When you write something quick and read just as quickly as you’re writing it, mistakes happen all the time. I made quite a few faux pas which was typing in a contraction instead of the past tense and missed a helping verb on another sentence. It seems I was having some serious brain fart there. I honestly did not catch it since my brain probably performed an autocorrect while reading it. The human brain does that and it’s pretty amazing.
I refuse to use Grammarly for personal reasons (the more they come up with apps that supposedly make everything easy, we get dependent on them and we end up using our brains less) and I’m sure it keeps blaring at me for obvious reasons; I make a lot of grammatical errors and there IS a direct correlation to what you are doing on the computer and the ads that appear while you are on it. That is why there is an option on your browser to turn on/off tracking. To some degree it probably does what it says, but I can’t rule out the possibility it’s only there to do a placebo effect since I still keep seeing the same ad and other ads related to my activity even with the browser being set on not keeping history.
We can liken our lives to a written piece. There is a beginning and an end. In between that timeline, we make a lot of mistakes. We need people in our lives to catch things we might have missed or fail to see because God designed us to be relational beings (Proverbs 27:6, Proverbs 27:17, Acts 18:24-28). That is supposed to be the Christian way. It can be embarrassing to be corrected and yesterday, my son who happens to be meticulous with grammar pointed out something that I completely missed on my post. I thank God for my son and for unlimited edits and revisions. Thank God for all the chances we have to repent and take the necessary steps to correct our erroneous ways.
While grammatical errors and typos are easily fixed, doctrinal error on the other hand can have dire spiritual consequences. If you have a friend or someone who is willing to tell you the truth no matter what, especially during those “something’s stuck in your teeth” kinda moments, consider yourself blessed to have found a rare gem. The world could use more truth-tellers.
Let the righteous strike me;
It shall be a kindness.
And let him rebuke me;
It shall be as excellent oil;
Let my head not refuse it.
For still my prayer is against the deeds of the wicked.
Psalm 141:5
Microsoft Word hates the passive voice, but when I write about redemption, I have to use the passive voice. Christ redeems us; we contribute nothing. If I followed Word’s suggested corrections, I’d be publishing heresy frequently. J.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: ” John 1:12 NKJV
“Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-” as rendered on the NIV.
My main concern about grammar is limited to using the correct tenses and punctuations. Other than that, I am a repeat offender when it comes to grammar rules. My main goal is to deliver a message with the hope that the intended target receives it and thanks for bringing me back to things I have forgotten and certainly ignored.
The structure of the message can be delivered from active to passive as long as the meat of the message is intact. Though Jesus died once and for all, “Christ redeems us; we contribute nothing” can be addressed to people who are YET to obtain salvation as Jesus’ atonement does not get automatically applied to those who reject Him if we go back to the verse above.
Believing in Him is deliberate and a choice which cannot be made for us by those who were before us, otherwise, we would not be accountable for accepting Jesus as our personal Savior especially if our initiation to the church was by way of infant baptism since the infant has no recollection of having chosen Christ on their own which is why Jesus said to Nicodemus that a person has to be born anew. An infant having just been born does not need to be born anew at that current state. Mental assent and true surrender are two completely different things as I have experienced when I was once a Catholic.
This is what makes Judeo-Christianity different from Islam. In Islam, one is not afforded the choice to accept or reject. They are just automatically Muslims until death and those who do choose to leave get the death penalty.
“If I followed Word’s suggested corrections, I’d be publishing heresy frequently.” – Grammar correcting apps often correct quoted passages from Scripture also. This is another reason I completely avoid using it, other than the reason I stated in the post and lastly, I still want to sound like my faulty self. ヅ
[…] an old post entitled Mea Culpa, I shared my personal preference on avoiding the use of Grammarly. If you’re really curious […]