Skip to main content

Amazed by Grace

Too often I am numb to the extraordinary truth of Christianity. My whole life is inundated with theology, church, prayer, and the whole religion thing. I work for a church so everything I do, in some way or another, is about or at least related to faith. This means that I hear and read the language of grace, redemption, resurrection, and all the rest all the time.

I will admit that I sometimes just get used to it.

Grace no longer astounds me, its just a part of life. Redemption is something brought up twenty or thirty times a day. The Resurrection of Jesus, the center point of history and the fundamental fact of Christianity, is just a given fact. Prayer becomes mundane, worship rote, and reading the Bible something I have to do because I teach multiple Bible studies a week.

I get the feeling that I'm not alone in this. Many Christians at some point in their life get in a rut. The more you are around something the more accustomed to it you get, and sadly this holds true to the truth of the Gospel. What is a radical, world changing message of grace, hope, and love just becomes another message among others.

It really shouldn't be.

The solution, however, is simple. Keep going. Every time I've hit this feeling of going nowhere in my faith God has always gotten me going again. One of the great joys of grace is that we are not called to do it all alone. God is with us. God is helping us. God is empowering us. 

Think about how absolutely mind boggling that is. God loves you so much that he is with you all the time. He is constantly molding you into the image of Jesus. Our faith and growth are not entirely dependent upon how we feel. There will be times when we lose that fire or feel stuck. God is still with you and working. His grace is amazing, and we should remind ourselves just how incredible it is.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Thankful

Today is Thanksgiving, the day that we are supposed to celebrate all the things we are thankful for. It is a time of family reunions, football, and turkey eating. I sincerely pray that each and every one of you has a good day today. I'll admit that being thankful has not been easy for me this year. As pretty much all of you know, my mother passed away December of last year. Though she had been in the hospital for months, we were not expecting it. In fact I was sure she would be finally able to come home within a matter of weeks. Instead she peacefully passed on into the arms of Jesus, whom she loved more dearly than anyone else. As you can imagine, the entire family was heart broken. After what can easily be described as the worst Christmas ever, I returned to home to Illinois. It was here that I finally broke down. I spent the next months doing everything except being thankful. I cursed God, wept, screamed, begged to have her back, and was generally not the nicest person to be...

Proverbs, Wisdom

Wisdom is an essential part of living a godly life. The ability to make good judgments and identify potentially sinful situations are skills all Christians should have. The Bible repeatedly emphasizes that it is the duty of parents and older Christians to pass on these skills and train younger generations in wisdom. The book of Proverbs is a book all about wisdom. The various authors of the book are trying to pass on the things they have learned to a younger generation. They want all that come after them to know that true wisdom comes from God. Background Like the book of Psalms, the book of Proverbs is a collection of various sayings and proverbs from many different people. The primary author we associate the book with is King Solomon, who wrote the most out of any single author, but he is just one of several writers. It is a very interesting book in this regard. The book of Proverbs can be tricky because it isn't always consistent in how the text flows together. Some...

What is Theology?

Greetings all! For the first true post I have decided to cover what will be one of the defining aspects of this blog; theology. I know that when I was growing up theology wasn't a word that was used in the churches I attended. In fact I don't recall ever hearing the word until I was in high school, and even then it was used negatively like theology was a bad thing. Theology is inseparable from Bible study, Christian living, and being a disciple of Jesus in general. It is an indispensable part of being a Christian. The thing is we haven't always treated it that way. We have allowed our theology to fall by the wayside, believing it to be useless or not appropriate. So what is theology exactly, and why is it so important? What is Theology? The word theology simply means "the study of God." The goal of theology is to reveal who God is, and when we know God we also come to know ourselves, sin, the world, and so on. What we've done in the past (and this may ju...