The pressure. Can you feel it?
Every aspect of life involves demands that create standards, that add expectations, that place pressure…
…to be good enough, to obtain a certain level of perfection, to be defined as a specific type of person, to achieve a culturally pre-determined definition of “successful”…
If you’re life me, there are times when you would give anything to be able to drop all of the expectations and run away from the real world.
And if you’re like me, a lot of times your faith tops it all off by adding the most pressure of all.
You feel the pressure to try and earn the salvation you have been freely given.
And if you’re like me, you fail to see the oxymoron in that very statement.
Grace is a gift from God.
But it’s not one of those gifts that is given with an expectation in return. It’s a gift given out of pure, undefiled, all-consuming, love.
Love that invokes change. Love that revolutionizes lives. Love that covers a multitude of sin. Love that casts out all fear. Love that does not condemn. Love that ignites passion and purpose. Love that gives freedom from shame and bondage. Love that prompts the choice to walk faithfully in grace-inspired obedience. Love that provokes the confession that He is far greater and that He, alone, satisfies.
It’s by God's grace and the blood of Jesus that we are adopted as His own children. That our Father loves us in such a way that we have an eternal hope, despite the pressures our world’s expectations place upon our shoulders.
Your mindset will be entirely wrecked in the most positive way when you came to terms with this incredible truth...that alone, your strivings are in vain, but in the Lord, you are more than a conqueror through His strength.
So release the pressure into His incredibly capable hands and walk in freedom, choosing daily to fixate your eyes upon the cross where the free gift of grace was bought at the highest cost.
Your faith will be revolutionized when your obedience to God begins to stem from a place of accepting His grace – a place of knowing that you’re redeemed despite your flaws, known and understood within your mistakes, and loved by the One who defines love.
When it becomes grace-inspired obedience instead of pressure-inspired obedience, you’ll come to terms with the fact that it's not perfection that God is asking from us – it’s for a heart yearning for more of Him, yearning for His will, yearning to become more Christ-like. He’s asking for the control that we surrendered on the day we became Christians.
He's asking for us to walk in faithful grace-inspired obedience within the confusion, within the hurt, and within the conviction, knowing He has more for us.
