This week we provide a 10-step plan guaranteed to fill you with God’s joy. (Not really.) Like many other things related to our life in Christ, enjoying God doesn’t come with a set of instructions complete with pictures to help you put it all together. We’ve had people write to our podcast ministry feeling as though they weren’t experiencing the fullness of joy in their life.
This week, we bring some encouragement that even the joy the of the Lord isn’t dependent on us or something we do to in order to experience it on a consistent basis. We can live in joy by departing from religious duty and obligation, and by resting in being ourselves and realizing who we’ve uniquely been created to be in Him.
There are many reasons why people preach and teach the gospel of God's grace and peace, and why people want to evangelize the church with the message of God's grace and peace. One of the big reasons is this: It makes people free. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, and yet many believers are bound up and are far from free in Christ.
Next month marks the 10th anniversary of the weekly Growing in Grace podcast that I do with Mike Kapler. The reason we've continued to do it each week is because it continues to help people find and stay in the freedom of Christ. Over the years we've received many emails and comments from people, sometimes simply asking questions about grace and other times pouring out their hearts and souls to us. In this video I share a couple of these emails, as they go to show the bondage that people have found themselves trapped in through what they've been taught in the church, and then the freedom that they've found through hearing the good news of God's grace and peace!
Morality. Behavior improvement. Trying harder to live right. Following Christian rules. Don't touch. Don't taste. Don't handle. Followed by failure, self-condemnation and starting over by trying harder the next time only to experience the same results. Doesn't sound like much fun, does it? It doesn't have to be the rules of the old covenant either. Plenty of new rules await to steal your joy. What if we could tell you the Christian life doesn't have to be any of that? Suppose you could live in a state of complete contentment, joy and reassurance without the religious side-effects...
