The Grace To Believe.

In case you haven’t discovered it yet, I am a “grace” guy. I function entirely through the realm of grace. As a matter of fact, so do you – whether you believe it or not. This is what I am going to tackle in this writing: Belief, believing and ultimately, how it matters.

Today, very few people believe in, or even on God. I recognize that many who are reading this may take exception with this statement, but I make this claim even to you simply because what in fact you believe is what has been handed down to you from relatives and the institutions with their creeds and doctrines which were handed down to them.

To have a belief that makes you a believer is to have an experience which has penetrated to the very core of who you are. This experience by divine intervention is foundational to your character and cannot be changed.

There is a whole world of people out there who have created their beliefs from great amounts of study and reflection – but no experience. I don’t mean that they haven’t tried the things they have studied but that they haven’t had the Experience of the Presence to either validate or invalidate their assumptions. Many have lived entire lives devoted to a premise which is completely devoid of any truth whatsoever and have even championed this ignorance onto the following generations.

I’ll be the first to admit that I lapped up their “insight” and puffed up my chest as testament to acquiring the “sacred knowledge” they espoused. I felt empowered to take the teachings and scatter them as the true seeds of kingdom revelation expecting the appropriate harvest. They never manifested a 30/60/100 fold return simply because they got choked out by the vines and thistles from prior broadcasts created to restrict and inhibit believing.

And yet there is grace. Consider how the Apostle Paul, who through the divine revelation which was imparted to him and subsequently elevated him above even the first disciples in understanding what Jesus accomplished, had to deal with what he called “a thorn in the flesh.” Anything which pricks, pokes, and prods the flesh jointly pricks, prods, and pokes at the thoughts and beliefs held in the mind. Entreating God for relief, Paul hears, “My grace is sufficient for you; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

Read this carefully: We are no better or different from Paul. Our thoughts and beliefs are covered by grace. We all have different beliefs about a variety of things, some of which at first blush might seem contradictory to the orthodoxy called Christianity. Yet, grace is liberally applied to them all simply because these thoughts and beliefs are our weakness. This even applies to those who refuse to believe in God!

I hope that you have the maturity to understand how the thoughts and beliefs I am referencing to here are not in any fashion limited to God and His kingdom. All thoughts and beliefs are covered. Until you are capable of accepting your divine nature, your thoughts will always be the weakness which grace covers in order to make you strong.

So, the question of how does this matter is eventually going to arise. Our beliefs are created. They are created by the events in our lives and they reflect what we have experienced and accepted as valid representations of who we have determined to be our “true” self. Because I need to place quotation marks around the word true should indicate how this is not a reality but a manufactured result on our part. As Solomon would respond, “.. this too is vanity.”

Because we fail to recognize and accept our true Self, grace covers us in our effort to express who we truly are. This applies not only to us but to those around us who are experiencing the exact same thing. All of humanity is going through this daily and grace is working for each one.

There are certain groups of people who have determined how their beliefs are the absolute final truth for all mankind. They are staunch adherents to a mindset they believe is God ordained. When this group meets a different group who is as adamant in their beliefs as them there is often conflict about the “rightness” of their belief. Neither of these groups is willing to accept how grace covers the weakness each standard of belief has.

If you have done any in depth study on the original teachings of the Christian faith and how they have evolved over the course of two millennium you would recognize how many tenets have morphed as more and more study has been applied to the basic precepts. While there are those adherents to these flights of religious fancy, each one fails to accept that grace is intentionally covering their weak understanding so that they may one day enter into the absolute truth which eludes them.

The apostle Paul has said how “…we are looking through a glass darkly.” We profess to know the truth and are willing to sacrifice everything to it without having known the Presence of the Truth. Hopefully, now, you can recognize the beauty of grace to believe. It might appear admirable to claim how your belief is the one true faith until you meet another who espouses an even greater conviction. Neither is right or wrong but merely evolving towards the high mark of our calling. A calling enveloped in grace.