faith and death

Posted: January 23rd, 2010 | Author: Serena Woods | Filed under: life | 9 Comments »

Sometimes I get letters from people who want to bash their fellow Christians and think I’m game for a little stone slinging.

I am not here to give anyone the ammunition to return the condemnation. I offer evidence of an ocean of grace for the purpose of showing you the unlocked shackles and pointing you to the light under the door. We move in whispers and don’t waste time with small talk and tea, much less showers. This is gritty business.

It angers me to watch the newly free immediately capture a religious bully and shove them in the prison they’re barely out of.

Did they learn nothing during their stay? It’s not possible to receive grace and still want others to suffer. Faith in your own salvation and gift of grace is dead without working out that truth for others. What you give is only the overflow of what you’ve been given.

You can no more show me your works apart from your faith than I can show you my faith apart from my works. Faith and works, works and faith, fit together hand in glove. Do I hear you professing to believe in the one and only God, but then observe you complacently sitting back as if you had done something wonderful? That’s just great. Demons do that, but what good does it do them? Use your heads! Do you suppose for a minute that you can cut faith and works in two and not end up with a corpse on your hands? -James 2:18-20

‘Faith‘ is in Jesus as the savior. ‘Works’ is never denying that to anyone regardless of how they’ve hurt you. When you receive that gift, don’t sit around and start pointing your fingers at others who don’t get it because, then, you’ll be lost to it.

This is important: you are weighed on your own scales and then some. If it’s good, it’s better for you. If it’s bad, it’s worse for you.

“Pay attention to what you hear: with the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you. For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” -Mark 4:24-25

If you have written off a fellow believer who does not understand grace the way you do or they’ve been rude or condemning toward you, then you have set one side of your scale on perfection and put him on the other. When it’s your turn, you’ll be weighed against perfection, too. You are choosing prison over freedom. You have to change what you’re measuring. You can’t remove ‘perfect’ and replace it with you, either. You remove them and put Jesus in their place. That way, when you get weighed, you get to have Jesus in your place, too.

ford


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