Grace and my Spiritual Bank Account

For much of my life I have struggled to understand grace and it's power to change my life. I know that God always has and will love me unconditionally yet I have been trained through traditional religon to believe that his love for me comes only after I have taken some form of action. What I mean by this is that it was communicated to me that I MUST believe that Jesus died for me...confess my sin...and then I will recieve his grace. Before I go any further, I want to express that it is very important to believe in the death of Jesus and that owning up to my sin is very important...but I can no longer accept that after doing this I receive acceptance. I read something this week that continues to float in my thoughts..."Salvation involves faith, not belief". The experience I grew up in was one of information and knowlege equals salvation, meaning that once I have knowledge of the events of the cross I'm safe. The problem with this idea is that the church has converted thousands every year with alter calls and sermons asking the question..."if you die tonight will you go to heaven?". So people respond in eternal insecurity but with very little desire to be changed by grace. Maybe we don't experience salvation because of what we believe but because we have faith in the experience of grace in our lives. The "sinners prayer" as I have prayed hundreds of times in my life is not a prayer I find in my Bible...yet it's widely regarded as the way slavation comes. The problem with this idea is that we use grace as a bank account from which we make withdrawls when needed to keep us assured of our eternity. I don't know about you but this doesn't seem like the kind of conversion Jesus offered or what the disciples displayed in the early church. I like what Spencer Burke says about conversion..."We need to be converted to a fresh understanding of God's desire and vision for us". My spiritual journey is one that seems long and sometimes frustrating but I'm learning that along the way I'm not stopping to make some kind of divine withdrawl from God's love bank, but rather grace is in me throughout my entire journey. It resides in me...changing me...leading me.

Simply accept that you are accepted! IF that happens, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed...and nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but accaptance. -Paul Tillich

May we cease in trying to grab grace and learn to just live in it...

Peace and Love
Rex