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.