Life Groups - Week 1

​Psalms has been one of my favorite books of the Bible for such a long time. It's raw. It's intimate. It's real. People may think the Bible is a long list of rules when in reality a lot of it is just other people pouring their hearts out to Jesus.

In my life group, we're studying the longest chapter in the Bible - Psalm 119.

I'm excited for this study because I've never really dug deep into the Psalms before. Not only that, but getting to do this alongside other believers who are seeking truth will spark a lot of conversations that I'm looking forward to learning from.

Tonight we looked at verses 1 through 16.

In our discussion, we talked a lot about grace.

“Grace is awkward because we know we don't deserve that.” - Joey Tovar, my life group leader.

I love that he pointed that out because it ties in with my biggest takeaway. In the first verse of this passage it says, “Blessed are those whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the Lord.”

The law of the Lord is not a list of do's and don'ts. It has nothing to do with religion and it's actually much simpler than people realize. (Even I can forget because I complicate things in my mind sometimes.)

The law of the Lord is to love God and love others. That's it. It's just to spread love. Anything that isn't loving isn't of God.

It's so simple yet we make it more complicated. Why? Because we're human and screwing things up is what we're best at.

So if God knows this about our nature, why would He make His law something we can't always do perfectly? Why is it set up that way?

And this is where the beautiful-yet-awkward truth comes into the picture.

Grace.

God made us as spiritual beings but we're living in a physical world. We're also physical, so we can't enter the spiritual realm.

We're stuck in between. (Well, for now.)

God lets bad things happen. He will never distance Himself from you, but He will allow you to distance yourself from Him. Why? Because we're stuck and we fail at a lot of things. Pride will take away our passion for Christ but so will comfort. Frankly, God just loves you too dang much to let anything take you away from Him.

That's why His law is designed that way. So that in order to be blessed, we need to rely on Him. No matter what,  we can't escape His love and that is why grace is so powerful in a walk with Christ.