I struggle with falling so far short of what I really want to be. I find that in all my best efforts – in ministry, in life as a father, husband, friend, and brother – I constantly seem to be falling short of what I believe God wants me to be or where God wants me to be.
One of the best life messages for me is the concept of grace gap. It is the name I give to the gap in my life between what I know how God wants me to live and the reality of my life. There’s a gap – a gap between what you long to be and what you know you are. What do you do with that gap?
I see three ways I have learned to live through life:
1. To lower my convictions. To say, “Well, God surely doesn’t expect me to be like that. We abandon our convictions. We compromise.
2. To become hypocrites. This is particularly true to a lot of us in the Christian ministry. We pretend about our lives. My wife uses the illustration of the man with a withered hand in Mark 3. Jesus asked him to stretch out his hand. Which hand do you think he stretched out? Well, most of us would stretch out our good hands because we’re ashamed of our withered hand. But he had the courage to stretch out his withered hand. As a result, he experienced the healing power of the Lord Jesus Christ.
3. To deal with it through the gospel – the good news of God’s grace. To see the gap in our lives as the very context within which we experience daily the grace of God. Whether it’s a small thing like mistakes in our notes or big things like failure in our personal life, in our relationships, we learn to reach out and come and appropriate God’s grace and say “Because of God’s grace, whatever has happened to me, at this moment, I can reach out my hand of faith and take hold of God’s hand of grace and I can exchange my life of failure to his life of love and holiness and I can know myself to be fully accepted.”
– Mike Treneer, International President, The Navigators
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