God Continually Amazes Me with His Grace.

My dog pippin is an extremely intelligent dog with huge capacity for learning things quickly. By the time he was 6 months old he knew more tricks than any dog I have ever owned. At some point, however, he stopped learning tricks. He did not become less mentally capable dulling his ability to learn. He would just shut down when I would request tasks of him. In retrospect I am able to see the cause of this. During a time in my life when I was overwhelmed, and stressed, while not due to pippin, I projected a lot of my pent up reactions on to him. Being short with him, and forgetting to praise him when he did well. For a while his listening to me was solely based on his fear of my punishment, don’t hear me wrong not abuse, just not enough patience or praise. Due to his level of perception of my emotional reactions toward him, and his confusion as to why I would get so upset with him, his only motivation to obey became fear of reprimand. Eventually Pippin was totally shut off to new requests. Instead of clearly listening for commands he would just start throwing out all of the tricks, which he already knew, that could possibly be the “right answers”. I have recently been working on repairing this damage by working with him in healthy ways, giving him appropriate reproach yet also providing ample amounts of praise, when he does well. Pippin has started to respond positively to this. Over the last 5-6 months I have started seeing an opening to where he is beginning to enjoy learning again. Because Pippin is a highly receptive dog, there are still residual effects that will take time to repair, although with consistent effort to rebuild a positive learning environment for him, I’m sure he will soon be back to full speed, at which time he will begin to once again blow me away with his ability to doing whatever I ask of him.

As I was reflecting on this it brought something to my attention. Often times it is easy to make our relationship with God the same way as that of Pippin, and I became. Not because God is harsh or rash with us, but because we focus on a fear of doing wrong, or a sense of condemnation which, whether imagined or placed on us by others, is damaging on many levels. Our relationship with God becomes a system of trying to find the right answers instead of just being able to grow, and dwell freely in the love of God. Our relationship becomes based on our nonexistent perfection, therefore making it an unreachable relationship, and in turn completely destroying hope. The Belgic Confession, a reformation document from the 17^th century, puts it this way “Far from making people cold toward living in a holy way, justifying faith so works within them, that apart from it they will never do a thing out of love for God, but out of love for themselves and a fear of being condemned.”

A healthy relationship with God is built upon a realization of His free grace; respect and admiration for God; and justifying faith. Another way of putting it is one which I heard while listening to a podcast of my college pastor, Jake English, back in November. At the time I was cleaning stalls, and when I heard this I took note of it, however, the message did not fully impact me until here recently. Here’s what Jake said "The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else. Whereas, if you do not fear God you fear everything else... and when I say fear God it's not this trembly ghost-like impression of who God is. It's a respect, it's an admiration, it's recognition that its giant, and bigger than you are, it's that kind of awesome, awestruck, fear and respect, but if you don't have that you're going to fear everything else. Every wind of circumstance, and its consequential change. You're gunna be afraid, and that is gunna drive you. A lot of christians are driven by how their consequences are... thats consequential faith, and thats dangerous faith; it's antithetical to scripture, and it will hurt you, and it will crush you."
          While the situation with Pippin is a bit different because his fear was undoubtedly caused by me, his reaction was similar to that of anyone living in fear of condemnation. Once you begin striving to only show perfection it is impossible not to shut down to growth, and authenticity because there is no perfection to be found. Fortunately God is more than ok with that! He appreciates it when we humble ourselves, and allow him to use us through our weakness. He has given us the ability to do amazing things through him, and only him.
2 Corinthians 12:9 says "And He said to me 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore, most gladly, I will rather boast in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me.