grace driven

i have ben thinking recently about a great many things - but the one that has been driving my thoughts of late is this idea of grace - what is it, how is it to effect us and what is it that makes it such a important part of our lives - and, in my personal view, is the center of all we are as followers of christ - as disciples of the master we should be "grace driven."

grace is one of the hardest things in our faith to grasp - because of the required elements that make up grace - for grace to be grace, it must be carried with love, forgiveness, acceptance, understanding and have at its core ideas centered on helping others, going beyond self, giving of your total reality and mostly a desire to be willing to die for another - even someone you do not know. it is in those elements we truly find the grace christ had for us and it is truly the grace we should have with each other.

grace requires that we accept each other for who we are, and not what we think others should be. grace requires that we forive all, not just those we think are "worthy" of forgiveness. grace requires that we love everyone with "corinthian" love, and not just those we like. grace requires that we seek to understand those we do not understand, not to change them but to truly understand them. grace requires of us a true change of heart, a true change in life where we place the needs and wants of others above the needs and wants of ourselves.

i have written before that living in grace is harder then living via the law - because when we live via the law we have "rules and regulations" we can follow to help us know what and what not to do - but when we live by grace, we live by what we believe the holy spirit is telling us - we believe we are acting in the way God desires us to act - when we live by grace, we live by a standard set by christ, and carried over time to the hearts of millions.

you see, when we are "in the law" we can only do as the law tells us - if the law says "being nude is a sin" then we naturally carry that to the extreme and even disallow bathing "in the nude" - but with grace, we see the human body as a wondrous gift from God - and see the form as something wonderful, filled with grace. law blinds us and causes us to create other laws - which cause other laws - and we become a culture based on laws, where only the judges and lawyers have any idea what we are doing - or how to do anything.

the idea is not to be driven by the stick rules of law, but by the fluid nature of grace - to learn to move with the nature of our hearts and connect our reality with the reality of God. it is when we do that, when we strive to live by grace and find no excuses for not doing so we connected deeper to the God who created us, and the humanity that God created.