'Oh to gracehow great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be
let your goodness
like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to thee
prone to wander
Lord I feel it
prone to leave the God I love
here's my heart, Lord
take and seal it
seal it for thy courts above'.
These words have always fallen beautifully upon my ears . In high school I'd tasted them as right upon my lips. It wasn't until college, though, that I experienced them and found them vital to my life. I've strayed from God. My freshman year proved to be full of tests, the biggest one consisting of faith. Alone, on my own, I failed miserably [thank goodness for Him and His grace]. I've never felt more like Peter in my life, denying the God I'd known deep and personally in the past. There were moments of darkness. Times of tribulation. Many knew. Some prayed. Some held me tightly. Some didn't seem to care.
Perhaps I gained understanding of what Charles Dickens meant when he wrote, 'A Tale of Two Cities', because for me that season of my life was the worst of times, but it was also the best. You may not be able to at first comprehend how the darkest time in my life could also be called the best of times, but in response to your confusion let me ask one question: how could we have light without darkness? My heart was in such a messy place during my first year of school, but God never would've been able to restore it if the situation wasn't so. I have said in the past that God can bring good from a bad situation, but I never truly saw it in my own personal life it until I left home. You might be wandering what happened during this time, and I may share bits and pieces if I think it applies to a post or if I feel someone can relate or learn from what happened, but I don't find the details significant enough to share right now. Let it suffice to say that I doubted God. My soul finds peace in sharing this because He has restored my heart and revealed Himself to me in various ways, but perhaps someone else out there needs to know that it's okay if doubt is present in your current season of life-and it can take many forms. You're not alone.
I used to get caught up in the details of all that I experienced. After the Lord in His sweet mercy brought me back to Him, drawing me close to His side in a way I never could've imagined, I still struggled. My struggle was different, though, because now instead of drowning in doubt, I was sinking in shame. My head was saying that God forgives and that His grace is overwhelmingly enough, but my heart took a long time to reach this same conclusion. I often felt too aware of people around me, like I couldn't quite live boldly in faith because what I had said and done in the past was worse than what other believers had said and done. My sin was greater. My doubt was different. God loved them more.
[To the ones who have 'never doubted', I encourage you to love those who come to you in confession regarding skepticism. Nothing can hurt a heart more than a hardened soul who rejects that person for being honest about their hurt and current state of seeking].
Not all who wander are lost, but I was exactly that: lost.
The focus of this post is not to dwell on how God reached down and pulled me out of the mud, though He most certainly did, but that topic is for another time. It's not to discuss how lost I was, either. It's simply about one concept that applies to every single one of us at every moment of every day: grace.
Today, I just have to share an epiphany I had while studying the book of James. The final chapter presents a passage over what it is to prayerfully live in faith, and before when I've read this concept described by James, the brother of Jesus, I've always found it beautifully inspiring and powerful, for we are encouraged to pray when our days are full of sunshine, when all we see is rain, when we desire health, and when we are seeking out all sorts of healing-physical, emotional, and mental. James encourages us to not only pray but to pray communally, for one is shown to be the loneliest number, and there really is strength in numbers. However, the very last verses are the ones that set my heart on fire today:
'My brothers, if any one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover a multitude of sins'. (v.19-20).
Of course, I love these verses because they apply to what I experienced almost two years ago, but today I saw them in a new light. The Spirit asked me, 'Why did James include this last little part here?' Yes, it's encouraging, but God was taking me deeper, and as I thought on the verses, I realized two truths: we cannot forget nor rate sin.
You may be a little fuzzy in understanding, so let me explain. Ever since my Peter Experience, I have always looked back on that time as a season that was exceptionally darker than any other time I'd experienced, am experiencing, or will experience, and perhaps it was, in some aspects, because I was indeed at low points physically, emotionally, or mentally. Even spiritually, it was a dry and barren time.
Here is the catch, however: sin more visible does not make grace less applicable.
I may have been pushing God away. I might have been denying His name and all that He entails. I might have seemed more broken on the outside and might have felt more sinful on the inside than everyone else around me, but God didn't see me through eyes such as those. He only saw beauty.
Even when my heart was wandering, He was there. Waiting. Speaking. Loving. Moving. Existing.
No action performed and no word spoken could change how He felt about me.
So, there is the first point. Grace is a beautiful scandal because it overwhelms everything we know. To quote one of my favorite speakers, Ben Stuart, 'Reconciliation to God can happen to anybody no matter how dark, broken, or twisted our lives have become'. Amen to that.
Here is the other point: prayer brings us into the glorious.
If we know that His net of grace will never fail to catch us, then how we view our entire lives should change. Our whole perspective should undergo alteration, because it leads us to ask the question of why: why is grace necessary? If you're a follower of Christ, then you've somewhere along the way admitted that you have a brokenness inside and that you want to be fixed. You've accepted the gift of grace-freely given-and you've [hopefully] let the love of the Lord Jesus Christ saturate your very being so that it flows out of your hands and feet, shining through your words and actions like the rays from the rising sun. An interaction with grace should change how you interact with people, because when a life truly receives grace, it can only then extend it.
If you don't know the one guy who can bring you life, then I invite you to read (and this will simply skim the surface) about Him here.
If you have experienced grace, then I encourage you to walk down memory lane for a moment. How freeing was it? What all did the Lord reveal to you during that time? How did your view of yourself and of God change?
Back to our present moment. Do you feel that way right now? Are your head and your heart on the same page as far as grace is concerned? Here is what I realized while reading the book of James: living a prayer of faith means living under grace. When we pray, we are acknowledging that we need God. When we cry out to Him, we are allowing our souls to break down in humble surrender. When we praise Him, we are acknowledging that He is the one who fills our lives with blessings just as Jesus filled the disciples' nets with fish. His hand should be the one that weaves our lives into a lovely tapestry of grace.
Though His grace is freely given and ever-existent, it, like any other gift, can only be received if it is accepted. We are called to receive His grace, and this happens, yes, in a moment of being eternally saved, but it doesn't stop there-it cannot stop there. Just because you are saved does not mean that you are not living in a broken world. You may be saved, but you are still going to be tempted. You might be sanctified-made more and more like Jesus-every day, but you are still waiting on the King to return, and until then, you are just as broken as the person next to you. The difference is that you know the Savior-the Great Physician-and you know that He loves to love. He delight in us, even though we turn away from Him. He loves us, even though we spit in His face daily. Someone may be visibly sinning, but that doesn't mean you aren't a sinner, too. What then, makes a Christian different from a non-Christian, or even from someone who may be saved but is living in sin-from a carnal believer?
The person who has a heart after Christ is a person who will strive for grace. It's a moment-by-moment lifestyle, not a one-time decision never to be returned to. We should live under grace, and that means daily acknowledging our brokenness so that we can lift our eyes to the giver of light. I think James included these verses-and concluded his book with them-to emphasize that a prayer of faith is a daily calling, because we are all straying, every day, from the Shepherd of our souls. Sometimes the person caught in sin may be the one looking back in the mirror. We need to spend our days-not just our church camps, retreats, or Sunday mornings-calling our attention toward the glorious. Let us get on our knees today, because it is in this that we enter into the deep waters where God is calling us in faith. Knowing our brokenness forces us to depend on God, because He is the only one who is whole. Admitting our brokenness brings our pointing fingers down, diminishes our judgmental attitudes, and breaks down even further our entire being. The irony is that only by being fully broken can we finally be beautiful, because in those moments God is made much of. Being people of prayer is vital, because it means we are being people of brokenness. Praying together helps us relate to our brokenness as a whole. It brings unity, vulnerability, and honesty, and I truly believe that when the people of God start to acknowledge that they need God, Satan and all of his demons flee. There is no power of Hell that can remain in the Presence of the Almighty God.
The Church can be nothing less. The moment we start to think that beauty is of us, we start to expel others. We cannot view someone's sin as any worse than our own, because in that moment we are viewing ourselves as above grace. Be broken for sin, yes. Be sad for sin, most definitely. Do not rate it, however, and most certainly do not let it affect how you see a person, for that person is a child of the King of grace.
So, when I think on my season of doubt, I see it a bit differently than I used to. It cannot be viewed as necessarily that different than a lot of other times in my life, because I've realized something: we all doubt God every day. We all put ourselves above Him. We all believe the lies that we know a better way to live, or that He can't be trusted, or that His goodness isn't present. We are all prone to wander. We all are tempted to leave the God our souls love. There is indeed a battle happening between flesh and Spirit-between evil and good-and we need to wake up and realize it. We all need grace, and it's the only way to win the battle. Winning ironically comes through humble surrender to love and hope and the source of all goodness. It's a scandal. It's life-altering. But it's beautiful.
And those are my epiphanies from the words of James.
