Grace
Romans 5:19-20
“For just as through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners so also through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. The law came along to multiply the trespass. But where sin multiplied grace multiplied even more.”
In most every Christian church on any given Sunday morning you are going to hear that we are forgiven of our sins because of our faith that we place in Jesus Christ, and there is no possible way for us to work our way to God. But do we actually live that out in our daily lives?
I was listening to a pastor a while back and he was talking about the fact that we have this idea in our minds that we have good spiritual days and we have bad spiritual days. But, if we are saved and kept by the grace of Jesus Christ at salvation, and when we get saved we are forgiven of our past, present and future sins, then does that really mean that we are going to have good or bad spiritual days? If once I am saved I am just as much a child of the King as I will be 30 years from now then how is there days when I am going to have good and bad days with him? I am I going to do things that let him down and make him want to turn me away from him? Probably so, and those are bad things and we should try to abstain from those types of things, but when we preach that once you get saved Jesus died for you sins past, present and future then do you think that we are going to do anything in our lives that is going to surprise God?
The section of scripture ahead may seem like when you first read it that it is a passage that is just condoning going out and sinning all that you want because the grace of God has already covered your sins and the more that you sin the more that God’s grace will be shown. But if you continue reading to Romans 6 you will see that God says “Should we continue in sin so that grace may abound? Absolutely not! How can we who have died to sin continue to live in it?” So I don’t want you reading this devotion and thinking that our church is simply telling you that you should go out and sin, but what we are trying to teach you is that your sin does not change the fact that you are saved. We are all going to struggle with sin in our lives, even after we get saved. Yes, we die to sin when we get saved, and that means that we don’t live in sin anymore, but we are human so we are occasionally going to fall into sin. We are not immune to failure at some level once we become saved. Some of us may struggle when we get saved of shaking off those old sin habits that we have lived in for so many years, whether it be lust, greed, self-righteousness, gossip, or whatever else it may be. But this still doesn’t change the fact that when we get saved we become a child of the all mighty God that created the universe.
The amazing thing about the gospel, as one pastor put it, “is not that God loves sinners, but it is that God loves me.” Why would he say something like that? Because he knows how sinful he actually is, just like you know how sinful you actually are. I mean think about all the lustful, or greedy, selfish thoughts that go through you mind in a day, and think about how God still loves you in spite of that. And not to mention the deeds that we say are righteous that have to be forgiven. As Martin Luther said, “God doesn’t just save us for our bad deeds, but also from our damnable good deeds also.” As Isaiah says, “Our righteousness is like filthy rages”, and if that is the case then Martin Luther was right on the money because the things that we consider to be righteous usually have a hidden agenda behind them where we want to come out on top and look the best.