“Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. Luke 6:35
I know today’s devotion sounds like an oxymoron, but it really isn’t when we realize most of us don’t understand grace. Grace is something we long for from others and God, yet it often is difficult to give. It can’t be bought or earned, yet we try to do both to attain it. It can’t be created or manufactured, but we often try our very best to do so. The truth is grace is given as a gift from God, because God is gracious. It is His kindness, mercy and favor towards a person for no particular reason, only because He is just and good.
Maybe you have heard the acronym for grace, God’s Riches or Redemption At Christ’s Expense. That sounds good and is true, but a very superficial explanation or something that is actually very deep. So over the next week we’re going to look at what these riches are and how when coupled with Holy Spirit they become supernatural in the Believer.
Today we’re going to look at what happens to someone who accepts Jesus and receives all He provided for us through His death and resurrection, which is Saving Grace, Ephesians 2:8 tells us it is by grace we are saved through believing (faith) it is nothing we have done in or through ourselves, it is a gift from God that needs to be received. And when we receive it, Holy Spirit comes it live within us. Our spirits are renewed and are empowered to become like Jesus.
When we accept Saving Grace, we also experience Justifying Grace (Rom 3:23-24), which simply means, our debt caused by sin has been paid in full by Jesus. We have been reconciled back to God and we are once again restored as His child, and are now righteous through Jesus and what He alone did for us, nothing we can do for ourselves.
Now the grace that we have received has become empowered so that we can show that grace to others and lead them also to come into a personal relationship with Jesus, who reconciles us back to God. We are now empowered to begin to be transformed into the image of Jesus. We now begin to see ourselves differently, because we are no longer who people or society says we are, but who God says we are. I encourage the congregation often, to say even before they get out of bed, I am the righteousness of God through Christ Jesus, and there is nothing I will experience today that Him and I can’t face together. Use your search engine whatever it is and put in Who I Am in Christ. Print it out and remind yourself every day who you are now that you have truly experienced amazing grace.
Tomorrow we will be seeing how grace teaches us to live in the power of Holy Spirit.
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