Salvation By Grace Alone and The Judgement Of Our Lives According To Our Works
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Salvation by Grace Alone
Now I take it as something that you would confess like I do with all your heart that we are sinners. We are comprehensively, profoundly, disgustingly sinners. And our only hope of salvation and reconciliation with God, of peace with God, of eternal life, is that God should extend to us as a completely free gift His favour, His peace, and His righteousness: which we do not deserve and could never deserve.
We know that the Bible's message from beginning to end is that only God in the Lord Jesus Christ could sweep away guilt as mountainous as ours, could deliver us from bondage to evil as protracted and powerful as ours and into which we had so willingly punched ourselves.
Over and over again the bible lays bare the character of salvation as an act combining an infinite mercy, with infinite power, because nothing less could raise to holiness and heaven people as thoroughly in need of salvation and as thoroughly unwilling of salvation as we are. That's why we are repeatedly treated in Holy Scripture to the salvation of murderers, of rapists, of thieves, of idolators, of invincible egotists because they are pictures and representations of all of us. We are all of those things. To some degree or another, we are all of those things all of the time! And to a holy God who looks upon the heart, and sees what we are in our attitudes, and sees what we would do if only we were put in the right situation and under the right pressure; you realize that we are sinners through and through!
And yet God has loved us anyway, He has sent His Son to pay the penalty for our sins on our behalf, He has sent His Holy Spirit into our hearts to overcome our otherwise invincible hatred of Him and indifference to Him and to the truth of Jesus Christ and of salvation. It is true just like the stanza says in the hymn 'Amazing Grace' that "It was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved".
Those of us who are Calvinists have seen that with a crystal clarity: we contribute nothing (absolutely nothing!) to our salvation except the sin from which we must be redeemed. And that sin (your sin and my sin) is really way beyond our power to calculate or to measure. We see only the tiniest portion of our sinfulness and of our guilt before God.
Page 1 ⇦ Previous | Next ⇨ Page 3
Salvation by Grace Alone
Now I take it as something that you would confess like I do with all your heart that we are sinners. We are comprehensively, profoundly, disgustingly sinners. And our only hope of salvation and reconciliation with God, of peace with God, of eternal life, is that God should extend to us as a completely free gift His favour, His peace, and His righteousness: which we do not deserve and could never deserve.
We know that the Bible's message from beginning to end is that only God in the Lord Jesus Christ could sweep away guilt as mountainous as ours, could deliver us from bondage to evil as protracted and powerful as ours and into which we had so willingly punched ourselves.
Over and over again the bible lays bare the character of salvation as an act combining an infinite mercy, with infinite power, because nothing less could raise to holiness and heaven people as thoroughly in need of salvation and as thoroughly unwilling of salvation as we are. That's why we are repeatedly treated in Holy Scripture to the salvation of murderers, of rapists, of thieves, of idolators, of invincible egotists because they are pictures and representations of all of us. We are all of those things. To some degree or another, we are all of those things all of the time! And to a holy God who looks upon the heart, and sees what we are in our attitudes, and sees what we would do if only we were put in the right situation and under the right pressure; you realize that we are sinners through and through!
And yet God has loved us anyway, He has sent His Son to pay the penalty for our sins on our behalf, He has sent His Holy Spirit into our hearts to overcome our otherwise invincible hatred of Him and indifference to Him and to the truth of Jesus Christ and of salvation. It is true just like the stanza says in the hymn 'Amazing Grace' that "It was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved".
Those of us who are Calvinists have seen that with a crystal clarity: we contribute nothing (absolutely nothing!) to our salvation except the sin from which we must be redeemed. And that sin (your sin and my sin) is really way beyond our power to calculate or to measure. We see only the tiniest portion of our sinfulness and of our guilt before God.
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