Grace and Faith

        Today I read an article from the Catholic magazine, The Word Among Us (Jan/Feb 2015) about the interconnection between grace and faith.  It compares grace to the net firemen hold below a burning building, and faith to our decision to trust the firefighters and net and jump.  Our decision to leap into the arms of Christ is the only way to be safe, it is a decision of life over death, and it is not a one-time choice, but one we are faced with every day.  When we choose to make the Lord our refuge, our stronghold, our true repose, we open ourselves to an “endless store of grace and blessing.”

        This is because we carry out the part of God’s faithful whom He promises in Psalm 91 to protect.

        The article goes on to say that “God’s grace without our acts of faith has very little ability to change us. And our efforts, no matter how faithful and disciplined we may be, simply won’t have much impact if we aren’t open to the flow of grace that God is always pouring out from heaven.”

        This simply means that we Can change, by agreeing on a daily basis to cooperate with God’s transforming grace, whether it is easy or not.

        Three examples from Scripture are then given:  (1) In Jesus’ Parable of the Sower (Matt 13:3-8), the seed is God’s grace, and the soil is our faith.

        The harvest is righteousness, or the “fruits of the spirit” Gal 5:22, i.e.  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  I formerly thought bearing fruit meant producing positive signs that God was blessing our faith-efforts by allowing them to have apparent results.  This, however, is a separate yield, and the keys to this harvest are in His hands.  As this issue was what I was seeking understanding of, and I didn't understand yet, I set it aside and went on studying the article. I'll come back to it later.

        Next, (2) Peter tells us to ‘long for pure spiritual milk (God’s grace) so that through it you may grow into salvation.’ (1 Peter 2:2), and in order to allow His grace to work in us, we must get rid of 'all malice and all deceit, insincerity, envy, and all slander.' (2:1)

        What is meant by growing into salvation other than “running the race” successfully, that is, keeping Christ’s commandments throughout life? Yes, the way is hard, but not too hard, because God is for us, if we remain open to His direction.  None can snatch us from His grasp, yet we must choose to “cleave to Him” and not unto the world, else we will produce little fruit.

        Third (3), the article calls putting away “all filth and evil excess” (James 1:21) that leap of faith which together with humbleness, permits God’s seed of grace to take root in our souls to our salvation. 

        My NASB reads, “putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness,” which is reminiscent of Jesus’ admonition against putting new wine in old wineskins.  We have accepted God’s Holy Spirit into our beings, and have fresh clean skin and fresh clean insides, why sully them by lying again in the mud or eating our own vomit, Amen?  Certainly this would be a barrier to grace working in our lives.

        The article then compares “cheap grace” to “costly grace”.  Cheap grace, according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, is failing “to live a different life under grace from the old life under sin.” Costly grace is being a true follower of Christ—leaving our nets behind.

        To truly be His followers we must acknowledge Him as our Shepherd and King, our one true Master—in this daily action, we leave our nets and our homes and choose no turning back.  Anxiety for money is our chief temptation to pull our trust from Him, which is why Jesus repeatedly tells us not to worry for such things the world runs after, and to believe that the Father who is good and loves us, will provide for us He calls His children.

        The Catechism calls grace “the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call” which demands our “free response”. The article adds that “we have an important role to play…to yield to God’s grace, however costly that yielding may feel,” and it cites Abraham, Moses, and Mary as examples of costly grace.  But choosing to yield, as they did, to accept that grace, “will bring untold blessings to us and to the people around us.”

        This is my “faith-berg”—that I do not perceive my faith increasing, or recognize the fruits of my labor, because my eyes have been elsewhere, on tangible results in the lives of those I’ve prayed for, in my relationship with God and my circumstances.  This is my wandering in the desert to a land I do not know, these were my sacrifices of everything valued by the world, my risking exposure and devastating disappointment, my fear of having done everything in vain, for a false hope and a lie that I could not protect myself from, because I believed it of God.  I have walked by faith, out of love, I have not turned back, out of love, out of faith.  I have not seen these untold blessings either to me or the people around me.  I have not yet valued the work of grace within me as much as God evidently has, because I have continually looked for the rest of that “faith-berg” to rise into sight.

        Today I arose from a bed not of my devising but on which I had been trained to add to my own suffering.  I could because I left behind my self-image, the hardest thing of all to leave behind.  I came to that point because it cost too much to keep striving after an ideal, from the Bible and from how I and others interpret, interpolate and extrapolate what it says, that had progressed beyond impossible to meet even with God’s presumed and implored help.  It was a false ideal, and had nothing to do with how God sees me.  I am acceptable in His eyes, and the way that I am is worthy to Him, not impossibly far from a standard no human can meet. 

        Today, I am no longer who I thought I was, and that is a weight off my chest.  I am free, indeed, the truth has set me free.  I am who He says that I am.  I will accept what He believes of me, over what I have been accustomed and learned from others to think of myself and my walk with the Lord.  I will quit measuring myself by where I think I ought to be in comparison with my past or with others.  I am no longer strapped between boards screwing the thumbscrews of Scripture down deeper into the prison of flesh that He does not want but keeps me imprisoned in.  These are the lies of the enemy, and today the threads of those screws, unable to tighten further, became stripped all at once, the boards sprang loose, and I have begun to breathe again, live and hope again, and have joy as a new person, the person I believed so long ago that Christ desired me to be.

        Today, in my heart again without hindering doubt, I know I am loved by my Father, and I believe at last in my heart what He says, that His love for me is greater than I could ever know.  I receive with joy the knowledge that His will is not to crush me, but to lift me from my pallet and bed of death to walk at Christ’s side in beauty and love and light forever.  Amen, Alleluia.