in the town where I had graduated from college the previous May. I had been thrown into the deep end of the pool before I had any time to learn how to swim. I knew very little about a whole lot. I often say that the secret of my success is that I never let ignorance stand in my way. In this case it was “fake it till you make it” time. Now I want to share the journey from that start in case I found some truth that can make sense to someone else.
Most of my “sermons” were shallow little devotionals that I stretched into the right length by telling stories and illustrations. Every sermon had to be about either the standard Baptist idea of a set plan of salvation or a presentation of the Christian life that was wrapped up in Bible study and prayer. The combination of the two was to produce a whole new person with clean thoughts, no temptations and not even any “want to’s”.
Baptist seemed to have a “Damascus Road” complex. The idea that a guy named Saul saw a blinding light on his way to Damascus and wham bam the next day he was the apostle Paul writing the book of Romans. Everything had to be miraculous and instantaneous. No gradual growth allowed. No learning about ourselves and growing toward a new way to be. Get saved and you are there. Except I could never get there.
I preached that God would change our “want to’s.” That His presence would take away the very human and built in desires and needs that are part of how we are made. I talked of “new creatures” while still being an old one inside of myself. I not only did not see the promised results in the folks I pastored I did not see them in me either. I continued to fake it even though making it turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. And then I hit bottom.
For some reason people started coming to me for personal counseling. Since I had no idea what to say, I learned to listen and evidently that is what most people need so I filled my days being sort of a protestant’s confession booth. In one week, I found out that one of my pastor friends had gone to comfort a woman whose husband and a child had been killed by a car train accident. He ended up going to bed with the woman that very night and left her even more devastated and guilt ridden. I found out that the seminary professor I had the most faith in was having an affair and then a woman grabbed and kissed me in my office and I really wanted to have sex with her right there in my office. Fear saved me but I was crushed.
I stepped back and thought, “I can’t make this work and I don’t know anyone else that can” I have nothing to say. Is this all just an act? Am I promising things that cannot be delivered? Am I saying God will do things for us that He will not really do? Put a fork in me I am done.
For the first time in my life my despair let me to take an honest look at myself. I realized that I had spent most of my life trying to get my father to like me, to approve of who I am, and now I was spending my life trying to get God to do the same. How do we get God to like us? It is easy to believe He loves everybody but that is different from Him liking, approving, accepting and being pleased with who and what we are. Do we pray more, read the Bible, go to church, witness, change our behavior? what does it take? I realized the only place it had to work was in me. If I could make it work I had something to say. If not I had nothing.
At the bottom, a scripture I had read many times and never really understood seemed to sit in my mind and would not move. It was from Romans 5:6
“God commended His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”
It hit me. His love toward us is not based on our behavior. He loved us before we began to behave. Christ did not come into this world to get us to behave ourselves. Behavior is not the key word of the gospels. The key word is relationship. He came to get to know us and love us as we are. The gospel is about what can happen when we really accept and know that love.
Christianity is addition not subtraction. He does not take our humanity away from us, He just adds himself to us as we are, and change grows out of our walking and struggling together.
We do not behave our way into relationship we relate our way into behavior.
Everything He wants to do for us, to us or with us is not the result of our fitting some pattern of behavior. It comes from the discovery that He loved us while we were unlovable.
Pardon the length of two blogs but I could not wait to share the next one
THE DISCOVERY OF GRACE
PART 2
My friend Grady Nutt was a humorist and deep thinker who could make any audience laugh and think at the same time. Before he died far too young in 1982 he wrote the most profound and meaningful picture of God’s grace I have ever read or heard. He wrote:
“Picture yourself as Cinderella and it is the morning after the ball. You are back in the basement on your knees scrubbing floors when you hear the prince enter upstairs. You want to run to him and shout TA-DA it’s me, but you realize he fell for a princess and you are a scrub girl.
You hear your step-sisters try to get their fat feet into the slipper and hope they break every toe they have.
Then your heart breaks as you hear the prince begin to leave.
Then he pauses and asks if there are any more women in the house.
The step mother says, “Well there is a scrub girl in the basement but it could not be…“
The prince says, “Send for her.”
Now you are walking up the stairs trying desperately to straighten your hair and hide your nails and rough hands while trembling with fear that he will take one look and laugh.”
Then Grady says, “Grace is God kneeling in front of you with a glass slipper in His hand. Seeing value to you that you never knew existed, seeing potential in you that you could never imagine.”
I preached for several years before I ever let Him put the slipper on my foot. Before I ever dared think that God could not only love me but could like me, accept me warts and all, see value in me, and most remarkable, even be pleased with me. When I finally began to accept that wonder the impact on my life was not at all what I expected. I did not suddenly become holy or super religious. It was much more meaningful and ultimately more powerful than that.
This guy who was raised thinking he was ugly and dumb and who had spent his life hiding his deep feelings of inferiority behind jokes and humor began to think that if God could accept him maybe he could accept himself. If God could love him maybe he could even begin to love himself. If God thought he was worthy maybe he could begin to struggle his way out of an inferiority complex. From the time I hit bottom and discovered that God wants to build an individual relationship with us based on His love I have believed that the victory in Jesus is self-worth out of which everything else comes. He came to help us understand our own worth and that makes all the difference.
It changes how we relate to others. Without self-worth we are left with a huge vacuum inside of ourselves that needs to be filled so desperately it dominates our lives; when we meet someone, how they see us is far more important than how we see them. We collect folks in an effort to fill the vacuum inside of us. The problem is the vacuum cannot be filled from the outside. Even if they praise us to the heavens it falls on our deaf ears. Unless we love and accept ourselves our mind tells us they don’t really mean what they are saying and if they really knew us they would never give any praise.
His love takes away our fear of what others might think. All of us struggle with that issue but those of us with feelings of inferiority live our lives trying to earn love and notice. When we begin to discover the self-worth Jesus offers it is like “If the general likes me I don’t have to worry about the corporals.” I no longer need to fear, I no longer need to compete. Jesus loves me and if someone else doesn’t that is their problem. I have a poster I try to live by that says, “Your opinion of me is none of my business.” I think that became possible when He put the slipper on my foot.
But wait there is more, stay tuned.