Come back

If you've fallen from grace--the place where all you know is that all you have is a gift and that what you do have is undeserved--if you've fallen from that place of grace you will find yourself in selfishness, vanity, greed, anger, jealousy, and a feeling of weariness.  Now let's come back.

Because we can. 

Paul writes in Galatians 5 to the church at Galatia to stop trying so hard to "do right."  Nothing right comes from us! We are cracked buckets that can't hold diddly squat!  Eventually everything slips from our grip.  Christ got between the cracks of our bucket, getting stabbed and squished and humiliated in the process-- and there He held us together through suffering and blood.  So that now only by Him we have life.  Our buckets are full of Christ's flesh and blood in the cracks so that if we hold anything good it's only because his pain allows us to have it.  

Sometimes we see our cracks and lose hope.  We can't handle family issues, we hate the way we look, our grades suck, we can't make good friends, or we don't have the money we want to live a certain way.  This is a fall from grace.  Perfect people get perfect families, perfect people are beautiful, perfect people get perfect grades, perfect people are loved by everyone, and perfect people live comfortably!  Right?  Right?! If so we will try try try to be perfect.  Work our way towards being perfect rather than finding perfection in the opposite thing: grace.  

“You who are trying 

to be justified by the law 

are alienated from Christ; 

you have fallen from grace."

--

So if you desire to come back to grace it means 2 things: 

1.  It means you have a certain freedom in the cracks of your life.  The freedom is that they can be there and they won't change your freedom.  It's like when school is out and you still have stuff you learned in your mind, but it's no longer needed for a test.   The test is over...but you still carry around what you learned.  In the same way, your life-cracks exist, but they are no longer a threat to survival.  Life has been won by Christ.  This is the first step into grace. 

2.  Grace-laced freedom is extremely potent. It does not mean perfection in itself, it simply means an opening has been made to perfection: which is to develop a relationship with Jesus.  But here we can use our freedom to go back to slavery too since freedom means we are not held back from anything. This second step is important: practice using this grace-laced freedom to pursue a life of loving others.  Instead of loving to get a good life, get a good life by loving.  Loving others is not the means to an end, it is the end.  So we focus on how to love more truly rather than focusing on the payout of our "acts of love."  This means we must walk with the Holy Spirit in us who searches our hearts and reveals when we truly love and when we are just faking it.  

"For you were called to be free, brothers; 

only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love. 

For the entire law is fulfilled in one statement: Love your neighbor as yourself. 

But if you bite and devour one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another.”

‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5:4, 13-15‬ ‭

So there it is family.  

A fall from grace doesn't have to continue, but we can turn back to grace-laced freedom in Christ who is our life and avail ourselves to His transforming work in our hearts to love as He loved us.  

Stop trying to be perfect.

Let's choose to have life in Christ today. 

Come back. 

Love you guys