Why Would God Forgive Me? The Awkward Truth

Jesus said in Mark 7:6-8  "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written; 'These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.'  You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men."

Some days a Bible verse just smacks you in the face, you know?  I wonder how many times my voice joined the choir to support rules taught by men rather than God's commands.  I shudder to consider it, and yet today it's my very salvation that is being brought to mind.

When I received salvation, it was after I'd repented.  Repentance is sort of "old fashioned," isn't it?  But we all must start there, right?  I had to accept that my sins are worthy of bloodshed.  Red, warm, painfully drawn and spilled blood.  A life was given - brutally - because that was required to cover my sins before God.  A sin offering.

No matter how my heart breaks for those who are tortured in their lives on this planet, or volunteer to ease someone's suffering, I can't earn God's forgiveness by doing a lot of good stuff - not even the stuff that He himself has told us to do.  If I stand in my contemporary church service and lift my hands and eyes to heaven as I sing, "How Great Is Our God," it doesn't cover me in righteousness... no matter how much awe is flooding through me, my sins are not covered by an exceptionally high level of emotion.

Someone innocent of all my sins was beaten, crucified and bled out for those sins.  Why?  Why can't I just love people, love the idea of a gentle and tender God, sing emotionally uplifting songs of worship and call it a beautifully spiritual (not religious... religious is a bad word, right?) and blessed day in the life of a Christian? 

Because God is Holy.  He doesn't compromise on sin.  I don't get a pass for 5 sins because I purchased sin credits with exceptionally loving behavior.  Oh, this is flying in the face of all those rules taught by people... by Christian people. God is loving.  Yes.  Restoring?  Yes.  But restoration is taking something in poor condition and restoring it to a valuable condition.  This wasn't done by a big hug, a pat on the head and a comforting "It's OK."

A price was paid for our restoration.  It was done with the body of God's Holy son.  God didn't turn his back on holiness to be able to accept me.  He provided a sin offering so I could turn my back on those sins and once that blood covered them, I would be cleansed from their stain - grateful for the mercy... not pretend that it wasn't all that dirty. 

Do I carry that message?  Do I forget the powerful experience of that first cleansing of my soul?  Do I downplay the beauty of holiness so that I honor God with my lips but not an obedient heart?  Do I worship people (the creation), bowing to a resistance to submitting ego and self esteem in repentance,  rather than worshiping the creator and His Truth? 

Sin killed Jesus.  It isn't harmless or unimportant.  Sometimes I think I've become comfortable with some sin in order to be comfortable in our culture.  But Jesus bled for those sins.  I share the love part of my faith, but I'm not very quick to share that my faith began with submission and repentance. 

Wow.  It just got real. 

Yes, we've all been called to love and serve the hungry, imprisoned, lonely, sick and don't forget .... LOST.  How can they have hope for a clean soul if they're shielded from testimony of our repentance?  Precious things are rare or expensive.  Salvation is precious.  It was very expensive.  It isn't easy to get, just because we don't have to shed blood.  We have to submit our pride, bowing to a Holy God.

I'm certainly not implying we're all called to live in the wilderness in animal skins like John the Baptist and shout "Repent" at people who walk by.  Though, as uncomfortable as we may be with that - God has called someone to do just that at least once, hasn't he?  But we don't have the authority to change the message that repentance is required for salvation.  We don't get to tweak it to be easier or less dramatic.  Being saved by someone else's death is nothing if not dramatic.

I Don't Live in a Billboard Picture of a Beach Vacation

I read a story this morning, in a magazine called The Sun. It was about a young woman just before and years after her older sister disappeared at the age of 16. The sister was found, years later, murdered. 

The author expressed the emptiness, regret, horror, fear, suspicion, danger, loss, fragility of relationships – so perfectly to my own imagination it made me cry. This had been my greatest fear. I didn't want to feel this.  

More than 3/4s of my life I lived in that fear – what happened in this fictional story could truly happen to anyone. My mother was taken from me in my fearful, terrorized imagination many times as a child. But not in reality. My life has been filled with fear of the tragic taking someone from me. My mother, my dad, my husband, my little children, my teenaged children, my adult children, my grandchildren, my pets. 

Writing requires honesty, if you desire to share something meaningful. In the past, however, I haven't handled visits to my painful memories very well.  I thought perhaps I should avoid all thoughts of them. But, it isn't honest to share a picture of joy and spiritual freedom with no context. So, those painful fears are relevant. They are part of the story, the “before” picture, truth. If I refuse to “go there”, to recall what I've been delivered from... what I share will be as superficial and shallow as a billboard picture of a beach vacation. 

For many years, I believed that my fears and pain had to be someone's “fault.” Someone was responsible, if not for a direct action then for failing to take preventative measures. Blame was a close friend to me for decades. It was assigned to whoever was deemed the “root” of the pain I was experiencing. But, no one was truly able to insulate me from every discomfort. 

Most times, the people I held accountable were doing the best they could, with no desire to harm.  They had no control of the neuroses that could grow from nursing a tiny injury that I didn't seek to heal. Sometimes the smallest event can spread like a crazed fracture in a plate of glass tapped not so very hard but under just the right set of circumstances. 

Blame pours its inky black stain all over your images of that person. You cover them so thoroughly that their image no longer bears the truth. Nothing is able to shine through the opaque covering of a handful of actions or decisions amidst millions of intentions, actions and decisions that reveal the true character and identity of the ones you blame. 

So, while I must “go there” and remember where I began, that pot of ink is a boundary. I have no business opening it and no right to pour it over another. Yes, it hurt. But mine is not a life of stagnant victimization. It's a life of movement and growth, gaining strength and wisdom... which one cannot do if she covers every flawed human being in her history with the opaque black ink of blame. We are all flawed. Our decisions and actions may tap on another's pane of glass. Some of these are our children. If we teach them to blame, we help them to spill the ink, grow their fears, hide from wisdom and live at the mercy of the brokenness. 

We aren't whitewashing anything, just recognizing that the painful truths aren't the entire truth. Don't let your story end with ink stained hands, ink covered relatives, and bitterness and injury haunting you like wraiths. It isn't what God intended for you.

Judging the Judgmental and Our Moms

God managed to find us, even though we were rural, poor, and without a car.  We lived along a church bus route. I should have been thanking God for this for 38 years.  Embarrassingly, I've done more pouting than praising.  I can count the souls saved in our family alone at 19, all beginning with that church bus.  The vine tangles out into the world in many ways as we've each interacted and worked in ministries ourselves.


Embarrassment and shame breeds an ungracious heart, and after I left that church, my heart looked back with suspicion, mistrust and blame.  Some deserved, some imagined.  I carried embarrassment for sins committed by me as a young girl, and by my divorced parents.  I've harbored resentment for the legalistic atmosphere, and rarely expressed any words of gratitude for their part in my salvation.  I overlooked the incredible gift of a loving, generous and kind Sunday School teacher.  Mrs. Charlotte Ramsey was both beautiful and happy - and I still smile when I think of her.


Shortsighted, I allowed myself to dwell on the negatives. I was ungrateful for that church's willingness to reach lost kids like me, kids without a dime to put in the offering plate.  That church was where God courted the broken heart of a little girl, as though she mattered.


I've been the same in my recollections of my childhood family life.  We didn't have much, that's easy to remember.  The childhood hurts and disappointments were ugly raw wounds for a very long time, and I believed my parents could have shielded me from all pain.  In our family, this expectation was a tradition.


Those expectations foster woundedness and ingratitude.  I taught my own daughters to hold people accountable and protect themselves.  Apparently, I thought my experiences would make me into a perfect mother, able to fend off every injury for my own children - and thus be exempt from this ever coming back to bite me in the butt.  (In case you're still innocent enough to believe this is possible – it isn't.)


There is only one God.  Only he knows the secret workings of our hearts, the inner needs and the unspoken hurts.  Mothers don't.  (Churches don't either.) And not only do our children belong to God - so do our mothers.  I'm not my mother's judge.  As well as I think I know her, God knows her infinitely better.  She actually had a name before Mom, an identity that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with God, her creator. 


Over the past 5 years, the truth of my mother's identity has slowly become evident to me.  This year, I realized something shocking.  While Mom always accepted and loved me for who I am, I haven't done the same.  My approval was reserved for some sort of superhero - a woman capable of protecting me from every hurt, able to rid my childhood of vulnerability, wounds and disappointment, and supernaturally know me in a way only God could. I believed this SuperMom would customize her parenting style and abilities to be MY perfect mother.  Of course, my sister needed a different model, and my brother...

I don't want to be imprisoned in memories of disappointment, pain and injustice.  There is another option.  There are memories of joy, tenderness and laughter. I don't want my mother trapped in my judgments, feeling as though she owed me something I was cheated out of.  That's the work of the enemy.  I'm setting us both free.


Philippians 4:8  "Finally brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things."