As I mentioned earlier, I chose to forgive my parents of the abuse when I was 12, so I honestly thought I had done everything a good Christian girl should do. My mother took me to church twice on Sundays as well as every Wednesday night for as long as I could remember. My walk with Christ has always been most important to me, but I have not always understood what walking with Christ truly entails. Since my family attended a somewhat legalistic church, I grew up believing I would lose my salvation if I sinned. I lived each day in fear that I would make a mistake, sin, and fall from God’s grace. I prayed daily for God to forgive me of my sins.

That is such an oppressive way to live life. Each day of my life I saw every other Christian as “having it all together” and doing what God wanted them to do but as for me…I could only see my faults and failures. I asked forgiveness for each and every one of them. It was many years before I learned that many of those faults and failures I constantly asked forgiveness for were merely human mistakes made by an imperfect person.

Some of those things I asked forgiveness for truly were sins. 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I daily clung to that promise. Unfortunately, when I heard messages about grace, I thought they meant that grace was only good until the next time I blew it. Yes, I had read Ephesians 2:8-9 where it says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” It’s just that at that time in my life, I thought the next time I sinned I would fall out of grace and have to ask for it all over again. I lived in a perpetual state of fear of losing God’s grace. Daily, I asked God for forgiveness because I was so afraid Jesus would return at a moment when there was a lapse in my state of forgiveness, and I would miss Heaven.

That is an incredibly depressing and oppressive way to live, and I am thankful that years ago the Lord helped me see the error of my belief system. I no longer believe that because of John 10:27-29, where Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.” Even though I had read this scripture often while growing up, I never truly grasped the meaning of the words, so I was totally liberated the day the Lord helped me understand the truth of this scripture. I had spent my life trying to be perfect enough to keep God’s grace when in fact, He had given me His grace the very first time I asked for His forgiveness, and He had never taken it away. I had simply been living my life blinded to that fact.

The freedom I now enjoy gives me daily peace. Where I used to live each day constantly in fear of losing my salvation, now I have continual peace that God knows my heart. He knows that I want to serve Him and make the right choices, but He also knows I am human and make mistakes. I know now that God loves me right through my mistakes. He never leaves me. He helps me see my mistakes and correct them where needed. His Holy Spirit shows me when I need to ask forgiveness as well. What I have found essential to remember is that Grace is God’s unmerited favor, which means while it is a gift I don’t deserve, it is kindness from God.

Internal peace that my salvation is secure does not mean that I live free from the side effects of the abuse I endured. Learning to identify those side effects was only a first step. Through the years I have diligently worked to eradicate the poor behaviors from my life, and while I have made tremendous progress, I still deal with behaviors that were hard-wired into me from a young age.