For most of my Christian life I had a very wrong view of God. I’d love to blame it on my church, or my education and say that the way they taught the bible to me led me to hold this terrible view of God…but in reality the blame falls square on my own shoulders. I believed the way I did because (I thought) this view aligned with my own experience of Who God was.

I look at God like a sort of heavenly cop, He was up there always watching, just waiting for me to mess up so He could “whack” me. Don’t think that I’m trying to make light of the situation because this is truly what I believed about God. I had heard many times before about the chastening of God and how He never allows sin to go unpunished, and so as much as I respected God and His holiness I was afraid of Him…much like the children of Israel were afraid of the God who dwelt at the top of mount Sinai.

It wasn’t until my Jr. year of college that God finally changed my view of Him when I had to do a study on the love of God. At the time it seemed like one of those studies you do but you know you’ll never learn anything. However as I studied God’s love reviewing in passage after passage something started to whisper to me in the back of my mind. God’s love seemed so very unconditional, so much of a blanket acceptance of who I was. It seemed so final, and so finished.

By the time I had completed the study I realized how wrong about God I had been. A Christian is someone who has accepted the free gift of Christ’s death in place of our own. Christians have accepted His blood as an offering to God for our sin, Jesus has redeemed us from sin making us dead to it (Romans 6). What I finally understood was the reality of what this means.

God will never hold me accountable for the sin that I have committed in the past, present, or future.There is no judgment for believers, there is no weighing of our actions and meting out of judgment upon the heaps of sin we have committed in our life-times. While this thinking may fly in the face of what most people believe, understand, or even teach in their churches it is what the bible teaches!

The great white throne judgment is for unbelievers only, and this is the only judgment in the bible that deals with the judgment of sin. What I had to come to understand is that when God looks at me, He no longer sees Tyler Collins the selfish and evil sinner who has often profaned His grace and mercy, but rather He sees the pure righteousness of Jesus Christ. He sees the radiance of Christ’s perfection shining from my soul, not the foul black of sin that used to be there!