forgiveness

Grace

/ Neal Embry / Leave a comment

Ironically, “Grace Greater Than All Our Sin” is playing on Spotify as I begin typing this post. Funny how that works.

I’ve been praying lately that God would keep me from just thinking about Him in the abstract.  That the doctrines of salvation and the knowledge of His grace wouldn’t just be something I “understand” in my head, but a very real reality that I rejoice in in my heart.  Theoretical grace doesn’t save anybody.  Understanding the sacrifice of Christ doesn’t mean it’s applied to my heart.  I’m a real sinner with real sins who needs a real Savior and real forgiveness.  Because before I’m a seminary student or a budding theologian, I’m a sinner saved by grace, and a sinner that must live every day trusting in the grace of God to sustain me and keep me in Him.

Do we even understand what grace is?  The downside to talking about it so much is that we lose it’s meaning and significance.  It’s the same thing with the word “saved,” which may be the topic of my next post.  We hear the preacher say “God is gracious,” and go, “Well, yeah, of course He is…duh.”  God, grant us the grace to not be callous to your truth.

Grace: undeserved favor.  Being accepted, declared right with God, forgiven and loved, not because you have done a single thing to deserve it, but because God is gracious enough to send Jesus in your place, and mine.  Even though we deserve nothing from God but wrath and condemnation, in Christ, we are given everything.

But before we get into God’s saving grace, it’s good to look at common grace:

  • You are alive if you’re reading this.  That means that God gave you a mom and a dad, and sovereignly brought you into this world.  He put air into your lungs and gave you a body that’s capable of doing wonderful things.  Being alive is a gift.
  • Love.  Not just His love, but the love of others.  I have a loving mother, grandparents, a dad who I’ve been able to reconnect with by the grace of God, and a whole host of other family members that love and support me.  I have a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend that I don’t deserve, and a group of friends who are truly a gift from God.  I haven’t done a single thing to deserve that.
  • Many of you live in America (or maybe another first-world country).  While the hashtag #firstworldproblems may be slightly humorous, it’s more sad and depressing.  While we complain that our water filter takes five minutes to clean, an eight year old in a third-world country struggles to walk the mile-long trek from her home to the town well, where she’ll have to hope that the water won’t make her and her family sick.  My goal in this is not to produce guilt, but to remind us how thankful we should be that God placed us where He did, and to be reminded that that’s for a reason: Help others.  If you are blessed, it is for the sake of others.  It’s not because you (or I) deserve it.
  • A job.  You may not like what you do, but if you have a job, God has shown grace to you.  And especially if you love what you do.  You’re getting paid to do something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid! That’s grace!

Any and every good thing we have in our lives is a result of grace.  You have earned nothing.  Even what you “earned” was gained because God was gracious enough to cause you to have life, to give you gifts and abilities, to allow you to hold a job.  This doesn’t mean you aren’t intelligent or capable, but that your intelligence and capability comes from God, as a gift.

And that’s just common grace.  Now we embark on the lifelong journey of attempting to see how much grace God has given us in His Son, Jesus.  We have:

  • Been forgiven.  Our sins don’t stand against us.  We are forgiven because God the Son chose to come and die on a cross and effectively take away every sin.  When we confess our sins to Him, trusting His cross for our forgiveness, we’re forgiven, and reconciled to God.  We see this when we first become a Christian, but we also experience His forgiveness every day (1 John 1:9).
  • Been declared righteous.  There’s no way I can be perfect on my own, but I know I am perfect in the eyes of God because Jesus is righteous.  Every believer’s confidence for being declared righteous before God is in the obedience of Jesus Christ.  So when we fall down in sin, we fall down clothed in the righteousness of Christ, so we can get back up, trust in His salvation, and keep following Him, not to earn righteousness and acceptance, but to walk it out, to be who we already are in Christ.
  • Been made alive and placed under the Lordship, authority and care of Jesus (1 Peter 2:25).  We were dead in our sins (Eph. 2:1).  But God graciously opened our eyes to see our depravity and our need for new life, to begin walking with the one true God.  He opened our eyes to Jesus and His work, so that we can declare Him to be Lord.  For whatever reason, we often see repentance as a door we have to pass through to “get grace.”  Is it not grace that God would, instead of condemning us for our sins and throwing us in hell, open our eyes to see that we’ve gone the wrong way, but that we can turn back and be made new?  Is it not grace that the King we have sinned against would, instead of telling us to swim to Him, would come take over our lives and reign as Lord?  Indeed, this is grace!
  • Been given the Holy Spirit.  God lives in you.  He has changed your heart, turning you against your sin, to say that God is God, and that we should trust Him and follow Him.  And He has taken up a home in your heart, and is changing you, day to day, even though we fall many times.  He convicts us of our sin and leads us back to Jesus our Savior.  When we don’t know what we should do, He gives us wisdom.  We cannot, must not, diminish the importance of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is not an “it,” but a “he.”  He is God.
  • Been adopted into the family of God.  Honestly, this is one of the more difficult truths for me to accept.  Because when I fail, it’s almost impossible to understand that God doesn’t treat me like an employee who has to be fined and/or fired.  Rather, He treats me as a son, who He disciplines out of love for me and hatred of my sin.  God, grant us the ability to see you as Father, for in Christ, we are your children.
  • Been given an inheritance that does not fail.  You know why you shouldn’t concern yourself with building up treasure here?  Because your treasure is in heaven.  Because the eternal inheritance you have in Christ is better.  You get to be with God, see Him, rest in Him, worship Him, and see His glory revealed, fully, for all eternity.  That’s better than anything this world can provide.
  • Been given eternal life.  Christians will not just live forever, but live forever with God.
  • Been brought into the body of Christ.  Looking around at the church body on Sunday morning and recognizing that this is now my family is one of the most beautiful thoughts I’ll ever have.  It is greater to be an orphan with no family who is a Christian than a non-believer that has an enormous family. 
  • God providing for us.  Why don’t we sin against God and go get what we need however we see fit?  Because we trust God to provide for us.  This is a weapon against sin, particularly greed, lust, anger, jealousy, selfishness and lying.  We trust God to provide our needs, from salvation to breakfast.

This is not an exhaustive list.  I can’t type forever, and by now your attention span is waning.  But I urge you, Christian brothers and sisters, to see all that we have been given, and repent, rejoice, rest and worship God every moment of every day.  If you’re not a Christian, I hope the idea of common grace is clear: that God has even shown grace to you who does not know Him.  I pray you know His saving grace, that you would put your faith in Jesus and start following Him.

Lord, may we never forget grace.  May we trust in you, and may you provide everything that we need.  Thank you for grace.  Amen.

God bless,

Neal E.

The Gift of Salvation

/ Neal Embry / Leave a comment

I do apologize for such a long absence to those who read my blog. I have been busy, with a lot of good things, but busy nonetheless. But I’m ready to start blogging more regularly, so let’s get started.

I wish it was Christmas time. It still feels like July in Alabama, and I’m ready for colder weather. But more than that, I’m ready for the season…because at this time of the year, if only at this time, we seem to understand the nature of gifts and grace and love. We see it, we show it…why? Because it’s Christmas..cheer up! No one’s sad on Christmas. At this time, we remember God’s “gift” to us–His Son Jesus.

But I have to wonder…do we understand this gift from 8-5 in the middle of June? Does it mean as much when we get trapped in the day-to-day struggles of life? Do we enjoy God’s gift in the middle of October when we’re stressed out with school? I know it’s easy for me to forget.

I’ve been thinking more and more lately about the gospel (never a bad thing to have on the mind) and it finally hit me as I was going through some material for evangelism training at our Baptist Campus Ministries–salvation is a gift.

Now I’ve known this for several years, but I think, for the first time, I’m seeing the beauty and the majesty in that truth.

Gifts are received and enjoyed. They are not worked for, paid back for, or left to sit on the counter. I’ll briefly discuss all three of these misunderstandings about gifts as it relates to God’s gift to us in Christ.

When my mom buys me a gift, whether it be the latest Madden game, a new pair of jeans or a cell phone, she never once asks me to earn it. If I earned it, it’s not a gift! If I earn it, it is the result of my work, not a gift.

“Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.”–Romans 4:4

So if we work for our salvation, it is not a gift, but what is due us. The problem with this is that we can’t earn salvation. Romans 3:23 tells us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” We read God’s law and hear Jesus say that whoever has broken one law is guilty of trespass against the entire law. We are guilty before God, with no way to justify ourselves by our work.

Yet, God has given us a gift:

“And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”–Romans 4:5

So..we don’t earn it. We believe and we receive. All we’re asked to do with a gift is to receive it with joy, thank the giver and enjoy the gift. That’s it. We don’t earn it.

And we don’t pay it back. How dare we think we have something to add to the righteousness of Christ? How dare we think we can make a better sacrifice than the death of the King of Kings? We cannot. We must not. If we do, we do so at our own eternal risk.

So we trust in Christ.

We also don’t leave the gift sitting on the counter. We don’t let our salvation become numb to us.

So how do we enjoy our salvation? We walk in it. If we have stopped trusting in our own righteousness and trusted in the righteousness of Christ for our salvation, we have been given righteousness (Romans 10:4–“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for everyone who believes.”).

Therefore, walk in righteousness! Don’t sin! Enjoy being righteous in Christ, and walk that out in this life. We will fail, and we’ll repent and turn back to Christ for forgiveness and rest in His perfection in the midst of our imperfections.

However, for those who trust and rest in Christ, we can confidently face temptation and sin and say, “I am righteous in Christ. I don’t have to do this. I enjoy following Christ and walking in His ways.” And we should grow in confidence in Him and walking in His righteousness throughout our lives.

We’ve been forgiven by trusting Christ to cover our sin and take them away through His cross. We’ve trusted Christ to apply His finished work to our lives so that we are no longer under the wrath of God, but under His grace. Our hearts have been changed in repentance and faith, to hate our sin and love God and to trust in Christ’s work.

Therefore, worship God! Therefore, forgive others! Therefore, pursue Christ to be more like Him and to have joy, not to earn acceptance! You already have it–in Him!

If you don’t have this gift, let me paint a picture of what Christ has done and what He offers.

Jesus is the Son of God, King of Kings, and eternally reigns on the throne. He needs nothing. He is completely satisfied and happy because He is holy, worshiped, adored and in a relationship with God the Father. We are dirty sinners, dead in our sins, not desiring God and choosing other things. But Jesus came, becoming a man, just like us. He lived a perfect life, completely obeying God, completely having joy in Him and Him alone, and then went to the cross having done nothing wrong. The King of Kings became the least of these so that He could take all of our sin, every single one, on Himself. He took the wrath of God and the death we deserved for our sin. He died. Then He rose again to show that for everyone who trusts in Him as the sacrifice for their sin, as their Savior, God no longer condemns them, but forgives them by covering their sin through the cross. So the offer is: Confess your need for Jesus. Turn against your sin to call Jesus Lord, trusting Him to take away the sin you now hate. Give Jesus your sin, trusting Him to cover it and take it away through the cross. Trust in Him to give you His righteousness. Walk now under the Lordship of Jesus Christ as you learn how to walk in the salvation you’ve been given.

The perfect King of Kings, Lord of all the universe, died to take all my sin, and gave this wretched dead man life and, more than that, righteousness before God. He led me to repent and trust in Him to give me new life and forgiveness. Now I’m accepted and seen as perfect in Christ! I don’t deserve this! And it’s still hard to believe. Sometimes I don’t feel that way. But my forgiveness and righteousness and salvation isn’t dependent on my feelings, but on Him in whom I put my faith. The object, not the strength, of our faith is what matters.

O Lord, may our repentance flow from a hatred of sin and a love for you. May we trust in your cross to cover every single one of our sins. That’s the only sacrifice we need. May we rest in your perfection to cover us before God. May we worship you and give you the highest praise. May we have confidence and assurance of our salvation because we are confident and assured of you and your resurrection. May we enjoy the great gift you give us. May we look forward to the day where we see you face to face, where the enemies of sin and Satan are no longer and our joy will be complete in you. May we love you more, Lord Jesus. Amen.