Over the last couple of weeks the study group I'm part of has been looking at the theme of grace. Particularly the totally undeserved Grace that God pours out on us through the sacrifice of His Son on the Cross.

In the last study something really stood out to me about what God's Grace really means for those who believe and follow Him. We are free to identify as God's heirs and children and therefore are HOLY in his eyes, like Christ. 

How is this possible? Well, if we look at one of the books of the Old Testament, the prophet Ezekiel tells us that God promises to give us a new heart, one that will be able to obey his teachings.

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws."  Ezekiel 36 vs. 26-27

The Holy Spirit, God's gift that inhabits those who believe in His Son Jesus and choose to repent of their sin and turn to follow Him, is the one who fulfils the outworking of the Grace of God in our lives. Our blind and ignorant hearts are removed and replaced with hearts that are able to feel more deeply the pain and corruption of our sin and the conviction of the Spirit in order that we might be redeemed, to be what God intended us to be. 

The true gift of Grace then, is that we can declare ourselves to be Holy in the sight of God, because that is how God sees us. As the author of Hebrews writes:

"And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all [...] For by one sacrifice he has made perfect for ever those who are being made holy." Hebrews 10 vs 10 & 14

This seems to be a paradoxical statement, how can we have been made holy (vs. 10) if we are still being made holy (vs. 14)? The answer is not straightforward, but perhaps is one of the fundamental truths of Christianity. We are both holy and being made holy. I.e. our holiness is a work in progress, but has most definitely been completed on the Cross.

I have a theory on how we might understand this more easily. From our point of view time progresses in a linear direction, from A to B, the past into the present into the future. However, if we are to understand that God is outside of the universe, then He must be outside of Time as well. In that case A does not necessarily lead to B, A and B may be concurrently true at the same point in time, i.e. a paradox. In this case, God sees us as Holy because of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross, but at the same time is able to see our depravity, our sin. The incredibleness of this is that for us we often choose to see ourselves as sinners instead of Saints, but what we forget is that God actively chooses to see us as Saints, as the author of Hebrews puts it:

"Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more." Hebrews 10 vs. 17

God does not forget our sin, it still causes Him pain when we sin, but he chooses to not remember it. If we are in His Son, when He looks at us He sees the great work and sacrifice of Jesus at the Cross in place of our sin.

As a result of this Gift of Holiness, we are called to obey God's laws. Taking our focus on the New Testament, we see that we are called to follow Jesus and obey his teachings. As Jesus Himself said: 

"Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me." John 14 vs. 21

Before our Salvation at the hands of Jesus we were all under the law. None of us were able to declare ourselves righteous because the law condemned us for our sin. 

However, as Paul himself wrote to the Church in Rome:

"What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.' But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead." Romans 7 vs. 7-8

What Paul is saying here is that sin took advantage of God's law, giving us the desire to do the evil things that God clearly expressed us not to do. Paul argues that if he had not known what coveting was, he could not have been guilty of it, but that the Law, by making these crimes known to us, allows us to have knowledge of our guilt and wrong-doing. Sin corrupts everything that God intended for Good. 

However, now that we see that we are no longer under the law because we are not the ones who have made ourselves righteous, instead Christ has elevated us to that position, sin can no longer corrupt us in the same way. Yes, we will still sin because our human nature is sinful, but we can see that this is the case, because we see the Law as it was designed to be, not a stronghold, but actually as a good thing.

In the Garden of Eden, the Serpent tests Eve over whether God said that she couldn't eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Adam and Eve's downfall occurs because they doubt God's command, and instead seek to be in control. What Jesus did by dying on the Cross, was to fulfil the Law, to make it WORK not to condemn us, but to free us. As the law is not sinful, and we are no longer sinful in the eyes of God, we can now choose to obey the Law knowing that it does not hold the power of life and death over us, because Christ has already paid the punishment for our sin, and granted us eternal salvation. 

The True Freedom that Grace brings is that we have the choice to obey God, because even if when get things wrong, the final presiding of our lives has been made. We have been made holy by Christ's Sacrifice on the Cross, and the fact that we know that we cannot do anything more or less to earn this salvation, truly makes us free to live for God, because it becomes a joy and not a burden to serve Him with our everything. 

Thanks for reading,