Grace Doesn't Mean 'Do Whatever You Want'!
Justification — being declared righteous before God — is possible only by grace through faith. You can heap all your good deeds upon one another and climb them to heaven, but if you aren't clothed in Christ's righteousness, God will toss your self-righteous self right out of his presence.
Our sinfulness runs too deep for any of our deeds to be purely righteous (Isaiah 64:6), and the guilt we bear for our trespasses is beyond our ability to absolve. The blood of Jesus is the only hope any of us has. Seeing all that Christ is for us and trusting in him to save us is the only means by which we can be declared blameless. Christians glory in being justified as a gift by the grace of God alone — not their own works or morality (Ephesians 2:8-9).
However, in every generation there have been ignorant and unstable people that take the message of God's grace through Christ and, as Peter wrote, "twist it to their own destruction." They, as Jude once wrote, "pervert the grace of God into sensuality." Leave it to the ever-descriptive Paul to put it bluntly: "For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power."
