Be the Fjällbo Shelf You Were Made to Be

A Blog on Grace and Purpose by Julia Sifers

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always struggled with grace. I’ve always thought that there has to be a catch.

We are born with sin, and the penalty is death.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23, NIV)

So Jesus comes to earth, lives a perfect life, and then dies because He loves us enough to take the blame, take the punishment, take our sins and pay the price for our sins.

For Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put the death in the body but made alive by the Spirit. (1 Peter 3:18, NIV)

Grace comes to those who believe.

Yet to all who receive Him, to those who believe in His name, He gave the right to become children of God. (John 1:12, NIV)

The Bible makes it very clear how it works, and I believe that grace exists. But I used to believe that grace was like a contract with fine print. That we accepted grace, but then we read on, and there are rules—like the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins, or the fruit of the Spirit, or the verses with the lists of what loves looks like, etc.… In those “rules,” there are expectations, and meeting those expectations is how you earn grace, by living the perfect life. If you don’t, God’s going to make you wish you did.

It was a Robot Christian lifestyle.

In my mind, I had to stiffen up. I had to stay on the straight and narrow. Make the best choices. Remain positive. Work hard. Never break. Never show my weaknesses. I had to not just love, but like everyone. If I dabbled with anything outside of these parameters, I was going to get pulled into non-Christ-like-perfection.

I was a slave to my self-created Robot understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. My heart was squeezed tight with the heavy weight of what I could never do: earn my salvation.

So, I decided that it was easier for me to just put half-efforts into my faith rather than to saddle up and Robot on. To do that, I kept Jesus at an arm’s distance and faked it. But there was a void now…. My heart that had received grace, and had been carefully pruned throughout my life, was becoming empty and dry. Everything was harder.

Then I took the third round of Story School that the She Speaks Stories team offered. Let me tell you, I was dragging my feet. This season was all about Spiritual Disciplines, and all I knew about those was that they were another list of the “must-dos” to earn your worth so that grace could apply to you. I thought I “knew” this, but I soon learned I couldn’t be further from the truth.

Katie, Portia and April took turns walking us through the Spiritual Disciplines each week, and each week, a layer of my misunderstanding fell off. This wasn’t a list of must-dos to earn His grace, and neither were any of the other lists in the Bible that request behaviors or list off attributes. I had it backwards. When we are given grace, and we look at Jesus with utter thankfulness and love, we then take His outstretched hand and walk with Him. When we begin to know Him, what He’s like, what He’s all about, how He lived, we start to imitate Him. And we have no idea how to do that, because we are broken sinners, so the Bible lists ways to help us apply our desire to be like Him.

The best way for me to explain this is with an IKEA shelf we’ve just purchased. We get the box full of raw wood and the plastic baggies of screws, bolts and a bendy tool. We can want to build the shelf and try to do so without any instructions, but chances are—and I may or may not have tried this to know for sure, ask my husband (Sorry, Nik!)—we will fail. But when we get the instructions out, we’re able to step-by-step build the shelf the way it was intended to be built for its intended use.

We are that shelf. We have an intended purpose—whether you’re an Ekenbben, Kallax, Fjällbo or another impossible-to-pronounce IKEA shelf! We’re a special God-design, made for a job (or many jobs) that will bring Him glory.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10, ESV)

When we realize that we were made with a purpose, we want to be the shelf we were created to be. When we realize that we can be that shelf by following the instructions, we want to follow them. And the bonus is, not only will being this shelf bring Him glory, but it will bring us joy and potential happiness, and I believe an overall goodness during our life here on earth. It’s for His glory and our benefit! He knows that sinning makes our life harder, so in His love for us, God is not walking us through how to earn His grace, but how to avoid that pain as much as we can!

The Robot Christian mindset is not from God. It’s not what He wants from us (or I think He would have just made us actual robots). He gave us a heart, emotions, feelings and a deep desire for relationships. He wants us to know Him. He wants us to be close to Him. And He deeply loves us. Knowing that we are relational people made by a relational God shifts the mindset of daily devotions being a chore that we do to check the box and validate our salvation. Our daily devotions become our time with Jesus. The moments we push all the distractions away (as much as we can—I see you, fellow moms!) and take His hand and walk with Him.

My challenge to you is to make the time for Him this week. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or fancy. For example, I had a week of “Lunches with the Lord,” where I sneaked away after I gave my kids their lunches and had 30 minutes with Him. I put a timer on my phone and actually talked out loud (so that I wouldn’t get distracted by my thoughts) with my Bible open. I cannot express the levels of peace and the shift in my ability to handle what was thrown at me each day.

Guys, we’re made for this. Time with the Lord is like getting in your body’s daily need for water. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Psalm 34:8a, ESV).