My neat, little Christian world was blown to bits at an Exodus conference in 2004.

Exodus wasn’t new to me.  I had met Alan & Leslie Chambers at a campus ministry conference in 2000, early on in my dating relationship with my now husband.  I had kept in touch with them over the years of dating, engagement and then marriage.  The Chambers also connected me with a local ministry for people struggling with same-sex attraction where I began serving in April of 2003.

And then Clark Whitten spoke.

Let me back up and share a little history.

I had been a Christian 5 ½ years, and my world wasn’t so neat & tidy as I wanted to believe.  I had a long history, even before I was a Christian, of trying to overcome my struggles by using sheer will power.  The truth is I did have some success overcoming some of the external ways my issues manifested themselves.  I was no longer struggling with an eating disorder, something that had plagued me for 13 years.  I wasn’t struggling really at all with same-sex attraction.  In my good moments, I felt in many ways that I had arrived.

But if I was actually honest, I still had very dark times. Moments when a small trigger of some sort (a scowling glance or a thoughtless word from a loved one) would send me spiraling into a deep place of despair and self-loathing.

My struggle with my thoughts was so intense that a friend had begun to encourage me to explore grace. She saw how hard I was on myself and how I struggled in my relationship with God.  She had been sending me emails about grace, as well as mailing books & teaching tapes (yes, people still listened to tapes occasionally then) all on the topic.

I was slowly beginning to realize that while I believed in my heart that I was saved by grace alone, I was demonstrating a different core belief through my actions: through rules and my own effort, I could overcome all my struggles and wrong thinking.

Now back to the Exodus conference.

Clark Whitten was, and still is, a frequent speaker at Exodus conferences.  He seems to almost always talk about one thing: grace.  At this conference in 2004, Clark preached a thorough sermon on grace (he followed it up with another teaching on the law which was almost as earth-shattering for me).

Honestly, as I sat there, I didn’t believe what he was saying. I mean, he was quoting the Bible, and using the verses in context. It seemed to line up with what I knew about God and what His Word says about grace. But it was, again, shattering my little Christian box I had been living in.

Grace just sounded too good to be true.

Grace really is too good to be true. Maybe that’s why we try to measure our accomplishments through rules and our own effort. Yet God is very clear in how He expects us to react when we fail:  “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:16

Through giving us His grace & mercy, God has the help we need.

Clark reminded me that Jesus didn’t just die to modify my behavior. I didn’t like that answer at all because I still had a lot of behavior that I really wanted to be modified! That’s why I had constructed a nice set of rules to encourage my own behavior modification.  I also saw a lot of behavior in others that I thought needed to be modified (yes, I was a bit of a Pharisee).

If I had boiled it down, my core belief I was demonstrating would have been “I believe I can change myself by berating myself.” Another core belief was “My faith, and the faith of others, can be measured by the external changes we have made.” Thus, when I made a mistake, my response was often to resort to name-calling and self-degradation.

Trying to be free through rules and human effort injects you into a cycle that makes YOU responsible for your own healing. I’ve found living this way only heaped shame and condemnation on my head.

Galatians 3 says “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?”

Colossians 2 says it another way: “Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: ‘Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!’? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.”

The Bible is clear: rules have no power to restrain. Human effort will fail us.

So, if following rules has no power to restrain, then what does?

Clark said, “The greatest constraining power on earth against sin in your life is love.”

We make different choices, in our actions and in our thoughts, because He loves us, because He declared and proclaimed us worth knowing, worth loving and worth creating when He hung from that cross.

Choosing to live in grace became one of the keys in overcoming my struggle with self-image and self-acceptance. I needed to choose to walk in His grace when I failed.  I needed to learn to accept God’s love when I made a mistake.  I needed to transform my mind, as it says in Romans 12:2, and renew my thoughts to line up with what the Word of God says about me.  I needed to choose to believe what He says about me.

Does grace sound too good to be true to you?

The Reality of Grace is the theme of this year’s annual Exodus Freedom conference.

I asked the question last September: have you attended an Exodus conference?

This year’s Exodus Freedom conference is June 8-11 in North Carolina.  Have you considered attending?

Do it.  Seriously.  You can find more stories of lives changed at conferences here.