Obstacles to Accepting God's Grace

Poster 1 – OBSTACLES TO ACCEPTING GOD'S GRACE

My name is ??, I’m a lay person and my talk is “Obstacles to Accepting God’s Grace”. Please join me in reading the Kairos Community Prayer on page 11 of your Freedom Guide.

We talked during the Weekend about God’s plan for our lives, about forming a Friendship with God and the security that comes from that. We talked about forgiving others and ourselves and accepting God's eternal forgiveness for us. And we prayed, asking God to help us remove those painful memories that can become a hindrance in our daily walk with Christ, so we can become a source of help to a brother to relieve his burden. These are some of the positive things we can do, if we can develop a habit of living this way. To live this way, we need God's grace.

Poster 2

Here is the easy definition of “God’s grace:”

  • An everlasting, loving relationship with a forgiving God, just like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, or the father on the porch watching his prize rooster being killed. And it is unconditional and we don’t deserve it.
  • The best thing about all of this is that it is free! When was the last time you ever got something this significant and it didn’t cost you anything?
  • That is what the expression “Good News” is all about.

But, brothers, while this grace is a free gift from our Father, it can get messed up when left up to us . . messed up by what we call the Obstacles to Grace.

Poster 3

What are these obstacles, these roadblocks?

People.

First is us.

  • We can refuse to respond by not accepting the gift of God’s grace.
  • Since relationships improve when we make amends, refusing to make amends to those we have hurt can make our life more difficult. Just remember not to subject yourself or others to any further injury or danger.
  • Our refusals can take two forms:
  • Active rebellion
  • Our failure to make any choice at all. Remember from the Choices talk, not to make a choice is still making a choice.
  • Yes, we had a good time on the Weekend, but the Weekend is over. The weekend was an introduction. Now our Kairos journey – our fourth day - has begun.
  • If we don’t do anything with it after today, that’s passive indifference. And that’s exactly what the world expects us to do.
  • St. Paul calls it self-indulgence, meaning that we will do things or make choices in order to either protect ourselves or to satisfy our selfish desires.
  • In this environment, all of us can see how seeking protection would be an easy choice. But that’s the rub; it’s the easychoice. Being Christian has never been easy.; how easy was it for Jesus to go through what H did, suffer the humiliation, the physical pain, and a public execution in front of His mother?

Poster 4

Also under the heading of People are others.

  • The world you live in is a hostile place, filled with people overflowing with negativity.
  • As you already know, some of your fellow Residents are not standing in line to hug you out there; they could care less about what you’ve experienced. They won't have changed.
  • Some of them will even try to destroy this experience; and if you tell them too much, they will follow you all over the yard calling you a hypocrite every time you lapse. Remember, we are all broken vessels on a spiritual journey with Christ. We are not perfect people without problems.
  • Some of your old friends will not like the fact that you are trying to change the way you are living your life. They want you to go back to being like you’ve always been. They will call you a hypocrite. They will ridicule you and put tremendous pressure on you, and will want the old you. But just like Jesus did while he was incarcerated, you must resist. Remember the choice to resist is totally yours. Will it be easy? No.
  • And to make things worse, you may even find some of your Christian brothers “act good” when the Kairos team is around; but back in the pod, they continue to act like they always have the rest of the time. We call these folks the sayers and not doers. You may even fall into this same trap yourself from time to time.

Poster 5

Here are some ways you might describe the sayers and doers who don't live up to the Christian Ideal:

  • How about “Mechanical Mike? You know, the one who goes through the right motions of being a Christian with all the proper moves and sings just the right words to all the songs. But that’s all there is to him, and that’s the difference in being a Christian and being Christian.
  • How about “Pious Pete” and his twin brother “Holy Joe”? They can quote scripture with the best of them but doesn't live up to it. I know you’ve seen guys like these because we see them in the outside world too.
  • And finally there is “Harry the Hypocrite”. He acts one way at Kairos or at the chaplain’s chapel functions, but back in the compound, he’s totally opposite, right? These kind of people will bother you – a lot . . . maybe even to the point that you will not want to have anything to do with them or Christianity. If you let this happen, you will be the looser!

It is important to keep in mind that just because you've been through a KAIROS weekend does not mean that you are not susceptible to these same temptations and failures. Don't forget: there but for the grace of God go I. We are all sinners.

Let me give you another thought: Let’s pretend a person has a serious illness, like heart disease, and he goes to the very best doctor he can find to get help. When he walks into the crowded Doctor’s office, he looks around and all he can see are sick people; and this annoys him. He doesn’t want to be around all of these sick folks, so he leaves. Now how much sense does that make? But that’s what being around our Christian brothers is like. Christians are not perfect people, far from it. We all have problems; that’s why we seek out Jesus. He’s the Great Physician, the best doctor in the whole universe!

Here’s another thought for you to think about: You can defeat evil and hypocrisy and pretend holiness by praying for, and yes, with, those other persons rather than criticizing them. This is true; just ask any of your free-world brothers here this Weekend who has experienced the very same thing as you. There is great power in praying for and with others. Don’t forget all of those all over the world, and those who are in prisons who prayed for all of us during the weekend, and even before the Weekend started. How powerful has that been to you?

Poster 6

The second major area is Places. You know the places that I’m talking about:

  • A certain part of the yard or dining hall that will cause trouble for you.
  • Places that you find drugs, home-made wine, gambling activities and such, places that are full of negative behavior.
  • If a place presents a source of sin for you, then you should make the choice to stay away.

Constantly putting yourself in places of great temptation would test the most dedicated Christian.

  • Let others notice the change in you; that you’re no longer hanging out in the old places.

Be prepared for their initial negative reaction; it may be very harsh.

Be ready to help them when they begin to ask questions of you, because they will when they realize that you are serious about changing your life. Once they recognize that you are for real, the people who give you grief will start coming to you when their own time of trial comes.

Poster 7

Third, seeking to satisfy our selfish desires can be stated in a nicer way by saying that our passive indifference can be influenced by Things, our old habits. What are some of these Things, our old habits?

  • Pornography/Sex
  • Gambling
  • Gossiping
  • Drugs/Alcohol
  • Racism
  • Peer Pressure/Gang Activity

It’s easy to say, but to get rid of these things, these old habits, is very hard. Please think back to the third leg of our 3-legged stool: Christian Action. We need to put our actions behind our words so that we don’t become a Mechanical Mike, a Pious Pete, a Holy Joe, or a Harry the Hypocrite.

  • Without that third leg of Action, our stool of Friendship with God cannot stand.
  • We need to replace our old habits with new habits of the faith.
  • Remember the Choices talk on Friday morning? It is a choice that all of us can consciously make.

Poster 8

As said earlier when we talked about Mechanical Mike, a Pious Pete, a Holy Joe, and Harry the Hypocrite, there is a difference in being a Christian and being Christian.

  • Being a Christian is just a label that the world puts on us.
  • Being Christian is a life-style choice. Think about that. Being Christian today in a prison can be very costly at first. But over time, people will come to recognize that you are for real. Think about the men right here at Buckingham who are real Christians.
  • While most of us free world people can never begin to understand the tremendous stresses of being incarcerated, being Christian is costly on the outside world too. And guess what? A lot of us fail, too, We have trouble when confronted with some of the obstacles to grace. Some of us still cave in to the world’s seductive things: pornography, peer pressure, gambling, gossiping, arguing and fighting, alcohol/drugs.
  • But for all of us, both free-world and Residents, a big step in overcoming our personal obstacles is to identify them and face them head-on.

During the weekend, we were told that while forgiveness is absolutely necessary for having a Friendship with God, we must also begin the long and painful process of asking God to help us heal some of those ugly old memories. My friends, not to do so, not to try to seek God’s healing can in itself become an obstacle to accepting God’s grace. Please don’t let that happen to you.

We need to face our indifference and our fear of being Christian in this institution. As I said before, the Weekend was not Kairos; the Weekend only opened the door to a lifelong journey, one that will have dark and stormy times. But it is a journey that the Kairos team will journey with you. We will be coming back every month to encourage you to share with each other. And we will try to give you some other tools to help you on this journey, which is the subject of the next talk, Walking in God’s Grace.

In the meantime, the choice is yours, brothers.

Please bow your heads for two minutes of silent meditation.