finding peace in repentance

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The word, "repentance" used to make my skin crawl. I remember telling my youth pastor in Jr. High that I didn't have anything to repent of and he acted as though I was an even worse person for thinking I had done nothing wrong. But I was a good kid. I never did anything that I was told was wrong. Ever. But this belief lead me to years of feeling guilty for things the Bible does not declare sin. 

In my previous post (breaking the shell one piece at a time) I mentioned that I read the Torah in eight, life changing days. This was back in 2013. The year I toured across country and released my self-titled debut album. The year I almost became an atheist. The year I made peace with repentance. 

I dug into the Torah to answer this one question, "what are sins?" I ended up with a lot more than I bargained for. 

Not to say that I have all the answers, I only have the answers I, personally, needed in order to heal. That being said, I found a lot of vague commands in the Torah that set me free.

The first being that the Torah does not teach that I have to go to church every Sunday, and for every bible study in order to be saved. In fact, we are simply commanded to rest on the seventh day. The seventh day, not Sunday, or Saturday, or Friday night. It does not specify a day of the week. It doesn't even say that everyone has to have the same seventh day, even though it would have been common practice for an entire nation obeying YHWH's commands together. It simply says that we are to work for six days and rest on the seventh. So, my weird and crazy work schedules could suddenly work towards obeying Scripture instead of forcing me to disobey and ask for forgiveness every week. 

The trouble is that people really don't like vague and open to interpretation commands. They want to cross their t's and dot their i's. So throughout church history men have made up t's and added dots to non-existent i's. Both in Judaism and Christianity. My bachelor's degree tells me so. No one will argue that religion has done corrupt and horrible things and "gotten it wrong" in the past. But what are we doing to set it right? 

When I read the Torah it changed my life because I started to see lies in sheeps clothing that had been holding me captive. Captive to feeling like it was absolutely impossible for me to please God. Period. Jesus saving me didn't change my inability to please God, it only gave me a window to try with some weird guarantee of heaven that made no sense to me. The Torah gave me the freedom to walk in His ways confidently so that I could finally start to know and understand my Messiah. Because yes, I believe that Yeshua is Messiah and yes, I call him Yeshua instead of Jesus because I have too much negative baggage associated with his English name that makes no translatable sense. But no, I do not go to church because (as my previous post shares) I have too much negative baggage with people holding me to standards I do not read in the Bible.

This is me, healing.

Until next time,
KELLY ANN

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