Legalism

I've been home for almost three weeks now, about to go to Idaho for a friend's wedding and then Pennsylvania to start working at Wayumi and I'm really excited for that. But I wanted to share with you something God's been revealing to me lately. More exposing the truthfulness of my heart and trust me, it's not pretty. But it helps me to write about it so here goes:

The last class I finished up as a junior at New Tribes Bible Institute was Galatians. Now my summary will fall quite short of doing it justice, but Paul talks a lot about the truth of the Gospel apart from works, apart from legalism, apart from US. How it's not about what we do and who we are, it's about what HE did and who HE is. Really cool book. And so naturally it caused me to look at what I was trusting in and why I did the actions I was doing. Am I trying to prove to God that I'm worth something? Am I doing things with wrong motivation? Sometimes I can answer those questions no and sometimes I can't, but I now know to ask the question. I now CAN ask the question. But today I was reading through Philippians and trying to ask questions and things and understand the tone of the book. Now, to be honest with you, I only made it halfway through chapter two and then I thought I had better sit down and type my thoughts because if you know me then you know if I don't do it now, I won't spend the necessary time stewing over that thought I had and miss out. So here I am. Sorry...sidetrack....back to Philippians. So I'm sitting there thinking "Okay, so Paul is saying all of this because he truly cares about the people. In 1:8 he makes that so clear. Really in the whole intro he makes it very clear how much he truly cares about the people." So then a little later, he starts telling them how they ought to act. And I asked myself why. He does it because he cares for them and their relationship to God. He does it out of genuine concern. That's completely evident if you look at the first chapter. And then I realized something....while I may not be legalistic in my living, I am in my "teaching." My motive behind sharing truth most of the time is based out of "they need to know the truth" not "my desire for them is to know and understand their Savior and have a relationship with Him that is grounded in truth." Now if I would have read that sentence like, two years ago I don't think I would have been able to make a clear distinction between the two motives, but as God has been showing me the depths of my own heart and the depths of His (okay, so I'm really just starting to scratch the surface of that one...but I'm scratching) it all becomes a lot more clear. And looking at the example God gave us in Paul really opened up my eyes too. I want people to know and understand their Savior and to be able to have the relationship with Him they were created for. I want the same for myself. But I don't want to share truth with people because it's the right thing to do. I don't want to share truth because I know it and they don't. I want to share truth trusting in Christ the whole time. And I'm thankful for a God who is patient with me to show me what that looks like and how that's done. I'm excited to learn. :)