Thanks for visiting my website! I’m Kimberly (many know me as Kim) Rikard, a devoted and very imperfect follower of Christ, pastor’s wife and mom to two adult children. My heart is to help others find freedom in Christ and live the abundant life Jesus tells us we can have. If you are like me, you have struggled with this at different times in your life. Join me in this journey as we strengthen our faith and fulfill our purpose. We’ve got this one life, let’s make it count!
Grace and Truth
I titled my website Balancing Grace and Truth, first because I felt led to by God and second, because it has been and continues to be the key for me to live a fulfilled, peaceful, and wonderfully abundant life in Jesus.
If you are like me you can have a tendency toward a perfectionistic personality which can cause us to lean more toward the truth side. If not tempered with grace, this can lead to legalism or making the rules or the law more important than God and others. This can then turn into using performance as a measuring stick and becoming critical of how others are serving or not serving.
My Search for Grace and Truth…
I grew up going to a Southern Baptist Church in a small town in North Carolina. That church is forever a part of me and it was the beginning of my faith journey. It was there that I met Jesus and was baptized at age 8. I may not have had a deep insight into the Christian life at that age, but I still remember the day when Jesus called me into a relationship with Him.
I spent my middle and high school years in a wonderful youth group learning how to serve in church, spending weekends at retreats, and deepening my faith. Towards the end of high school I began to veer off track. Instead of knowing the God who loves me and seeing His truth through that lens, I began to view His truth through the lens of the world. I allowed the world’s cares, concerns, and desires to distort His truth so that all I saw were a bunch of rules and standards I could not meet. This drives some people to try harder. I, however, eventually gave up. Deciding what the world offered was easier. The expectations lower.
God’s Grace
To God’s glory He called me back to Him in my late 20’s and I began the process of growing my faith as an adult. The problem was, I had a world view that needed changing. Instead of balancing grace and truth, I grabbed onto truth and prayed God would give me all I needed to uphold it. Again, my focus was more on truth than grace.
My husband became a believer around this time. Having never read the Bible and with the Holy Spirit guiding him, he saw things I had not seen when I was a young believer. He began to encourage me to seek that path of freedom, found in both grace and truth, instead of constantly striving.
What the Bible says about Grace and Truth
In my quest I began with the book of John (always a good place to start). I found chapter 1, verse 14 which says The Word (Jesus) came full of grace and truth. Then in verse 17 “For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
If Jesus came full of grace and truth then I needed to also be full of grace and truth! After all, the goal of the Believer is to be made more and more in the image of Jesus. The more my life is like Jesus’ the fuller it will be (abundant) with the purpose(s) He has for me.
Jesus offers salvation to all, forgiveness for all, love for all even when we were enemies of His. That is grace! His truth requires us to grow our faith and put it into action. To live an abundant life we cannot have one without the other.
Now this took some time to fully walk into, but it was life changing for me and I hope it will be for you too! To know that on our worse day God loves us the same as on our best day means we no longer have to check the boxes. It means we are free to love Him and serve Him as He guides us, not how someone else does or how we think we are expected to. It also meant giving others grace to serve as God leads them.
What about you? Are you ready to rest in God’s grace while living out His truth?
I hope you will join me on this journey because God and abundant life are always a prayer away!