Richard Dawson, 22 July 2015

As a new Christian and even as one who has believed for almost 40 years now I have found it easy to replace the grace of God for my own efforts to follow and obey God. This has worked well in short bursts but it always founders on the rocks of my own shallow human shore. I have found that over and over again I fail to follow God as I should and I must come back to God in reliance on His mercy and grace and for forgiveness. Indeed reliance on my human ability to follow God is deeply flawed in two very simple ways. Firstly, it is never something I can maintain as being adequate for long. Sooner or later I will ‘blow it’ with God or with others and do something which is not reflective of God’s life within me. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, however, even when I do get it right and am acting in a manner which is in accordance with God’s ways I discover that this is not really the most important thing in God’s eyes. Rather what God is after isn’t so much my ‘goodness’ as my friendship. God is looking for a relationship. A relationship isn’t based on whether we are doing just enough for another person but on whether we love the other. Love lifts our actions above the moral into grace. When we love another we will extend to them grace and we will act towards them in a manner which is good for them rather than simply the ‘right’ thing to do. And so I discovered a God who was far less concerned about my doing the right thing and far more concerned about having a real relationship with me. And the great thing about that was that as I focused on that relationship righteousness flowed from it.