We can never out sin god’s grace
Subtitle:On And Off The Field
I grew up in a household that was somewhat spiritually divided. My dad, being Jehovah’s Witness, believed that you had to work for salvation. It is what he calls the “preaching work”, going from door to door, handing out Watch Towers and inviting people to have Bible Study.
My mother, on the other hand, also coming from strict beliefs from a Pentecostal background, used to think that the holier you lived the better Christian you were. The less sin you committed the more saved you are. Holiness it what she called it. Holy life for salvation. Often, as one can imagine, the two would clash. My dad would say, faith without works is dead, while my mother would tell him that one could not work for salvation, it is a gift from God. We are saved to do good works not by good works. Of course, at the time I was too young to understand what was going on and what all of this was about. As I got older, my mother would try to explain faith in Jesus Christ’s finished work at the cross and how we cannot work to be saved. She explained to me that Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles (non-Jewish) which was us, wrote about grace. St Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8–9, “For 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.” What my mother was trying to help me understand was that salvation only comes through Jesus Christ, the gift of Grace (for God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son). It was His work, His doing, so we had no room to brag about any good work that we thought we may have done. We can never preach enough, do enough good deeds, or live a holy enough life to be deserving. Grace is God’s unmerited favor, meaning that is was unearned. It was something that we were not due. Charles Portis of True Grit stated that, “you must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God; you cannot earn that or deserve it.” If I earned it then it is something that belonged to me, like working for wages on a job. At the end of the week, I am expecting to get paid because I worked for it. I deserve it.
Grace, to some, as Bono stated, “defies reason and logic. It interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions.” To my dad, it made no sense that we can simply confess Jesus Christ and put our faith in Him and accept the gift of grace. It must be more than that, we must do something on our part. Grace is getting something that is not deserved. I remember when I moved to Allen, Texas. The football team has never lost a regular season game in over 5 years. I joined the team and played Junior Varsity. That particular year, I was moved from JV to Varsity toward the end of the regular season, going into the playoffs. I did not play in any of the play off games, or the Championship. However, I received a Championship ring based on the merit of others because I was part of the team. The same with salvation. I received it based on the merit of Jesus Christ. The most important thing I have learned about Grace is that it is available to everyone at any time while time is. Also, I can never out sin God’s grace.
