Core Beliefs: Grace

If you walk into any Christian church in the world and ask someone, “What do Christians believe?” there is a good chance you will get all kinds of different answers. I want to distill all those different things down to the irreducible core beliefs. Other things can be discussed and debated, but what is the essence of what it means to be a Christian?

In 1st Corinthians 15:3 Paul says, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures…” This first importance teaching is what I want to ensure remains at the core of everything we do. I believe it breaks down into three parts:

• Jesus
• Grace
• Bible

We looked at Jesus first and I would encourage you to read that before you jump into grace. These three pillars could also be described like the three legs of a stool. If you take anything away, you topple over into error. To talk about grace without first knowing who Jesus is from the Word of God and not the culture, and what he has done is very much putting the cart before the horse. We don’t believe in some general idea of grace by which God just forgives us and forgets all about his standard of holiness. Sometimes, we think of grace as synonymous with elegance, or a blessing we say before supper. But the biblical idea of grace is God’s unearned and undeserved favor towards sinners.

Romans 3:23-26 puts all of this together, “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” 

There are a lot of big words there, but in essence this is saying that all people have sinned and God can’t just let that slide. So instead of rightly punishing me for my sin, he sacrificed Jesus on my behalf. That in and of itself would be amazing. But I imagine that we would listen waiting to hear what this amazing offer is going to cost us. The outrageous claim that Christians make, which sets them apart from every other religion, is that God is willing to freely give this gift to us as sinners without any payment or expectation of return. Let’s look deeper as we see that we don’t do anything to earn grace and explore how it empowers us for a life of service.

Salvation is received by grace through faith

Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

We all need salvation because we are sinking in the quicksand of sin and the more we work on our own to try to get out, the deeper we sink. Jesus doesn’t just come along and hand us a branch and allow us to pull ourselves out. Instead, we have died in our mess and he comes along and scoops us out breathes new life into us and sets us on firm footing. We do nothing at all to earn this salvation and it’s received through faith, because unlike actually being pulled out of quicksand, we are dealing with spiritual realities that we can’t see.

The life of a Christian is lived by grace through faith. It is grace that allowed us to hear the gospel in the first place. It is grace that allowed our blind dead hearts to be stirred by the truth of his sacrificial death on our behalf. It is grace that awoke our hearts and allowed us to respond with faith. No one comes to Jesus unless the father draws him. When God awakens our dead hearts in grace then the natural response of this new born heart is faith. Then the rest of the Christian life and the struggle with sin is lived by grace through faith.

Good works are empowered by grace

Inevitably, after explaining this free grace for salvation, people will ask, “So does that mean that I just get to keep on sinning?” Of course not. Paul responded to this question in Romans 6, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” We are fundamentally changed at salvation. Galatians 2:20, calls it being “Crucified with Christ.” It is no longer our lives that we live, but instead we live by faith in the son of God who loves us and gave himself for us.

Does that mean that we have to live perfect lives or else risk losing our salvation? Do you imagine that the God who sacrificed so much for your salvation would then just leave you to your own devices to keep that salvation? If that is the case then we are all doomed. If we did nothing to merit our salvation in the first place then we can do nothing to hold onto our salvation.

Paul, in the very next chapter of Romans, wrestles with this saying, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

For the rest of our lives as Christians we will never get beyond his saving grace. Every day we lay down our lives and take up our cross to follow him. And every day we fail in countless ways and we rest in his grace knowing that our works are not the way we get salvation or keep salvation. 2 Corinthians 9:8 says, “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” Thank God for his inexpressible gift of grace! Praise God that we get to live in this abundant grace!