I was at a friend’s house last night and just snapping wood and tossing it into the fire and when I snapped one piece another chunk flew off and hit me in the left eye. I’m opening my eyes from time to time to make sure I didn’t misspell any crucial words, but this is mostly eyes closed ’cause it hurts less. So forgive any typos and misspellings. On to the content…
I was listening to the radio the other day… I guess it was yesterday… and I heard a pastor say that all our good works can’t get us to heaven, we have to pray and accept Jesus into our hearts. This is true. But see, where I come from, I had managed to make praying the sinner’s prayer a work that I could do to be saved. Something I could do to gain favor with God. I would pray it hard, pray it sincerely, and make sure I used all the right words. And this went on for YEARS! Finally one day I decided to call it quis on sinners prayers and just trust that God would tdo it. That wasn’t when my crazy relationship with this Awesome God began, but it was part.
See, at first all I’d heard was, if you pray this prayer, you’ll become a Christian. And I prayed it and I trusted God to do the saving. Or at least that the prayer was good enough. Then along came more people who said if yo didn’t pray it sincerely or if you didn’t pray it meaning it, you weren’t saved. And so this thing that was meant to be a cry out for God for help became just another good work. So then I was at a place where I could pile up all my good works and add to them this sinner’s prayer and hope that all that together (or just the prayer alone) would be enough for God to save me. Sorry if I’m rambling, but I’m trying to get the point across: that was, for me, a form of religion, where if I prayed right God would love me and save me.
And that was totally arrogance on my part but I had no idea.