Law and Grace

Sometimes God amazes me with how He works, especially when I am being stubborn and unwilling to submit to Him. He is still faithful and still provides for me, despite my keen sense of pride and entitlement and my lack of thankfulness. His grace and mercy amaze me.

I am thinking of this tonight because every time I have attended Beulah Alliance Church, the pastor has spoken about subjects that I have journalled about and prayed over in the past week or even just in the few hours before church starts. Yesterday I wrote in my journal, "God, whenever I read Your Word, my eyes skip right over the grace and get straight to the condemnation." Tonight Pastor Taylor was preaching on Romans 7:14-25, in which Paul is trying to figure out why he still struggles with sin in his life when he desperately wants to be free from it. I have found myself in the same place in the past few weeks because there are some sins and temptations in my life that I struggle with almost daily, yet I don't want to do them anymore. I don't want to sin anymore, yet I find myself slipping back into it far too often. Daily, in fact.

Pastor Taylor was talking about the fact that we cannot free ourselves from sin because we don't have the power. However, Christ does and He has given us that power. We need to work at not sinning but do so through the strength that Christ provides for us when we become His children. By cultivating our relationships with Christ himself and focusing on Him, we will find ourselves struggling less. God wants you to love Him more than He wants you to "keep rules" because rules rarely create a deep sense of love or adoration for the person administering them. When we fall more and more in love with the Author and Perfector of our faith, we will find ourselves more in-tune with what pleases and displeases Him and we will want to work towards perfection out of a desire to please God, not appease Him.

God has grace that is unending and He wants to extend it to us. He doesn't want us to be bogged down by sin and feel as though we need to clean ourselves up before we can come to His throne and admit our folly. He yearns to give us freedom from our burdens and to show us how truly beloved we are.

Romans 8:1 offers such hope after the bleak reality of our inability to overcome sin totally while on earth. "So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus." I cling to this verse when I see my shortcomings and I need to bring my sin and temptations to Christ because He desires to help me and to see me become the woman of God that I am designed to be. It is scary to think that we are made for greatness because it is easier to be mediocre. But that is another whole topic that I won't get into right now. I can only do these things through God, whose power is made perfect in my weakness.

Well, that's all my ruminating for this evening. I hope I didn't write anything heretical or theologically unsound.

Elisa.