I AM clean....

I wrote this blog on Easter morning 2012....I finally "GOT IT"  This has been the greatest discovery of my life....God's unfathomable and inexplicable grace....I finally understood the truth about God's radical grace and just in time! I had become suicidal because of the wrestling match inside of me and a couple months after writing this I decided to be true to myself and I accepted my sexuality and came out. That is when I discovered that God's grace was different from "man's grace" God's grace is unmerited, infinite, and free but the grace that people extend is limited, costly, and it usually involves work. Give me God's grace, because I can't afford man's--Bb


But the voice spoke again: “Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.”--Acts 10:15

Peter was in a trance, God had given him a vision...Showing him all the things that under "religious" law were unclean. Then He told Peter to eat them, and Peter, once again, argued with God, as he piously said NEVER have I eaten anything that would make me unclean!!! Peter was, once again, corrected by the Lord...He said DO NOT call something unclean if I have made it clean--

God was giving Peter a revelation about the Gentiles the people whom Jews considered an abomination, or unclean. Jesus was showing Peter just how inclusive, impartial and powerful His grace really was and He was calling him out of religion and into that grace. He  then sent Peter to the house of Cornelius and there at his home the Gentiles experienced their very own Pentecost! Jesus taught Peter to extend grace as He does...without bias, cost, or reservations, after all it wasn't Peter who died so that the Gentiles or otherwise could have grace!

Peter was so caught up in "religion" and the law that grace had no place. God had to shake him and stretch him so that we, the Gentiles, could receive Christ as our own. I sometimes get caught up in the same spirit of religion...Not toward a specific people or group, but in myself! I forget, in my passion for God, about His perfect grace! I get so driven toward being "Christlike" that I become a religious NUT! Wrestling with my own "cleanliness". I often get twisted up in religious ritual, because the guilt that is entangled in my flesh rises up and says, do this or do that, in order to be righteous! 

I was reminded of this very flaw just the other day when a very good friend of mine called me a "zealot" and I took it as a compliment. Zeal is a good thing, I said... Zeal IS a good thing--- that is very true, but I have this personality where I have to do things 200% or not at all... Zeal, by definition, means to pursue something with fervor and intensity, which truly sums up my personality in a single word-- 

BUT.... what am I pursuing. Why am I going through the motions of religious ritual? I was forced to examine my heart, am I a zealot, for religion or for relationship...LOVE? The enemy had planted a seed of guilt in me and somehow convinced me that I was "unclean" and I must follow a precise religious regimen in order to regain favor--I have been in the SAME wrestling match since the DAY I got saved! 

I had been hearing about all this RADICAL GRACE...and I, a former drug addict, refused to fully accept grace for fear that it would become an out...an excuse...an ENEMY!! I needed religion to hold me accountable, and KEEP ME CLEAN!!! I believed that grace was for EVERYONE else, but it was something that I couldn't embrace for myself--

WOW! All this time I thought I was free, but the truth is I just stepped out of one prison (addiction) and into another (religion)! I have been trying to "impress" God with my holiness...trying to prove just how much I love Him!! HE ALREADY KNOWS!!! I was trying to be the BEST CHRISTIAN!! Any one who knows me, knows that I HAVE to be the best (I'm a tad competitive)...I was so busy trying to be the best "zealot" or fanatic, if you will,  that I forgot how to LOVE Him by way of loving people... ALL people...wow how humbling.

I can just hear Him saying to me, "Sweetie, stop trying to gain my favor...it's already yours. Just come to My table and sit a while with Me. I made you clean, and what I have made clean you must not call unclean! You are Holy only because of Me.You are the reason that I died, and I did that so that you could have an abundant life; a relationship with Me, not RELIGION! NOW you go and extend that love and grace in the same measure as it has been given to you"

I feel like He is saying to us (The Church) "If you want to be like Me, LOVE like me...and don't try to be Me by decided what is "clean" or "unclean... When I said, "It is finished" I meant it!" 

Grace... unmerited favor-- It only took me 8 years to really get it!

Just Bb