Legalism and Love

A few months ago I was talking with a woman for whom I care a great deal, about some things that were going on in her life and things that were going on in mine.  This was a few months into my re-conversion when she asked a question that required a black-and-white answer and I sweated the answer for no less than a month before I gave it.  I regretted having to answer the question every time I would see her name - I still do.  In the end, it broke our friendship to respond because she perceived the answer to exclude her from value and care, and no matter how I tried to explain that love is given despite sin, she couldn't see it because of the way the Christians she'd known in her life could not give love to her where she was right then, those Christians required her to change before love was granted.

I was at a Bible study a few weeks ago, and during the discussion, one of the women there rather vehemently indicated that there was no loving the sinner, just hating the sin and eradicating it which made my heart brake.  I (and others) protested that Jesus LOVED those people.  Jesus reached out to people where they were, in the middle of their sin.  His stance was forgiveness and acceptance THEN an admonishment to go and sin no more, it wasn't the eradicating of sin in the sinner's life that brought these people to Jesus - it was LOVE.  His love for them.

I grew up in legalism.  As long as I followed the rules of church, of God, of my parents, of society, I was deemed righteous and acceptable.  There was no place for error, sin, failure.  Well, try as I might?  I suck at following the rules.  I try to be what society, what God, what my parents, what my friends deem as a GOOD person.  I'm not terrible at it either, but try as I might, I am far away from perfect.  I mess up.  I mess up a lot.  But, in the middle of that mess, God steps in and says, I love you.  I want you to know me.  I want you to know that I know YOU already and even if you change nothing about yourself, I love you.  God says, choose me.  Choose loving me.  THEN, go, and sin no more.

I think that Jesus loves the broken people most of all.  I'm not proud, I am counted among the broken and I am so very glad for it.  Because in my brokenness, God is glorified in my acceptance of His gift of grace and mercy.  I am not seeking to keep sin in my life, I want Him to burn off every attachment to any sin.  I want to be cauterized so that there is no place for sin to grow in my life, but like the garden I talked about in my last post?  Fertile soil grows all sorts of stuff.  It will grow the roots of sin as well as the Fruits of the Spirit... I just need to be quick about the pulling out the weeds of sin.

I am seeking more love in my life, more so, I am seeking to be a conduit of God's love into the life of others. It is my fervent prayer that I never forget the depths from which I have been rescued and the chasm that spanned between God and me and that I can relate and portray that understanding to those who are lost.