Recently the Lord has been taking me on this incredible journey into the immenseness and unthinkable mystery of His grace. Grace is something that has been always before me, but somehow I never fully saw it. It's as if I was always looking straight through it, but never directly focused on it. It's weird to me that I could pay so little attention to something so essential as grace. It is like the glue that holds basically... well EVERYTHING together. Without the grace of God we would be no where. We would be nothing.
So the question is - what is grace? Is it God ignoring all our faults and flaws so that we can get into heaven? Is it God giving us something we don't deserve? Where does it begin? Where does it end? Something the Lord has been showing me is that everything that we know and experience in the Christian life is through grace. Yes, I understood that it was only by God's grace that we are saved. We can never be good enough to deserve eternal life. But after we are saved, then what? How much is God's grace really involved in our lives? The answer is that His grace is so much more than just involved in our lives. In fact, it's the other way around, our lives are involved in His grace now. Because of His grace we are now in perfect union with the Father. All self-effort is pointless. Anything we can "do" cannot make us better Christians or help us grow closer to God. We are ALREADY perfect saints and are ALREADY one with God. This totally destroys all performance and striving. How freeing to finally realize - I don't have to do anything! Praying, reading the Word, ministering are all fruits of being one with God, but they don't help us grow closer to Him.
I just finished reading a book by John Crowder called "Mystical Union". This book changed everything for me. At first it was awesome and I could agree with everything he said. But then he started talking about these radical things like oneness with God. To be honest, this offended me. It's comforting thinking that you have some sort of control on your life and relationship with God. But as I was starting to see that is all truth I have no control, it offended my mind. But I know that God often allows our minds to be offended so that we are presented with a choice. The choice is to either reject this new idea because it's too difficult to understand, or to embrace it as being of God. That's where I'm at right now. I don't fully understand God's grace. Actually I feel like I don't understand it at all. It really doesn't make any logical sense. But I can feel the life that comes from stepping into his grace. It is like electricity to my spirit. It makes me want to laugh and cry and dance and jump all at the same time. So although it doesn't make sense, I am beginning to at least become aware of it's presence in my life. It's like a very blurry image, but I can see that it's there. So I jump head long into the river of His grace. No looking back!
