Spiritual Growth BasicsSample

The Essence of Grace

One reason the grace of God is so amazing is that it comes up no matter where we turn to talk about the Christian life. Let me just give you the essence of grace and how it relates to spiritual growth.

Grace is all that God is free to do for you based on the work of Jesus Christ on your behalf. It is God’s inexhaustible supply of goodness whereby He does for you what you could never do for yourself. This is the ABCs of the faith, but we need to review it because the truth of grace seems to get lost so often when it comes to how we grow in Christ. That may be true because growth suggests an effort on our part, while grace is a gift that can only be received and enjoyed, not earned. But the Bible says we are saved by grace, and we grow by grace. Or as Paul told the Colossians, “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him” (Col. 2:6).

If I were the devil and I didn’t want Christians to grow, I would keep them from drawing on God’s grace and drive them back to the principle of law to keep them in bondage. Romans 6–8 contain Paul’s classic contrast between the law of Moses and grace, describing in painful detail our complete inability to obey God’s commands in our own power.

Now Paul made it very clear that the problem is not with God’s law, which is “holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12). The fault is with our sinful, fallen flesh. What happened under the Mosaic law is that when God’s perfect standard, with its requirement of perfect obedience, was applied to sinful and weak human beings, something had to give—and God was not about to lower or adjust His standard to accommodate our sinfulness. And since the law carried with it a penalty for failure to obey, we fell under the sentence of death.

Paul also wrote, “The Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Rom. 7:14). The reason this is important is that the law had no power to help anyone obey its commands. Law tells you what to do, but it doesn’t hold out a hand to help you. The law reveals God’s demands, which never change. But we need someone to give us the power to obey God’s commands.

Living under "law" is like living with a perfect person who takes joy in telling you everything you are doing wrong, but never lifts a finger to help you get it right. Under these conditions, you will inevitably live an unhappy, defeated, and empty life.

We can see why grace is required for spiritual growth. Spiritually dead people can’t grow, but all that the law of Moses could produce, was death: because it was all command and penalty- without the enablement to obey. That’s why Peter said if we are going to grow, it has to be by grace. And not just grace as a theological concept, but as it is related to Christ.