Examples of Faith: IV - Grace ...

Friday, May 6, 2016. The key point of Christian faith is that humans are taken into heaven by grace through faith in Christ Jesus. Grace means that God does the main step - we cannot do it. Grace means that we cannot enter without him making us able to enter. Faith is the step to trust him, and to let him take us in.

Grace …

As humans we are equipped with many skills. It is part of our life to do things, to manufacture, to be creative, to play, to generate, to invent, to care. Within these skills, we tend to judge people by their skills, by their ability, by their success. We tend to base our relationship to some people on our judgment of their status. To some extent, it is reasonable to take status into account. But the value of people is far beyond all this!

God puts grace into the center of our relationship. Grace means that we cannot bring something to gain it. It means that we receive it, just because of love. It is given to us without anything we could give or bring to get it.

1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. (Romans 5, 1-6)

Trusting with full Risk …

Jesus has died, while we were still ungodly. Paul puts this forward in his passage about the justification by grace through faith. Think about it: God took quite some risk. He did something, without a clear perspective whether people would allow him to be saved. It is still a free step of a human to accept God into his life, to accept the salvation in Christ Jesus. You could claim God knows everything, even the future. But the trust he had, that his love and forgiveness would come to its goal, is a major and huge risk taken! It is the risk of freedom.

We are invited to his grace. This means that we are invited to accept it and to live from it. My yes to Jesus is the acceptance of his grace. It is not only one event, where I put my life into his hands. It is the beginning of a path. It is a new life, which I start with coming into his presence and trusting him, to hold me and keep me.

But it is also an invitation to live in grace. We are invited to practice grace. We are invited to let his love and grace fill our heart, and to act in grace towards other people, to everyone around us. This is a risk as well - people keep their freedom and it is a central goal of love and grace to give people freedom! Let us give it a try, again and again, and learn to live in his spirit of grace and truth! (RWEP) ... more texts