Romans 6
“God saved you by His grace when you believed.” That’s from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verse 8. “Believed what?” you might ask. Well, believed that Jesus was sent into the world fully man and fully God. Believed that He lived in perfect obedience to the Father every day of His life, teaching the Good News of forgiveness and eternal life that would come to all those who would accept that He, Jesus, was the real deal. The Savior. The Messiah. He lived to die so that in that final hour He could take unto Himself the punishment for every crummy thing we would ever do in our deliberate disobedience to God.
We are saved by Jesus’ grace, a grace that spared each of us in advance from the eternal death that our sin would have otherwise led to. When you come to believe that, you and Jesus are solid. You’re saved and nothing can alter that. You can live with the understanding that what waits for you on the other side of this life is something far greater, far better. But grace can also be a dicey thing for the Christian to accept and put to work in their life properly.
And that’s what I want to help us to navigate through this week. Because, by its nature the grace of Jesus Christ sees to it that we don’t face the punishment we deserve, many of us read that as an invite of sorts to go out in the world and sin it up. Why? Because, well, grace! Thanks to Jesus, I’m not going to get the punishment I deserve for doing the things I shouldn’t and that’s a high risk inaccuracy to be living under. In his amazing letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul asks this rhetorical question. “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of His wonderful grace?”
Paul then provides an immediate and direct, “Ah, that would be no.”
Grace is not a fire extinguisher used to put out life’s sin fires. The grace of Jesus Christ, granted to us from the cross is meant to be transformational. Grace is meant to change the way we view the dark things of the world. Jesus’ grace is meant to give us eyes to see the darkness for what it is and then reject it as a place we want nothing to do with. The other thing grace does is remind us that even though we are saved, we mess up. And when we mess up, the presence of the Holy Spirit living within us makes a way for us to confess our sin, ask Jesus to help us turn away from sin and then this magnificent gift of grace assures us that we are His and that sin cannot be our eternal downfall.
Grace in other words doesn’t give us a license to sin. Jesus doesn’t do handsprings every time we go out and deliberately transgress and then look skyward and say, “Sorry about that!” Jesus absorbed the burden of our individual lifetime’s worth of sin so that our focus in life can be to live like Him. We want to live like a people who look saved, not like a people looking to be in desperate need of rescue.
Grace is the thing that makes the sinner a new creation. Grace is the foundation of your testimony and most of all, it is the purest demonstration of Jesus’ love for you. Because of that, we need to be sure that grace is not being abused.
Grace abused points to a dangerous assumption that Jesus “owes” me redemption. No, grace is a precious gift that’s only available to those who recognize in the deepest recesses of their hearts that Jesus is the way, truth and life and that none of us can come to the Father without the grace that’s afforded to us by His precious blood. The good news attaching itself to that simple truth is this. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who you’ve been with, or even how long you’ve spent denying Jesus all together. In the moment you choose to surrender your heart to Him, grace is yours. Mercy is yours. Forgiveness is yours. Heaven is yours.
I close this week with this wonderful truth shared with us by Paul, Romans 6:13-14.
“Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So, use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God. Sin is no longer your master, for you no longer live under the requirements of the law. Instead, you live under the freedom of God’s grace.”
Amen.