Romans 3:23-24 (NLT) For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins
Let’s be honest here, we don’t deserve even one little part of what God gives us, including life itself, but His grace overlooks moral and spiritual blemish to consider us worth His favor.
It’s a concept that boggles the mind, but yet we, as mere mortals, could never be expected to understand the concept of grace in its entirety. After all, we don’t know a love like God’s; it’s literally incomprehensible. It’s exactly this inability to grasp the vastness of love that leads to misconceptions of grace and how it relates to our salvation.
While largely unintended, it’s common to equate God’s approval with an unblemished lifestyle, free of any sin at all – otherwise known as “merited grace.” Then one day in your youth comes your first conscious acknowledgement of personal failure, your first self-realized sin. The devil assaults your mind with condemnation to the point you think you might as well quit church now since you’ll never be ahead. Sadly, those problems still persist as adults. We have churches full of veteran Christians who, if asked, would still probably question their true probability of entering Heaven. For so long the church taught the concept of good deeds being what merited us Heaven; after all, being sinful relegated us to hell so why wouldn’t Heaven be the opposite? So as you can imagine, the collective amount of confusion revolving around salvation that stands predominant in the psyche of our congregation is staggering.
The problem is that grace is so simple and sin is so complex. The human mind seems drawn to complexity. This nature causes us to focus on the “What’s wrong?” rather than the overwhelmingly simple concept of grace. Ask a Christian any number of sin-related passages in the Bible and you’ll get dozens of answers from many scriptures. Yet ask those same people to quote passages about grace and your tally of scriptures will be embarrassingly lopsided to the former. It’s our nature. We know those scriptures because we’re defensive. We want to know what not to do in relation to our spiritual walk, and more importantly, Heaven.
So what does hope have to do with grace? Hope is not based in confidence. Hope is not factual. Hope is simply hope. It’s anticipating a positive outcome, not being sure, but being optimistic. Many times, hope is very effective and gives an enhanced quality of life. However, having hope doesn’t guarantee or assure of an outcome. For a person who hopes in regards to their salvation and eternity, hope is not enough. Hope, while fairly confident, leaves enough doubt that there isn’t total and resolute confidence. Give that kind of mentality to a person who already struggles with the concept of merited grace and you have all the makings of someone who unconfidently believes in their salvation. This person will ultimately wind up a worried and bound Christian or leave the church altogether citing their inability to resolve their spiritual and moral shortcomings.
Therein lies the reason that grace must destroy hope. Grace is confident. Grace abolishes hope and any doubt or dissatisfied reasoning that remains within hope. One could even make the argument that where there’s hope, grace is disregarded. While hope is being confident in an outcome, grace understands the outcome was already decided and hope is not needed. The shred of doubt that hope offers is the exact opposite of the resolute mentality that grace places in our mind. The devil will take even the most miniscule amount of doubt and magnify it to be larger than the confidence that hope was intended to offer. Grace replaces this misunderstanding. Grace states that no matter what we do we cannot do enough to enter Heaven. Grace eliminates the idea of the hope of salvation and causes us to realize we don’t need hope, we need grace. We need to accept grace in our lives to be at peace with our salvation. It is neither faith nor hope that people who are confident in their salvation possess; those people have accepted grace and understand its application in their lives. As Pastor said, peace is given by the confidence of grace, its understanding of its application to salvation in our lives, and the knowledge that when we have grace, we don’t have to hope anymore. Grace reminds us again and again that things between He and us were forever fixed when we were born again of water and Spirit. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and that everything we need, in Christ for salvation we already possess. – Phillip Newby
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