A new view of Christianity

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and a lot of praying, reading, talking, and all those other things I do when I'm reying to work things out. See, I was at District Camp this week, and I just really felt God speaking. Not just the general speaking, but direct to me speaking. Actually, it was more than speaking, it was sort of like an alarm clock going off in my spirit, waking up my soul. It was amazing and frightening at the same time.

I was thinking about how I live out being a Christian, and more than that, what Christianity really means. In one of the services I started journalling. The speaker said something along the lines of "We need a heart transplant, not just bypass surgery" and that set it off, it was as if those words explained everything that had been ringing in my soul.

God wants to change us. Becomming a Christian, getting "saved" has been simplified into a formula and perverted into nothing more than a selfish attempt to avoid judgement and pain. We comment all the time about people trying to be "good enough" to get into heaven without relying on God, and yet we use God to get into heaven. It's such a limited view of grace.

God desires more than just to save us, He desires to change us, to make us into something different. And all that work isn't just done so that we can live our lives and then get to heaven, it is done so that we can be a blessing to others, to expose them to the grace of God so that they can do the same for others. It is not about the destination, it is about the journey.

I talked with my husband about this and was shocked how hard it was. I somehow ended up doing the same thing I was fighting against. I was afraid to share what God was doing, because it wasn't "normal". I mean, yes, it's normal to want to be a blessing to others, but I'm talking about changing the way I (and many others around me) view what it is to be a Christian. The purpose, the main thing, isn't growing closer to God for ourselves, it's not just the feel good feelings of doing what needs to be done to "be a good Christian", it's taking that little bit of passion and love that we have for God and using it, nurturing it, watching it grow into something huge. It's breaking out of the mindset that this "CHristian Life" that we have is enough, because really, God's grace is bigger than that, He wants more, and we should seek after more.

After that conversation I started reading "A New Kind of Christian" (which I highly recommend), and a lot of what was happening in my soul was written there in that book, which was amazing, confirming, and just a God thing.