How could I live up to the requirements?

I cannot remember any specific day when I started believing. Even if I during my teenager years hardly went to church, due to reasons I will not mention here, I had the faith in my heart. I had received the gift of faith, but I knew quite little of what the faith actually meant. As the religious knowledge grew, faith in fact became more difficult to handle. The confusion grew because the teaching told me that there were a lot of requirements, being a Christian. And I never felt confident about that; because how could I manage to live up to those requirements? No chance at all. And times came when I did not feel qualified or good enough. I kept a distance, but still I had the faith in my heart. But I was kind of afraid to enter a church.

 

A couple of years after moving to Oslo, I established myself in a church in the city centre. The fellowship and the preaching increased my knowledge of the faith gift. But the above mentioned confusion never let me feel the freedom of the grace gospel. To be honest, I had not really heard or understood so much about the grace gospel. Because the Christian life in that period of my life, was a mixture of God's gift and several requirements that I felt that I had to achieve. In other words, it was an unhealthy mixture of the grace and the law that is not according to what the Bible actually teaches.

 

At the age of 15, the pastor of my church in Haugesund, gave me a scripture from the Bible. It was 2th Timothy, chapter 2, verse 15:

"Study to present yourself to God approved, a workman who has no cause to be ashamed, correctly dividing the Word of Truth".

Only many years later, after finding another church than the one I established myself in after moving to Oslo, the meaning of this scripture started being revealed to me. The revelation of this scripture was one of the reasons why my confusion finally disappeared. Because "correctly dividing" means to learn the Word of Truth skillfully. The Bible tells about the Law (the 10 commandments) and the Bible tells about God's grace and that Jesus Christ finished everything on the cross. Only when I got revelation of how to understand the Word of God, I also realized that the Law and the grace were never meant to be mixed.

 

For several years now, I have been feeling a great freedom in my Christian life. Neither God nor the church requires any achievements from me, and with no requirements to face, there is also no self condemnation for not managing the requirements. Even if there are still people who seem to be stuck with the word of condemnation.