Wait - its a trap!
On Sunday (26th April) Paul spoke about love and faith. Reminding us that love is the foundation upon which faith grows.
He spoke of the trap that we Christians can fall into. The trap that leads us to feel guilt not joy when we think of Jesus and his love for us. This trap erodes our faith and stops us growing.
I feel it myself, more than I care to admit. When I feel that I am a good person, doing good things it is easy to accept Jesus love for me. When I feel like a bad person, because I’ve done something wrong I find it much harder to accept that love.
It’s almost as though we see it like an infomercial that advertises “Get Jesus love for only $5.95 per month and the first month is FREE!”.
We happily accept his forgiveness and move into right relationship with God when we first become Christians and accept the free gift. But next month we are not so sure that we can just accept it again for free, now we start to think we need to earn it or pay for it. We want to show that the first gift wasn’t wasted on us, that we have improved somehow before we feel comfortable accepting it again.
We know that we are brought into relationship with God through his work not ours. But I think that we are only kept in that relationship through the free gift of his love, that covers every mistake we make and every poor choice we make. He freely gives his love regardless of us, and we must freely accept that love, without striving and without earning it. It is a gift.
We want to deserve his love. And so we, ourselves sometimes create a distance between God and us when we do wrong, because we no longer think we can accept his free gift of love and acceptance.
The truth is that Jesus knows we need ongoing forgiveness, grace and mercy. We won't read the bible as much as we think we should, we will do things that are wrong. And he is ok with our imperfections, he loves us anyway, he chose us despite all that. Freely with no strings attached.
So why on earth do we have higher expectations for ourselves than our very creator does?
Scripture tells us that nothing can ever separate us from his love. It’s not him that has the problem with our mistakes, failings and errors, it’s us.
It’s time to be kinder to ourselves and to see ourselves through the eyes of love, the way Jesus does. We need to remember it’s a free gift, every single day of our lives and stop striving.
KG
Comments