Christian “Square One” – Part 1

What I have found with the Christian grace message is that it basically brings you back to square-one: you return to that point in your life just before you became entangled with all sorts of religious demands and intimidation. For many such Christians there is a great deal of anger and frustration that you were lied to and abused for so long.

But there is inevitably a huge sense of relief that the intimidating, judgemental God that you believed in for so long – does not exist. Now, you are able to see God in a new light, free of the misunderstanding that turned Him into a tyrant in your mind. Now you see God as kind and loving. It is difficult to reconcile all the scary verses in the Bible in which God brought His wrath to bear on some people. But our perspective of everything in the Bible changes when viewed through the lens of love.

I think there are many Christians who are basically happy to just come to the grace message and live their life from there. Sure, there is a lot of soul-searching, re-discovery of self and a quest for answers, which takes place the moment you step into the grace message. But I think that for many Christians there is a genuine sense of relief when you know that God is not all those things you hoped He was not. Many of the grace Christians that I have befriended on Facebook, who had stopped going to church, eventually just move on with their lives and you hardly hear from them again over the internet. There is a phrase, which I daresay has become a bit of a cliché now, which says, “Just rest in the finished work of the cross.” Basically, Jesus Christ did all the work for us over 2000 years ago, and now we who believe in Him, can enjoy all the benefits of His death, burial and resurrection.

I think for most grace Christians, the message of grace is all that they need in order to just move on with their lives. There is a lot less stress in their lives as they realise that they are not going to go to hell just because they did not pray that morning and so on. I think there is a lot of religious detoxification that goes on as you no longer do the things you used to do. You might still read the Bible and enjoy doing so without it being a chore. But there is no longer a need to pray or read the Bible because you feel you must do so.

I’m not saying that life is just “plain sailing” for most Christians when they finally come out of religious bondage and into grace – everyone has their ups and downs in life. I feel that by the time a Christian has been around the religious circuit a few times, and they have experienced a life rule-keeping, by the time they come into grace they are older and more mature. The positive benefits of suffering and trauma are indeed debateable. But I think there is something about trials, struggle and suffering that has an attritional quality about it: life’s tests have an inbuilt function which grinds away at those negative aspects of our personality and makes us better people.