Grace is greater than

Serving God should not be a chore, it should not be a hobby passed on from generation to generation, a lifestyle to reap benefits, an excuse for pain and sorrow, or something you take part in one day a week. You have to fall in love with God, and once you have done this, you have the key, the key that opens doors of peace and joy and promises from centuries ago that are still true to us today. This key opens the door to heaven on earth; the keys to your heart are the keys to the Kingdom. Once we see it as a love story with our own love letter, things happen. Miracles occur. Miracles as simple as waking to see another day to as big as the price paid on the cross. When people serve the Lord because they love him. it opens a whole new dimension to the possibilities he has given us. To the promises and to the future. And it is by using our Love story to instruct us how to put one foot in front of the other that we see all the brilliance from above unfold in front of our very eyes. Like a flower opening in spring petal by petal. Like a duckling hatching and taking his very first steps. This is something it took a long time for me to realise, but when it did, it hit me like a ton of bricks, right smack bang in the middle of the face. People surround new Christians and expect them to get it right away, to be convicted of everything they were convicted of after all their years of learning. Give them time! I finally realised what it was I was living for, what my purpose here on Earth is: to love and be loved. What I’m not saying is that if you are dedicated to your church, God is disappointed. What I am saying is that if you are not doing this out of love, from the deepest place in your heart, maybe you should question your motive. Why do you serve the Lord? Originally, this lack of love pushed me from the straight path that God had already laid out for me to a path where there wasn’t all that much love at all. Meaning, the tie I had to God wasn’t cement, wasn’t strong enough to help me bloom like a rose into his child. When I first started church, everything was new to me. I was like a sponge and I couldn’t soak up enough of ‘God’ and the word and worship and helping out whomever, whenever I could. I suffered hunger pangs for knowing more about the Lord. But this wasn’t a revelation. It was an inquisitive nature. My fascination is what kept me at church. I did not truly understand what it meant to follow God. I had not had an encounter that changed my perspective of the term grace because all I knew was that it had saved me that one time. However, the more we meet with grace in our daily lives, the more our greeting to the rest of the world is Jesus. This encounter then encouraged me to turn into a false representation of myself. I quickly slipped into being a puppet and I wasn’t necessarily hungry for God but rather hungry for more of a knowledge about this God and the amazing things that he had to offer, the incredible miracles that he was said to perform. I let everyone tell me how I should behave because I lacked that wisdom from the Holy Spirit. I wasn’t quite aware of the fact that God is alive and working in and around me right now. Though this was done in love, it wasn’t what God had intended. He wants us to be nurtured into the person he created us to be, and that can only be done in love. It can only be done by Him, knowing Him, and understanding he wants a very real, very personal, very unique relationship with us. We have to know and Love God PERSONALLY, to watch him change us into the best version of ourselves, and this doesn’t happen overnight. As my big brother Jerome would say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The person I turned into was a very forced, stereotypical version of the follower of Christ I thought I should be, because I hadn’t quite encountered God for myself. I hadn’t quite met with him on a level or relation or understood that he is alive and he is well. At the time, I did thoroughly enjoy church. I loved the new friends I had made. When I decided to make the commitment, it was evident that the people I spent the most of my time with were not the best influence on my life. Although dear friends, the decision to cut them out of my friendship circle was, to this day, a decision I have stuck by. Thus church, instead of weekends, was what I lived for at that time.