Finding a Safe Place in Grace

Great piece by Justin Buzzard on grace creating safety- places where people can be real and be accepted.

We’ve all experienced (and contributed to) this dynamic: You are afraid to share what you’re really thinking and what’s really going on in your life with your spouse/friend/parent/church leader because you fear they will use this information against you. You’re afraid that sharing reality will result in being challenged, fixed, or judged, instead of being known, understood, and loved. This dynamic creates unhealthy cultures in marriages, friendships, churches, and workplaces–people never share what’s really going on because they’re afraid, and this stunts both intimacy and growth.

Fortunately, this unhealthy dynamic can be replaced with a healthy dynamic: grace. Grace is God’s undeserved love. When an individual embraces a grace-based identity (instead of a performance-based identity) and standing with God, he or she becomes capable of extending grace (undeserved love) to other people. This individual becomes secure, and safe. This individual now has the ability to truly listen to what another person is really thinking, to what is really going on, without attempting to immediately use that information against the person.

See, grace creates safety. Grace creates a culture of safety where people can face and talk about reality. And, lest any of you think I’m being soft on sin, change, or sanctification, the crazy truth is that this grace-soaked culture of safety is what finally results in people changing.

Think about it. Environments and relationships that approximate unconditional love are what resulted in true, deep change and healing in your own life. When you experienced grace and felt safe, you finally opened up. And then you finally began to get help where you most needed it.Grace creates safety, which creates change.

How can you be such a person to others? How can you use your leadership to create such environments?

“‘I will place him in the safety for which he longs.’”-Psalm 12:5

Enjoy Grace in 2014

I loved this post from Justin Buzzard - "The #1 Thing To Do in the New Year":

You may or may not have a list of resolutions for the New Year. Whatever goals you’re chasing and whatever you’re facing this next year, I want to make a suggestion: simplify things this year.

Instead of trying to do a lot, what if you focused your full attention on just one exciting objective?

Here it is: Enjoy grace.

Grace is the undeserved love of God. This undeserved love is extended most climactically in the substitutionary life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, a historical reality that changes everything about your reality. And, this undeserved love comes at you every single day of your life. Everything you will enjoy in 2014 is grace, pure gift from God: the oxygen you breathe, the relationships you enjoy, the food you eat, the shelter over your head, the laughter of your children, those amazing sunsets, etc.

“What do you have that you did not receive?” -1 Corinthians 4:7. Everything you have you have received. All is gift. All is grace. The screen you’re reading this on is a gift, as are the fingers you’re using to scroll through this post. Enjoy this grace, this great gift of having fingers, exploring screens, and learning.

Enjoy grace! Focus your full attention and energies here, and everything else will follow: love for God, gratitude, joy, love for others, and good stewardship of the life, talents, resources, time, and opportunities God has given you. Nothing sucks the life out of things like entitlement, thinking you deserve a certain kind of life. And nothing gives life like grace, recognizing that your life and everything about your life is pure gift.

Though it feels like you’re sitting still right now, you’re sitting on a planet that’s hurling through space at roughly 2.7 million miles per hour. This wild orbit and the wild adventure of your life is sustained and empowered by the grace of God, undeserved love that holds the galaxies in place, feeds you breakfast, and puts a fresh fire in your heart.

Happy New Year!

Enjoy grace!

Your Idols Do Not Love You

“Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21) Quote below is from a great piece by Justin Buzzard .   I'm quoting it in full because it is so well said and so necessary for me (and you) to hear.

Everyone has to live for something and if that something isn’t the one true God, it will be a false God–an idol.

An idol is anything more important to you than God. Therefore, you can turn even very good things into idols. You can turn a good thing like family, success, acceptance, money, your plans, etc. into a god thing–into something you worship and place at the center of your life.

This is what sin is. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything (even a good thing) more than God.

Do you know the idols you’re prone to worship? At our church we talk about 4 root idols that we tend to attach our lives to.

CONTROL. You know you have a control idol if your greatest nightmare is uncertainty.
APPROVAL. You know you have an approval idol if your greatest nightmare is rejection.
COMFORT. You know you have a comfort idol if your greatest nightmare is stress/demands.
POWER. You know you have a power idol if your greatest nightmare is humiliation.

Here’s what you need to know about your idol: That idol that you love, it doesn’t love you back. False gods don’t love you. Idols don’t keep their promises. Anything you worship and build your life on other than God will suck the life out of you and destroy you.

A relationship with Jesus starts when you identify and turn from your idols. Notice what Jesus was always doing with people during his ministry–he was constantly identifying and challenging people’s idols, calling them to turn from their false objects of worship in order to follow and worship him.

I’m convinced that the reason there is so much shallow Christianity in our culture is because many people never displace the idolatry in their lives with Jesus, but instead simply bring in Jesus as an “add on” to their life, keeping their idolatry firmly in the center.

Americans think freedom is found in casting off all restraint and being masters of our own lives. What we are blind to is the reality that everybody has a master. We all worship something and whatever we worship is our master. Idols make bad masters. They enslave. Until you identify the idols in your life you will feel enslaved, tired, and unhappy and you won’t know why. You will feel this way until you discover the only master who can set  you free: Jesus. Jesus is the one master who will love you even when you fail him. Your idols don’t do that. Jesus is the one master who loved you when you were at your worst and who reigns over your life with perfect wisdom, power, and goodness. He’s the one master you can trust. Only he can give you freedom.

Blow Up the Factory

Read this. Whatever else you do today, read this - Start a Revolt at the Idol Factory

"Your heart has an idol factory in it and the only way to fix the factory is to blow up the factory. You have to pump your heart so full of gospel, so full of delight in God, that you blow the roof of the factory."