Grace

Adrian asked:
>And, how did you get to a place where you left the "performance-based faith" to a more grace->filled one? Who are the mentors that helped you toward that?

I have spent many hours trying to understand the process God used to make His grace clear to us. In some ways it still isn’t clear, probably because the old ideas do die hard. In other ways, however, the message is so clear and our lives are being changed every day.

Somehow, very early in our Christian walk, my wife and I learned that Jesus is real and that He alone is our hope. We believed that Jesus is God and that His coming was the action of the Lord who truly loved us. We knew, firmly in our hearts, that our salvation was nothing of ourselves and everything of Him. I think that was what protected us from becoming overwhelmed by the performance spirituality system.

As we struggled with the legalism, we saw over and over that it denied the necessary activity of the Lord. It made our effort the active force for our sanctification and, by extension, our salvation. We saw in many of the people and even in the teachers, that Jesus was just nice to talk about but not particularly helpful in the Christian life. Instead, we were taught to have high standards, make sacrifices, and develop a repertoire of techniques and disciplines. If you did enough of these things, and did them just right, then the Christian life would work. If your Christian life didn’t seem to be working, you either weren’t doing these things correctly or you needed additional ones. Jesus was rarely considered to be a practical part of the Christian life.

That consistently bothered me. I heard it from the legalists and I heard much the same thing from most evangelicals. I remember sitting in a church growth seminar where Jesus was never mentioned at all – a three hour seminar! The church no longer needed Him, it appeared. I knew that wasn’t right.

(You can listen to the process I went through in an audio message on our website. The message is free to download and is called, “A Journey into Grace”. )

The more I struggled with legalism in the church, the more I studied the whole idea of the activity of the Lord and our relationship with Him. The more I struggled with the inconsistencies of my own life, the more I knew the answers were found in Jesus alone. Jesus was the Center.

A while into this, I visited with a good friend, a man whom I respect deeply named Bob Bingham. Bob has been bringing people to Jesus for years with a ministry called “CupBearers”. He spoke of the “functional” life of Jesus in us. As we talked about this, I understood that this was the key to the whole thing – this was grace. God came to us because of His love in the Person of Jesus Christ and exchanged His life for ours. Now His life functions in us. It isn’t about our effort; it’s about Him.

When I began to teach this from a more focused perspective, the legalist folks in the church became very nervous. They were so tied into their system, so invested in it, that they couldn’t imagine that Jesus was truly sufficient. They realized that this was different from the teaching they were getting from their teacher and began the process of destruction they seem to do so well.

There were others who blessed us along the way. I was able to listen to tapes and read books by Major Ian Thomas of Torchbearers. So helpful! Even though we were well along in the process, my wife and I were encouraged greatly by the books of John Eldredge. His perspective on the love relationship we have with God is so important. We have also been blessed by Brennan Manning’s books and we have had the privilege of hearing him speak. He puts the grace of God into a message of brotherly love in a way that challenged us and moved us closer to the heart of Jesus.

So, you see, it has been a journey, but Jesus has led us all the way. We have come to understand that His love for us does not change; that He does His work and we are only along for the blessing; and that we have nothing to fear as we walk with Him. He is real and He is active. His life is the functional life within us.