My name is Bonnie, but if any one of my three children ever has a girl (I have 2 grandsons and another on the way!), they have talked about giving her the middle name Grace, and would consider that as naming her after me, because they know that testifying to the good news of God’s grace is the passion of my life.
I have loved God since I was a child. I spent my early life wanting so badly to please him, but I was constantly filled with alternating determination and despair. I grew up in a church which taught me that when you accepted Jesus as your Savior he forgave all the sins you had committed up to that point, but any sins you committed after that you had to be sure to confess and ask forgiveness for, because if you died with any unconfessed sins you were lost. I was also taught that God was up in heaven reviewing the lives of those who claimed to be Christian, to see if their behavior measured up, and if it didn't, they were found unacceptable.
I kept hearing that after I gave my heart to God I would have the ability, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to be obedient, to be righteous. But I knew I wasn't. By the world's standards, I was not a bad person, but I knew that by God's standards, I was. I recognized my lack of love, my pride, my self-pity, etc. I kept answering altar calls, reasoning that I must not have made a true commitment the other times I had given my life to God, or I would be "doing" better, with the help of the Holy Spirit. I wept, I confessed, I repented, I pleaded, over and over.
Eventually, when I was about 30, I was introduced to what I then called Righteousness by Faith, and now call grace. It seemed too good to be true! I remember locking myself away with the book of Romans - no commentaries, just Scripture and the Holy Spirit - like it was a matter of life and death, because to me it was! If this was a lie and I believed it, then I would be lost! Finally, by God's grace, I was given a clear picture of what Paul was saying. I can't tell you how excited and relieved I was! And still am, to this day! I never stopped being consumed with wanting to do God's will, to serve him and please him, I just stopped the cycle of fear and despair. This is what I learned in Romans: The entire human race stands on one side of a chasm, the size of infinity, condemned by the law and God's requirement of perfect obedience, doomed to suffer the wrath of God. But Jesus came and fulfilled the requirements of that law and then suffered the wrath of God and united me to him in his life, death and finally in his resurrection. I now stand on the other side of that chasm, with God, who is well-pleased with me, not because of my own good works, but because I am "in Christ". The law that condemned me and doomed me is still on the other side of that chasm. It has no more power over me now because in Christ I am safe. I have died and been resurrected with Him. God sees me as perfect, because he has credited me with Christ's righteousness. Romans 4:17 says, "He gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were." He calls me righteous (which I am not) as though I were. It is because of that incredible gift that I did not and could not earn, that I am exhorted to no longer offer my body to sin, but to surrender myself to God as his slave, as a response of gratitude for this entirely undeserved gift of salvation.
I teach the Senior High teens at my church, and I tell them that Jesus gives us an A in the Class of Salvation 101 and then the Holy Spirit teaches us the material in his own time and way, uniquely and personally designed for each of us, transforming us, in His time, into the image of the Son. He is the one who causes us to want and to do his good pleasure. I haven't met any living person who can say, believably, that the transformation has been completed in them. But God says he began the work, and he will be faithful to complete it, some Glorious Day!
To be honest, even after my ‘Aha’ moment with Romans, I still fell into the quicksand of legalism from time to time. It has taken me about the same length of time to unlearn "works righteousness" as it did to learn it originally--about 30 years. I think I've "got it" now, but I still feel the need to constantly run to the cross and thank God again and again that it is not about me and how well I am doing. It is only and always about Jesus and what he did and continues to do for me!
My prayer is that my blog may play some small part in giving you the encouragement and relief I have found in this good news of God's grace.
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