THE BLESSING OF A BEATING HEART
Earlier last week as I laid on my bed, the position I was in enabled me to feel the rhythm of my heart. As I became relaxed and still, I paid special attention to the movements, visualizing the organ as it circulated blood flow through its valves. Feeling these pulsations in my chest brought me to peace as I fell in awe and wonder of God: Do we slow down enough to appreciate that which we have no control over, but which have such significant roles in our lives? Feeling my heartbeat reminded me I am not in control of anything other than my choices. And by the grace of God, even those are influenced by the power of the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus, that I can see what I would otherwise remain blind to without. What is it we cannot see without the grace of the Holy Spirit?
BLIND TO GRACE
The truth is that the answer to this question would be fruitless to those having not first received God’s grace. But receiving God’s grace undoubtedly answers the question on its own. In other words, to have received God’s grace is to be humbled enough keep it; to not have God’s grace is to be blind to the treasure of knowing we need it.
I would like to spend this article appreciating God’s grace and looking more deeply into the experience of recognizing the beauty of what isn’t ours to give ourselves.
RECEIVING GRACE
Honestly, grace was, more or less, a weightless spiritual term for me before recently. While it held its place in the spiritual conversation, the character of grace did not live up to its name. Little did I understand until recently that it was because I had not received grace more fully (deep in the spirit); rather, I had only taken notice of grace on the surface. To know of grace as a religious term is to have knowledge of a word without its context or purpose; to receive grace is to feel the Holy Spirit influence and reshape our heart by the humility of knowing the control (of thought, choice, and action) we have is painfully flawed and in need of divine correction. If we have not received grace, we will not desire correction; we may view ourselves as a work in progress at best, giving ourselves the credit of believing we know how to fix what is broken. The problem is we believe we can correct ourselves in our current state of understanding of what it means to correct, when in fact it is our skewed understanding of “correctness” that brought us to our flawed state to begin with.
DIRECTIONS TO A MEANINGLESS DESTINATION
Grace instigates a change on the inside. God reframes our understanding of what it means to receive what He gives us as an outpouring of His love, rather than knowing of His gift like directions to a place we’ll never travel to. What kind of difference would it make to know how to get somewhere we’re not interested in going? It wouldn’t. What difference would grace make then if we could not see our current state? Grace pulls away the veil and reveals with the light of Christ the dark space inside that is our blindness. We cannot remove a veil we cannot even see is obscuring our view.
OUR TRUE NATURE REVEALED
Grace remaps our perspective. Say a friend tells you that you have something in your nose. This may draw different reactions, namely relief and surprise; surprise because you might not have expected such a comment, and relief to discover there was something to remove. Grace is similar, but obviously to a much greater and more fundamental degree—it is the revelation of Christ’s character. When our sinful way of living is revealed, we are likely to be surprised by just how off-putting our lifestyle really is, but we are relieved to know there is a much better way. First, we must understand what a healthy lifestyle looks like by comparing it to what is unhealthy, and ultimately desiring what is more healthy. Grace is the unveiling hand, revealing where we’ve chosen for the worse.
INTERNAL EXCAVATION AND REBIRTH
Grace can be believed, but still not received. There is a difference. A received grace can be found in the fruit of a person’s actions, after the true nature of grace has been divulged to them. When we receive grace, there is a deep, internal shift—not merely permutation; there is no reordering or rearrangement of our spirits—there is an entire excavation of our original mentality to make space for a new spirituality; our old, dead spirit for our new, reborn spirit. Grace complements the process and reality of rebirth, where we surrender our old, “sinful self” for our new spirit in Christ. What is amazing is that with grace, we desire this excavation; the renovating of our very interior walls into our reborn spirit, where our new eyes can now “see” ourselves before and after Christ. We then begin to understand the end of Christ’s means through His death and resurrection, and we are witnesses to our own transformation.
CHRISTIAN “BRAIN-WASHING”
Some people fear or suspect this “excavation process” (my personal choice of words) to be what some might call the brain-washing effects of Christianity. Let me be clear—this is not brain-washing because there is no manipulation or deception: The Truth of the Spirit of Christ speaks for itself. We cannot stop grace from interacting with our spirits anymore than we can stop water from being wet—because this is merely the natural, organic communication between grace and our spirit inside. Grace does not need manipulation to have a sincere impact; grace’s intrinsic form evinces our most inner self by wiping the manipulation and deception of sin from our eyes; no facades, no defenses, no excuses, no masks—only the truth.
The reality of grace is that while it is a perspective change, the shift is triggered by the change of our view of the self (which is initiated by grace). In other words, when we see ourselves differently—spiritually-speaking—our new spiritual view changes how we see the world around us as well. This is as immutable as fire is hot: To see oneself differently is to perceive one’s world differently. A doctor cannot be a clown and a child cannot be geriatric; a doctor cannot accept his identity to be a clown lest he forfeit the nature of his responsibility anymore than a child could not accept him or herself to have diabetes or arthritis while youthful and galvanized. Likewise, once we understand what our true nature is by the power of God’s grace, there is no returning to our previous identity (life without God) because to return would be to merely pretend (like the doctor or the child) not to see what cannot be unseen, wearing a front in the name of self-denial. These useless, vacuous pretenses would far more likely be brainwashing our minds than the genuine, revealing nature of grace in our hearts.
BIOLOGICAL REASONING AND DECEPTION
In this way, grace is not manipulation anymore than experiencing love firsthand renders us speechless. The experience of grace is not a trick or deception anymore than realizing what it feels like to love and be loved is “otherworldly.” We know we cannot amply explain love beyond chemicals and hormones (with strict regard to the biological argument), but we “know” our experiences are authentic, sentimental, and more precious than any other. This is our truth. Once we have experienced this love, or have come to understand it through the love of Jesus, we would not attempt to use logic to explain it away just because we cannot explicate the process further beyond our understanding of explicit biological reasoning. In other words, simply because we cannot explain love without using clichés when trying to break the argument away from science, this doesn’t stop humans from believing that their experiences are all the more real than much any other experience.
Likewise, we would not explain away grace as manipulation if we knew, from the spirit, the freedom of knowing (growing in awareness) our sinful identity is promoted by the deception of the enemy, and how having our eyes opened to the Truth of Jesus Christ is the most significant and essential reality to be encompassed by (reborn identity) and invited into.
LIBERATED BY A LACK OF CONTROL
When I felt my heart beating while lying down, I acknowledged to myself that at any moment, my heart could simply stop. Not due to health problems or the position I was lying in, but because God allows each new breath to come, and He could stop allowing it at any time. This realization is grace itself in action, reminding me how beautiful it is not to be in control of everything, including the very breath enabling me to continue living and making decisions and realizations—all of which impact the people around me. We are given so much control, and yet to truly see our lives from the bigger picture (what I like to call the “bird’s eye view”), we realize that the control we have is so little—and yet, this truth is extremely liberating when we receive grace and realize how much more abusive of our control we would be without it.
FREEDOM BY OMISSION
When we can admit and acknowledge this abuse, we turn inwards with humility and gratitude that God gives us the grace to choose Him, again and again, and to not so stubbornly beg and plead for more control. Grace enables us to see the havoc and chaos which would destroy our identities without Him who extends the gift, and in seeing this Truth, we are not manipulated, but set free from the lie that so much control is actually better than surrendering to a personal, loving, unconditional, selfless, infinitely powerful and omniscient God—a God creating each new moment (allowing every heartbeat) for us to remember once again why we serve with humble eagerness. May our eyes be opened to this Truth, and may we all be filled with peace, hope, joy, and freedom in the omission of more chaotic control as we follow a God whose sole intention is to give us the best life we could possibly live.
I pray this would be our new perspective, mentality, and source of relief. In Jesus name.
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