What is The Grace of God? 4 Things The Grace of God Is Not
Understanding the grace of God is no longer as simple as most would hope. Many wrong mindsets and false doctrines have come out to distort the image of grace affecting our thoughts and actions.
There's nothing complicated about grace. The problem is that sin has come to complicate it- just as it complicates practically everything. As a result, we have people- even Christians- walking through life with a wrong understanding of the grace of God.
It's important that we understand fully the nature of God's grace as upon it rests all we do and all we are. Grace is not just a Christian option. It's the only way to walk by faith in Christ and His finished work. To understand grace, we must learn to understand what it is not. Here are four misconceptions about grace that we must break today.
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Grace is not a license to sin
One of the common ways people get grace wrong is to use it as a crutch to keep sinning. Romans 6:1 tells us, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?" Grace is however not only a free pass around the consequence of sin, but an unlimited motivating power to teach our hearts to progressively abandon sin issues we face all together (As Titus 2:11-12 tells us.)
God's grace is not limited
Once in a while, the devil will come to try and deceive you into thinking that we have run out of God's grace- that we've sinned too many times, asked for refuge too often or depend to God a little too much. He wants you to think God's grace has a limit, but it does not.
Romans 8:38-39 says, "For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Grace is not compensation
Grace gives us power to change and a right to receive. And the good news is that all of these come freely! It's not because grace is of little value to God. In fact, it's so high in value that someone had to pay the full price. That someone was Jesus. We no longer have to treat grace as compensation for our good works. They come when we simply receive Christ's finished work and believe that what He did was enough.
Grace shouldn't be a comfort zone
Being in the middle of God's grace gives us solace, rest and refuge, but it also empowers us to go on a mission. As much as God's grace gives rest to the burdened and weary (Matthew 11:28), it also gives us power to become witnesses (Acts 1:8). Grace, therefore is not a reason to slack of and not participate but to be empowered to do great things for others through God.
