What’s your motivation?

About a week ago a pastor who was my youth pastor as a teenager posted a question to all of his Facebook friends. I found his question so intriguing I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since.  He asked: “What is the Single Greatest Motivator to our Prayer Lives?”

At the time I read the post he’d received the following answers, “hopelessness,” “brokenness,” “thankfulness,” and “knowing he loves us unconditionally.”  It really got me thinking about what my answer would be, and why I couldn’t come up with one.

I came to the conclusion that it sort of depends on how you define motivation.  If by motivation you mean reason (i.e. the reason I breathe is that my body needs oxygen), then I’d have to agree with the last answer.  If, however, by motivation you mean something that spurs us on when we don’t feel like doing something, or encourages us to do something more (i.e. incentive or inducement), then I find I am without an answer again.

Now that I understand grace and know without a doubt that God is absolutely crazy about me, that He is never angry or disappointed, that He always sees me as completely righteous, and that the life I live, I live in Him, all of which leads to me being absolutely crazy about Him, I don’t need any incentive.

Letting Go

I haven’t written in a while. I recently told a friend that I only write when God gives me a message, and I haven’t had one lately, but I was feeling guilty today, so I tried to find one. Oddly enough my message was going to be about letting go and letting God be in control of everything we do. A little hypocritical to say the least…. Even though I know better than to do things out of guilt, it’s still a powerful motivator. Legalism and religion just wouldn’t work without it.

At any rate, I started my post, but it was not flowing, and I knew why, so I deleted it and instead started a letter to our sponsored child in Kenya.

As I wrote I wasn’t really thinking about it, I just wrote my heart for her, and it turned out to be a much better grace message than what I was trying to conjure up a few moments before. So, I’m going to share that instead:

Out of Balance

Many Christians say they understand grace, but that “grace teaching” needs to be balanced. In other words, if people believe that they’ve really been forgiven and made righteous and that it has nothing to do with them, then they’ll rebel and engage in sin, since there will be no consequences. So, grace teaching, they argue, must be balanced by teaching about how to live a holy lifestyle.

But grace, by its very nature, is unbalanced. When God cut covenant with Abram he alone walked through the pieces of the sacrifices meaning that only He was bound to uphold the covenant. It didn’t rest on Abram at all. (Genesis 15) When Jesus died on the cross it wasn’t to get something from us, or make us act in a moral way, it was an act of grace born out of love.

Divine Enablement

A few years ago God spoke this to me, “let me be supernatural.” I think sometimes as humans we are so focused on cultivating our own capability that we push God out of the way. We don’t realize we’re doing it; we think we’re called to handle things ourselves and be good little soldiers in God’s army, but we’ve missed it. We’re called to dependence, not capability. There is only one man who was ever capable of living the Christian life. His name is Jesus and He fulfilled the righteous requirements of the law on our behalf, because we couldn’t do it (Romans 8:3-4).

But, if humans are anything we’re stubbornly persistent. We want to keep trying to do it on our own. “This time,” we tell ourselves, “I’m really going to buckle down. I’m going to be in the Word. I’m not going to let any angry words come out of my mouth. I’m going to think of others first and love everyone with God’s love. I can do it!”

That usually lasts all of a day or two, maybe even up to a week, and the longer it lasts the worse off we are because the more we’re convinced we can do it on our own. But where does that leave God? The creator of the Heavens and Earth who wants to live His life through us patiently stands on the sidelines where we’ve placed Him while we try to do it ourselves. He watches us fail time and time again, just waiting for the day we’ll give up and let Him come work through us.

Absurdly Real

I’ve become addicted to Steve McVey’s Sunday Preaching. I mentioned it last time, but I’m even more hooked now. My husband and I like to say that sometimes we need a grace fix.

He said something this past week that has been making me smile ever since. “Grace isn’t right or wrong…Grace is ridiculous!”

I love that! Who else but God would say, “You can never behave so badly that you would be less acceptable to Me, and you can never behave so well that you would be more acceptable to Me.”

We are fully accepted. He’s so crazy about us. I love walking around knowing that. I love knowing that I’m His treasure and all He wants from me is just to have relationship with me.

Valuables

About a year ago I watched a documentary called Fistful of Quarters. It focused on two men trying to break and hold onto a high score record on Donkey Kong. The subject matter seemed light-hearted but I found the movie very profound and actually quite upsetting. This is a fairly well written plot excerpt from Wikipedia about the two main characters in the movie:

“In Ottumwa, Iowa, Walter Day founded Twin Galaxies, an organization formed to keep track of high scores achieved on arcade games in the United States. Billy Mitchell, having achieved the highest ever recorded scores on Donkey Kong and Centipede in the 1980s, remains a video game legend in 2005. Twin Galaxies has now become a global organization. Mitchell is unabashedly cocky and fond of self-promotion, proclaiming himself the “Sauce King” of Florida for his successful line of homemade hot sauces. Next to his family, Mitchell considers his arcade scores his greatest achievements in life.

On the other side of the country, in Redmond, Washington, Steve Wiebe has been laid off as a Boeing engineer, and now spends his time as a science teacher. His friends and his wife, Nicole, describe him as a tragic figure who always comes up short, despite being proficient at music, sports, art, and mathematics. He was a star baseball pitcher but was injured and unable to pitch in the state championship. He is a gifted drummer yet does not care to perform. Preparing to get back into the workforce, Wiebe begins going to night school to get a masters degree and obtains a Donkey Kong machine to play in his garage as a pastime. After reading of Mitchell’s world record of 874,300 on the Internet, Wiebe uses his math and engineering skills to discover various patterns in the game, and is able to master the game and achieve a score of 1,006,600 points. Wiebe submits the tape to Twin Galaxies, and for a few weeks, Wiebe is a local celebrity.”

Test Time

Sometimes in church we hear a lot about confessing our sins, usually with 1 John 1:9 referenced or sometimes a little James 5:16 thrown in. Often we’re asked to examine ourselves to see if there is anything we need to confess and even encouraged to come to the alter to confess either to God alone or possible a friend or prayer partner and ask for forgiveness.

So what does this look like through a grace perspective? I do believe there is a place for confessing and examination, but I don’t think it looks much like what we tend to see in church.

First and foremost, I think a continual state of self-examination for the purpose of locating sins to confess fixes our eyes on the wrong thing. When we understand grace our eyes are naturally fixed on our Heavenly Father. If we are in a constant state of self-examination ours eyes will only be fixed on one of two things, ourselves or sin, with only two possible results, pride or condemnation.

Personal Note

So, the last post was a little indulgent (I’m borrowing Simon Cowell’s critique of many of the contestants on American Idol this year), but those will be few and far between. My goal with this is to discuss grace, not myself.

A Little Bit Personal

2 Corinthians 5:21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

If that verse doesn’t get you so excited on the inside that you want to jump or dance or shout, then you might not fully understand grace.

This is an excerpt of an email I wrote a friend a few years ago where I was relating a dream I’d had and the effect it had on me:

“Another strange thing that I know was in the first email I sent you is that my middle name means Grace. Whenever I think about that it makes me uncomfortable because I don’t feel like I understand God’s grace in a tangible way outside of just the line that you hear all the time “mercy is that Jesus got what we deserved and grace is that we get what He deserved.” You know how there is talk in the Bible about God giving us new names? I want a new name so badly, but I’ve told Him a few times that I don’t want it to be Grace because it doesn’t seem to fit. I can’t even really understand why I feel that way but I know I start to tear up every time I think about it. Grace feels like something that doesn’t belong to me and I feel almost resistant to having any part of it, which I know makes no sense because I’m a Christian saved by grace.”

The Problem of Morality

There is a focus lately on a return to morality, def. “The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct.” It seems to be many people’s answer to the problems that plague our world. Contrary to popular belief morality never helped anything, at least not long term and the story of the Bible is that morality never saved anyone. Morality was the emphasis of the covenant of law. In essence, God told the Israelites that if they would follow His laws they would be blessed and taken care of, but that punishment and consequences would come if they didn’t. Of course, God knew full well that they would never obey for long, and that no matter how many times they re-dedicated themselves and re-committed to following all the rules, they’d blow it again.

Yet, today we try to do the same thing, and most of the time it’s Christians leading the charge. We know we aren’t saved by being moral (works), but by faith, yet we still think following the right rules will ingratiate us to God and change our society for the better. Why is that?