What is it about God's Grace?
05 Jun 2010Grace was that unconditional part of God’s love that gives us the opportunity to return to Him and keep the conditional part of His love, by the debt that was paid by His Son since it is not in man to be capable of earning his own salvation.
I. God made man and gave him the command to choose to obey or die.
II. Man chose to disobey.
III. Man was barred from Eden and sent into the world.
IV. God’s plan to bring man back into a working relationship.
V. God’s mercy involved in bringing man back to Himself.
a. God gave “The Law” to show man that he is not capable of keeping it perfectly (and thus cannot earn the right to God’s favor). God wanted obedience from man, and “The Law” was the “boy leader whose office it was to to take the children to school”, teaching what God wanted and expected of man in order to please Him.
b. Once man understood his inability to save himself, then God finished His plan by sacrificing Jesus, so that all who joined themselves to Him would be saved vicariously through Him.
His Grace was the unmerited gift of His Love for man; the gift of Christ for Forgiveness, and only through His blood.
(1) To “earn” salvation would be to fulfill the law, not in “being a good person and doing good things that makes one feel good about himself”, even though the law requires just such action on the part of man as part of fulfilling the law. But the obedience must come from the heart since God wants man’s obedience to be done because he wants to please God. And to please God, man must keep His commandments.
(2) The commandments Christ gave — He told the diciples to go into all the world, teaching them and baptizing them “into Christ”; He told them that the two greatest commandments were to “Love the Lord God with all you heart, all your might, and to love each other even as He loved us”. Everything we do hinges upon this, even being baptized!
We are hard put by “the world” who wants to say that Grace was the gift of God to allow people to be saved unconditionally — that would even include the demons since they believe and tremble. The grace that God proffered (offered for acceptance) to us, was that, in spite of our sinful nature and inability to “earn” our salvation by our own merit, He allowed us the condition by which we could return to a working relationship in Him through His Son, Jesus.
Grace is not the “saving” element.
Grace is extended to all men.
The “actual saving” element is Christ’s blood.
Christ’s blood is limited to those who are “in Him”, and without it all the grace and all the faith in the world will not save mankind.
Yet Christ’s blood cannot be except by the Grace of God through our faith in Christ as the son of God, and His enduring promises.
Consider this then:
Grace is that effort of God to justify man and get him to return to a working relationship with Him in spite of man’s inability to earn salvation (fulfill the law) for himself. If man sinned in ONE POINT of the Law, he was guilty of the whole Law. It is still man’s choice to return, and the only way he can return is to be “in Christ” through obedience by baptism, and by observing all that He taught us in His teachings and by His exemplary life to the best of our ability and perseverence. His Grace was the unmerited gift of His Love for man; the gift of Christ for Forgiveness, and only through His blood.
