Can't I just try hard to love my neighbor?
I mean do we really have to go through all of this discipleship stuff in order to love those around us?
Welcome to "Inside The Cup Podcast" with Mike and Holly Walsh
Season 1: "How to Love Your Neighbor as Yourself"
Episode 6: "Effort AND Grace"
The truth is if we just try hard to love our neighbors we will not be able to keep it up all the time. Maybe we can in certain settings or when we happen to be in a healthy spot personally, but this eventually becomes a burden too much for us to bear. This eventually results in failure, hypocrisy, legalism, or just giving up because it's too hard.
So is effort a bad thing? No, effort will actually be an essential part of discipleship to Jesus and the process of transforming into a loving person, but the issue is where we place our efforts. If our effort is toward "trying hard" to obey the teachings of Jesus, it will not work. However, if we direct our effort toward inner character transformation through discipleship to Jesus, we become a different person on the inside and our actions will follow naturally.
So what about grace? Isn't this just a "works-based" merit then? Grace is essential, and inner change will only take place through grace. But God meets us in our efforts, supplying the grace to actually make it happen or come to be. From the teaching of Dallas Willard, Mike and Holly offer a fresh understanding of God’s grace (not just grace as forgiveness for sin but also grace which makes possible a faithful life of obedience to God), which is available now to disciples of Jesus.
Transcripts for each episode are available at:
www.insidethecup.com/episodes
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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Travelling
License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en