For this reason it is by faith that it may be by grace, with the result that the promise may be certain to all the descendants—not only to those who are under the law, but also to those who have the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all (Rom. 4:16). (emphasis mine) A beautiful illustration of the amazing aspect of God’s grace is seen in the experience of Isaiah the prophet. As a religious Jew, Isaiah would undoubtedly have been considered a moral and good man. But in Isaiah 6, the prophet recorded a vision he was given in which he saw the Lord high and exalted. The immediate result of this holy scene was the impact on Isaiah’s view of himself and of his nation. He wrote, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” (Isa. 6:5, NASB) Having seen God’s awesome holiness, he could see nothing but his own sinfulness and impossible state—at least from the standpoint of his own worthiness to have fellowship with God. I realized that as a journalist, I have to be respectful and cordial, even when I’m interviewing someone with whom I profoundly disagree. I approach them not as someone to convert to my way of thinking—that’s not going to happen. Rather, my goal is to get them to explain their point of view in a way that my readers can comprehend and judge for themselves. I’ve been trying to put that into practice even with friends and neighbors. My goal is not to win them over, or defeat their arguments, but rather to listen carefully so that I can articulate their position fairly.

What’s So Amazing About Grace - Genius What’s So Amazing About Grace - Genius

Even though many may have good deeds and claim a relationship with Christ, unless they have turned from trusting in their own works to faith in Christ alone, they are under the condemnation of the Law as Law breakers. All people break God’s moral law and fall short of God’s righteousness unless they turn to His provision of righteousness by grace through faith in Christ, as Paul shows us in Romans 3. Doing the will of the Father (vs. 21) starts with personal trust in Jesus as our one and only means of salvation. Philip Yancey: Jesus dealt with this issue in the Sermon on the Mount. It doesn’t take much grace to love your family or your neighbors, he implied (well, depends on the family and the neighbors!), but we’re called to love the unlovely, even to love our enemies. When the disciples recoiled at such a notion, Jesus gave the reason: God causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. That’s who God is. And the only way the world will believe in that God is if we demonstrate the same pattern of persistent, overpowering love. In What’s So Amazing About Grace? I retell that story, setting it in Traverse City, Michigan with a young woman featured as the prodigal. I’ve tried writing parables, and it’s hard work! Yet Jesus spun off parable after parable, seemingly off-the-cuff, and they speak poignantly to us some two thousand years later. Let us suppose that you have two corpses. Is one more dead than another? Does one need a bigger miracle to be restored to life? Fact is, the good person who lives next to you and the criminal you read about in the newspaper are essentially in the same predicament—both need the life that only God can give. 26As the updated What’s So Amazing About Grace? video study is being released, how do you hope people are impacted by the material? Let me be clear. When you come to Christ, you do not come to give, you come to receive. You do not come to try your best, you come to trust. You do not come just to be saved, but to be rescued. You do not come to be made better (although that does happen), you come to be made alive! But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing, 4:4 among whom the god of this age has blinded the minds of those who do not believe so they would not see the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor. 4:3-4). The gospel message is the story of the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and the present session of the Lord Jesus Christ at God’s right hand. As the personification of God’s grace, it is little wonder that in the book of Acts, this message about the Lord Jesus Christ is called “the gospel of grace” and “a message of grace” (see Acts 14:3; 20:24; 32). Grace Is the Means of Salvation

Grace: An Interview with The Shock and Scandal of God’s Grace: An Interview with

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter into the kingdom of heaven, only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. 7:22 On that day, many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons and do many powerful deeds?” 7:23 Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you. Go away from me, lawbreakers!” (Matt. 7:21-22).

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But most often, those who have never gone to the depths of sin like Newton think they do not need as much of the grace of God as did Newton or some notorious criminal. If we fail to see ourselves as wretched sinners, grace will not be so amazing and awesome. As Lutzer so appropriately put it regarding people who do not see their need of grace, In a number of places, the New Testament speaks about the believer’s freedom or liberty in Christ, but what exactly does this mean biblically speaking for the Christian? Our ideas about liberty may be skewed by our society. For instance, the first definition given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition is that liberty is “The condition of being free from restriction or control .” 33 The first definition in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines liberty “as the quality or state of being free,” but then gives the following as the first sub-definition of liberty, “the power to do as one pleases.” 34 But dictionaries do not provide us with an accurate definition of Christian liberty according to the New Testament. Also, stories reflect raw life. When someone asked Jesus a direct question, they probably expected a direct answer. They rarely got one. Jesus understood that life involves complexity and mystery. For example, a person asked him, Who is my neighbor? Jesus responded with the compelling story of the Good Samaritan. You can’t legalistically define the appropriate objects of love and compassion—no, we become the neighboring ones in the way we behave. His convicting story makes that point. In so many words, legalism says, “I do this or I don’t do that, and therefore I am pleasing God.” Or “If only I could do this or not do that, I would be pleasing to God.” Or perhaps, “These things that I’m doing or not doing are the things I perform to win God’s favor.” They aren’t spelled out in Scripture, you understand. They’ve been passed down or they have been dictated to the legalist and have become an obsession to him or her. Legalism is rigid, grim, exacting, and law like in nature. Pride, which is at the heart of legalism, works in sync with other motivating factors. Like guilt. And fear. And shame. It leads to an emphasis on what should not be, and what one should not do. It flourishes in a drab context of negativism. 37 License Having given clear proof from Scripture of man’s basic sinfulness, the next step is to demonstrate to whom this applies. The question is simply, is anyone exempt? Is the moral man or the religious man? Absolutely not and verses 19-20 plainly indicts all the world as accountable or liable for judgment.