Understanding Grace

If you think that you can lose your salvation, then you need to understand the word “grace”. My prayer is that after you read this you will know that you are in the grace of God. 

 If you have any doubt about your salvation or if you have any misgivings about whether or not your life has been good enough to keep your salvation, you need to learn the meaning of the word “grace”. If you are saved you are saved by the grace of God. If there is any hope of having the sting of death taken away it will come out of God’s grace.  

Understanding God – God made us. (Genesis 1:26) “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 

There are reasons that God made us in his image. The first is that God made us to have dominion over all living creatures. This means that man was to rule over the living things that are on the earth. To do this, man had the power to judge. This meant that man had to have the power to choose. 

The next reason God made man in His image was so that He could love man and man could love God back. If one is going to have real love one must be free to choose to love or it will not be love. This is to say that God made man to have free will so that he could choose righteous or evil and to love or not to love. God put the man in a garden and in that garden, He also put good and evil. Then God told him what was evil and told him not to choose it. Man chose the wrong one. The choice that man made was evil. So that man became God’s enemy this meant that God could not fellowship with man. But God still loved man and wanted to have fellowship with man.   

Understanding Grace – Grace came out of God’s love for man. 

Man does not deserve any kind of favor from God. But God still loved man and still wanted to have fellowship with him, but God could not because the man was God’s enemy. God is good and man is evil. Because God is rich in mercy, God came up with a way to reconcile to man. It is called grace.

In his grace, God sent His only begotten Son into the world to die to pay the penalty for man’s sins. (2 Corinthians 5:21) “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

What is the reason that God loves us? Why did God give us his grace that we could be reconciled to Him? We need to stop looking for the reason that God should love us in ourselves for it is not there. It is in God. There is no reason in us, in mankind, that God should love us. This is the reason that the Bible uses the word “grace” when it talks about God saving us, grace is unmerited favor. We do not deserve to be saved, but God wanted to save us. 

Also in the meaning of the word grace is the idea that God likes us. I do not know why God does, but He does. If God in His grace has given us salvation, that means He loves us and it also means He likes us. Since we know that we are sinners, it is hard for us to understand that we could be liked by God because He is so righteous. We can understand how one could love someone and not like him. We have family that we love but we do not like. We really do not want to be with them. God likes us, this is the reason He saved us – so that He could be with us. 

(John 1:17) “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

In the law, death and judgment are made more sure, but in Jesus Christ, grace is made sure by faith in Him for, (Romans 5:1-2) “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”

I want you to remember that we are saved by grace. This is to say that no reason in us would cause God to save us other than God loves us and want to save us. God will not take away His salvation from us because we sin; seeing that we were sinners when He saved us. The way we have access to God’s grace is by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. If there is anything in us that will cause God to save us it is faith but faith is only the door into God’s grace.

*Devotional written by Ralph Williams, retired pastor and member of One Hope Mobile.