Southwood Presbyterian Church

An Open Letter to Self-Deceived Sorority Girls and Soccer Moms…

Monday, October 10, 2011

I met a couple last week that just floored me. They were both ‘good’ Presbyterians, Calvinists, Bible-readers and church attenders. I assumed they had fallen in love through RUF and had a storybook romance ending with a wedding night where God blessed the union that they had both ‘saved themselves’ for. Not so much. They epitomized what the cancer of legalism and self-righteousness can do—it can make you look HEALTHY on the outside while rotting your spiritual bones from the inside. The wife said this to me, “Sometimes God has to show your sin to the whole world before you can see it yourself…” I told her, “You have to write your story down and let me put it on the blog.” Here is their story. I hope you see yourself somewhere in here.

It is an odd thing to tell your own story, especially when you aren’t sure who will be reading it. But, I have been asked to share my tale with honesty so I will give it my best attempt. To start at the beginning would be reaching too far back. It would begin on the day of my birth which I assume was a warm evening in the late spring of 1979. So, I will jump ahead 20 years to the day I truly saw myself for the first time. On the evening of February 7, 2000 I found the end of me which turned out to actually be the beginning. I was midway through my junior year of college when I find myself sitting in shock on the bathroom floor of my fiance’s college apartment with a positive pregnancy test in my hand. We had been engaged for about 8 weeks and based on my best guess we were about 8 weeks along. It was at that moment when I realized that everything I thought I knew had suddenly changed.

You would think that the greatest struggle would have been dealing with the responses from others, but God spared us the fights and resentments that often flow from families in a moment of crisis. Instead, I found that my greatest crisis was within. I realized that I no longer knew who I was. You see, up until then I was always the “good girl”. Frankly, in my own mind I was one of the best girls. I grew up with a long line of gold stars next to my name. My gold stars weren’t just for achievements at school either. I was earning gold stars for Jesus! I was a leader in my youth group, chaired the True Love Waits campaign, volunteered with community organizations, made my Junior Miss platform abstinence, and loudly rebuked all my friends when they fell into one of the deadly sins such as underage drinking or premarital sex. I truly thought that I was strong enough and spiritually mature enough to avoid this type of sin. Yet, somehow it had crept in, and there I was completely broken knowing that the sin I had tried most to hide was soon going to be evident to the world. 

What I discovered over those next few days was grace, true grace, the kind that gives you the strength to roll out of bed when you can’t even stand the sight of yourself. This grace is only found when you finally see the depth of your own sin. You see, I had been a believer nearly all my life. I had rarely missed a Sunday service or youth retreat. I had experienced many heartfelt moments of spiritual renewal and awakening, but I had never felt the unabashed, unending depths of Jesus’ love for me. It was there all along but I had missed it, because I had never really seen my sin. God had to reveal my deepest, darkest best hidden sin to the entire world before I was able to see it in myself.

This realization of my own sin came from the encouragement of our pastor at the time. He encouraged me to move past seeing my sin as an act that had taken place and to dig deeper to see the root of all sin in my heart. What I began to see for the first time, is that Christ had died to redeem me not only from the sinful acts that I committed, but from the sinful nature in me, the root of every sin that lurked in my heart just waiting for the opportunity to be revealed. Even worse, I realized that my greatest sin was the prideful love that I had for myself. I knew with confidence that all the good works I had ever credited to myself were filthy rags. I saw that I had done all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

At the time, I had thought that all my good works were my obedience to God, but those achievements and works were really about my glory and the favor I was trying to earn from God instead of the free grace I had been given in Christ. I realized that I had been living by own standard of righteousness. As long as I measured me in my own eyes, then I didn’t look too bad. However, when God showed me my heart, I saw myself measured against His standard then I knew Jesus was my only hope. Suddenly, I felt for the first time that because of Jesus, I had no less favor in God’s eyes when I was unmarried and pregnant than when I had been teaching bible study or leading worship as the “good girl”. With this truth secure in my heart, I was truly set free. I began to feel for the first time in my life that my walk with Christ was really not about my actions at all. It wasn’t about what I was doing or not doing, but it was about my heart before the Lord. It was about abiding and believing that my righteousness could only be found in the blood of Christ. This new found freedom compelled me to genuine obedience and works which flowed out of a longing to walk in a manner worthy of the grace I had received. Through Christ alone, I found that He had already accomplished the very things I was striving to do or not to do so I was able for the first time in my life to abide in Him and rest in His amazing grace. I had been set free, no longer bound to my image of being the good girl, but free to become a woman of grace who finds her value and significance in the cross of Jesus not in the eyes of the world.

Can I get an amen?