too much pride, not enough grace

for my psychology class i’m required to participate in a graduate student’s research. right now i’m participating in a study looking at the effect of friendship on self-confidence. every day for the past 10 days i have filled out a survey about the most positive and negative friendship experience of my day, how it made me feel, and how i feel about myself in general. there is one question that asks if i am feeling guilty for anything. every day i have answered yes.

i never really stopped to think why i answer yes, i just assumed that as a sinner indebted to God for grace, the natural trade-off includes carrying the weight of my sin around for the rest of my life. it’s not as if my guilt is crippling me in any way; it’s more of a nagging voice in the back of my head that causes my heart to sink anytime i think of the things i’ve done, and how i can never repay my debt to God.

i have been a fool.

all my life i have been the broken record, repeating the idea that i am justified through grace by faith. i’ve got the words down. it wasn’t until recently that i realized that living those words, truly believing them and understanding the ideas behind them, are completely different acts from just being able to quote them. so what does it mean to be justified through grace by faith? according to Brennan Manning it means that “i know i am accepted by God just as i am.” it means i am made righteous by an act of God that i have not deserved or earned, simply because i have believed without seeing these things: that Jesus is the son of God; He died for my sins and then conquered death after three days; even now Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God and will someday return.

Ephesians 2:1-10 (The Message) says:

“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing…”

this passage tells me that God didn’t hold grace over my head, requiring that i jump high enough to attain it. He offered it out of “immense mercy and incredible love.” a God that loves like that does not want us to feel guilty for accepting His freely offered grace. my own pride has gotten in the way of being free from my sin. if you have accepted for truth the idea that your sin is just too big to be absolved then you, like me, have let your pride get in the way of God’s grace. accept the truth that the God who “made the stars [and] drills them like an army” is bigger than your sin (Isaiah 40:26). abandon your pride in favor of grace.