I have heard this as a name once or twice before but had seen it spelled Karis. This word came to mind this evening while I was working at the hospital and reflecting back on the sermon from church this morning. The sermon was on remembrance, as it is memorial day weekend, but the main theme that ran throughout it was about GRACE.
The word Charis, according to Thayer's and Smith's Bible Dictionary plus others; this is keyed to the large Kittel and the "Theological Dictionary of the New Testament", is defined as follows:
1. grace
a. that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness: grace of speech
2. good will, loving-kindness, favour
a. of the merciful kindness by which God, exerting his holy influence upon souls, turns them to Christ, keeps,
strengthens, increases them in Christian faith, knowledge, affection, and kindles them to the exercise of the
Christian virtues
3. what is due to grace
a. the spiritual condition of one governed by the power of divine grace
b. the token or proof of grace, benefit
1. a gift of grace
2. benefit, bounty
4. thanks, (for benefits, services, favours), recompense, reward
With that being said, it is save to say that the word Charis can be define as GRACE in the Greek language. What is also very intriguing to me is that I have often heard the word Charity to be substituted for the word Love, mostly in King James translations of the Bible. I will come back to that in a minute though.
GRACE. Do you really know what this word means? Does it mean just being kind towards others? Does it mean moving in a way that appears as if you are gliding on water? What does the word GRACE really mean? Well I think I could probably write a novel or two or three about the meaning of GRACE, but God has really REALLY Really been teaching me lately what GRACE really means.
While I believe it is impossible for us as humans to ever really grasp how much GRACE God exhibits towards us, I do believe that as we age, if we are growing in our walks, he will teach us more about what it means to show that same kind of GRACE towards others. As you may have read in some of my previous posts, I am in what could be described as a difficult/testing period of my life right now. My parents are going through a divorce and am now estranged from my father and also the guy I was dating prior to the divorce. I also most recently had begun dating again and thought it was going very well, but I had been praying for direction in this new relationship and God answered straight and clear: Not right now. So needless to say, I have had a vast amount of experiences over the past 6 or 7 months that have been filled with hurt, anger, disappointment, and sadness.
I must confess, there has been a huge fortress around my heart that has been virtually impenetrable. As I have prayed for healing, God has slowly begun to break the hardness but it is still a healing process I am currently experiencing (thus this blog), however, the sermon at church today was like one of those bundles of dynamite that the coyote used to try and catch roadrunner. Something about the sermon sank deep into my heart, into a soft place that had not been stirred in a such a long time, as there were layers upon layers of anger, bitterness, and resentment built outside of it. I once was such a joyful person, there was virtually nothing you could do to bring me down and for the past few years, it has been nothing but the opposite: There was/is hardly anything that could bring my up.
You see, I think inside of my dark shell of anger, bitterness, and resentment, I found a place of security. I know it sounds totally crazy but if I hid inside under the hardness, no one could get inside and I could essentially "protect" the little bit of my heart I felt like I had left. About the only thing I could love was my sweet puppies, Savannah and Georgia, to which I am so thankful now that I do have. There is a quote by C.S. Lewis that pretty much sums it all up, I think I even had this as my facebook status sometime in the past few months:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
Now you may be wondering, what in the world could have been said in a sermon that changed my perspective so radically? Well in this healing process, I have come a long way. I have been fervently praying that God would allow my heart to beat for Christ and that I would be serving him and the greater purpose in all that I do, so I had begun to feel that I could let go of some of these negative feelings I had pent up for such a long time. Today in the sermon, our pastor said something along the lines of "If you have anger, bitterness, and resentment that afflicts you, GRACE is not steering your ship and Christ is not the master over you". Now, that is a rough paraphrase, I am going to try and get the actual phrase from him, but you get the point. This was just like a bucket of cold water poured on my head. Here I am praying and praying that I would be a servant of Christ but I DAILY let all of those horrible things control me and here's the bad part... I THINK I LIKED IT! I felt this sense of "entitlement" per say, in that I have had all these "wrongs" committed against me. Yeah I have, but if we are called to live as an Example of Christ, CLEARLY I needed a reality check.
It just all hit me when he said that Christ was not ruling my life if I was holding these things in and not surrendering them; they were ruling me. This was the total antithesis of what I had been asking God to do in my life. It was by far one of those few moments I have had in my life I felt like the Lord was speaking through another person and straight to me. During the offering, there was a bagpipe player who played "Amazing Grace" and I closed my eyes and prayed that God would totally break the stone around my heart and that I would exhibit true authentic grace to the people in my life that to be perfectly honest, my flesh would rather spit in their faces. I feel as if a weight has been lifted from me. The word grace and Charis now have a totally new meaning in my life.
What is interesting about the word Charis is that it is similar to the word Charity, which I mentioned has been used as a synonym for Love . It seems to me that Love and Grace are interdependent on one another. You cannot have one without the other, just as the ever well known John 3:16 says, "For God so loved the world that he gave he only son, so the whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life." If we truly strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus, we have to exhibit love, that's the easy part. Sometimes loving isn't necessarily always easy, especially when we have been hurt or disappointed, but loving someone in spite of those wrong doings is called
GRACE
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