The World, The Darkness, and The Baptism of My Soul

There I sat, drenched in the realization of grace. I sat, the whole world dark around me contemplating what was happening. This second that was lasting forever. God was taking His time to take every loose end of the way I thought of grace and was connecting each with the reality of what His grace is.

It wasn't long before this revelation started rearranging my entire faith experience. I sat in darkness as I realized that I had taken grace and made it small. Suddenly the world started illuminating around me, and with it the truth of my thoughts.  I had sentenced grace to be a companion to repentance, it was a tool I used to come back to God and that was it. As the darkness slowly retreated, and the drenching realization of God's grace started taking root in my heart, I could feel my misconceptions of grace beading, running down my soul, and dripping off of me one by one. It felt like a new baptism, my realization of His grace, the decent into a place where I experienced God like I hadn't in years, and an emergence back to this world as my old way of thinking dripped out of my soul, hopefully not to return.

I smiled, looking around at the other hotel guests eating their buffet breakfasts oblivious to the fact that God has just changed my soul. My brain couldn't keep up with how fast my soul was processing this wonderful revelation. I couldn't vocalize what grace was at that time, and out of sheer inability to do so could only manage this thought "What is this revelation of grace? My soul can't wrap around it! Like trying to drink the ocean through a straw, I'm breathless."

In the days to come these thoughts unwound in my soul, my soul tickling my brain constantly with new tidbits. It's still happening today, I can feel my soul quicken inside me every time a new shade of grace shows up! I now intend on dedicating my following posts to these "tidbits" rattling in my soul.

Divine Tolerance

After having a revelation, my mind sifts through how I viewed the topic of said revelation previously. In my last post I talked about the danger of chaining grace to forgiveness, and therein making grace a series of events, the epitome of those events being our salvation experience.

While contemplating God's unending grace my mind was able to work out a way to understand unending grace. The way I might have explained it two weeks ago would be to tell you that God always loves us, and grace is the way that God allows us forgiveness every time we screw up. This is the way my mind, understand the emphasis, this is the way my mind understood it. Grace was God's tollerance for my stupidity! I came to Him and said " I have sinned again Lord!". In my mind He sighed and said "don't worry Tyson, I have Grace. You're forgiven... Again".

I used to work with a man who would drive me to my witts end every shift in the first few months we worked together. I tried to excercise grace as I understood it towards this man. He would tick me off and I would walk away with my mantra going " just have grace for him Tyson. Don't lose your temper, the shift is almost over". I would get home proud of myself at having not blown up at him. Grace in my mind was the ability to deal with hard people without losing my temper! Think about it, when you show someone grace what are you doing. Do you clench your jaw a little be, maybe say to yourself "just have grace, just have grace" until you are away from that person and you can relax until your next encounter. This is not grace. It is tolerance. We are practicing tolerance. Tolerance is passive, it doesn't do, it stops you from doing. Tolerance holds you back from striking out, giving that jerk what he deserves. Tolerance is you doing a favor for someone who might be insufferable in your mind. Tolerance lets you stand that person just long enough.

This is not what God offers us! God does not patronize with divine tolerance, watching us sin over and over again. Being honest on how I used to think, my grace would have been described "Gods ability to tolerate our sin until we are finally brought to perfection after death". What a shallow view of God's grace. We sin so much that if we reduce God's grace to devine tolerance than we have to accept that, this side of heaven, there is no room for enjoyment, jubilation, or worship, either on our part or God's!

Examine your heart, if the ongoing grace of God is a safety net for you, if grace is tolerance, you are not understanding the grace of God. The only fruit that the thought of a tolerant God can bring from our faith is the rotten fruit of guilt. God does not tolerate you.

There are two scriptures that stand to me from my salvation experiences. The first John3:16 "For God So loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever beliees in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

The second is Romans 5:8- But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This is not tolerance. A tolerant God would give us a list of rules that would allow us to to placate him just enough until we die. Once we die, then, He will bring us on to perfection and we can finaly have a full, wonderful, loving relationship with Him, and He with us.

Tullian Tchividian describes grace as God's love that pursues us even though we don't deserve it. A deep, insatiable love is what God has for us, and his grace is the means by which he pursues us haphazardly.

My mind processed grace as tolerance. It brought about guilt, and inadequacy. I even found myself longing for the day when I could go to heaven and be free from earthly desire. It is so exhausting knowing my flesh will never stop wanting what it shouldn't want.

God offers me that freedom now. Through his grace. His relentless, pursuing, loving grace.

My mind reasoned tolerance, my soul craved freedom. When my soul finally realized what grace was I had a sweet taste of freedom. The freedom that comes through Grace alone.

More to come. Please keep joining me for these posts.

Much love, peace, and grace.

Tyson

Breaking The Chain

I might be putting the cart before the horse here but for some reason this sticks out in my mind as a good place to start.


We've all heard this dual deifiniton: Mercy is when we don't get what we deserve, Grace is when we get what we don't deserve. We deserve hell, mercy is us not receiving that punishment. Grace is getting the forgiveness we can never earn. 


We are taught, rightfully, that grace is what allows us to repent, God gives us grace! Once we repent he extends his grace to forgive us. Is that all? No. When we fall, the grace of God is there for our forgiveness. I will not contend this because it is true. I have depended on this grace of God my whole christian live. 


When we need forgiveness, BOOM, grace! 


So, that leaves an interesting conversation open. What if we abuse grace? We tend to run to a particular scripture.  Romans 5:20 - Romans 6:2

²⁰ Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, ²¹ so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 6

¹ What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? ² By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

I have often taken this scripture and explained that grace is not a pool we jump into when we feel like sinning, but instead it is the hand waiting to pull us out of the pool of sin. Once again there is no lie here. 

Another way that some look at this scripture is that our faith is a tight rope, and grace is an ever expanding safety net, we can't fall from our faith without being caught by a net of grace. Again, a beautiful thought of God's ever readiness to catch us is in our times of despair and bad decisions. 

Here is the problem, grace and forgiveness have been synonomized ( a word I made up to suggest that they have become almost synonyms, the two words being chained together and grace being used exclusively in the context of forgiveness).  

Here is where the problem enters. Although God's grace is needed for our forgiveness, grace should not be chained to forgiveness. A lot of people think of grace in relation to forgiveness. It's a safety net for when we fall, it's a way to get back in right relationship with God.  We need to break this chain. If we allow this synonamy (once again, a word I made up to suggest the words are not the same but stuck together) our view of grace may become very narrow. 

Grace has a danger of becoming an event. If grace is related only to forgiveness, then the greatest happening of grace was at our salvation, we had a giant grace event. Now we fall and jump from grace event to grace event. We come to God when we have broken through the guilt of what we have done and ask him for grace... again. 

Grace is necessary for forgiveness, however when we chain grace to forgiveness we miss out on the fullness it is supposed to be! 

I think I should stop there. Blog posts are supposed to be short. 

Describing grace is like trying to describe every raindrop in a storm. There isn't enough ink, there isn't enough paper, there aren't enough words. So, excuse me if I stumble through these posts, they are from the heart. I pray you keep coming back, this message has made my soul burn more than it has in years. Some of you might find it obvious, but for those of you who haven't stumbled across this yet, it is faith changing!

Tyson

Journey

First, thank you for coming to Rocks Are Dumb. Last week as I was vacationing in Florida I had a revelation of grace. If you follow me on twitter or facebook you would have read the status update:

"I fear that my view of grace has been horribly narrow.It's not just a means to return to good, it is the life blood of our growth in God."

I need to make a correction, it should say " It's not just a means to return to God". Either way it worked. That tweet came from a place of new discovery. I'll fill in more details later but for now I'll just say that I encountered grace as I had never encountered it before. I realized that my very definition of what I thought grace was was wrong. Well maybe not so much wrong, but as stated horribly, horribly narrow.

Rocks Are Dumb is going to be my playground as I explore exactly how deep this discovery goes.

I earnestly pray and ask that you join me on this journey. I can tell you with all confidence that this revelation has been the deepest, and most burning moment of my faith in 10 years or more. My hope is that those who haven't come to this place will discover it with me, that your faith will be strengthened as I wade through questions and realities of God's nature that seem to be to big for my soul to absorb.

Shortly after my first tweet I added this : "What is this revelation of grace? My soul can't wrap around it. Like trying to drink the ocean through a straw. I'm breathless"

Join me, comment, interact, lets wrestle with questions together. Bring a straw and your thirst and we will work together at discovering the true depth of Gods grace!

Tyson