We are all in the same situation. We all need God’s grace.
How Righteous Are We?
We are all in the same situation. We all need God’s grace.
I went over to listen to my neighbor’s peach tree last week.
Actually, I went over because he told me I could pick some of the peaches. But while I was there, I listened carefully.
The branches were full of ripening peaches, but I didn’t hear the tree straining with effort to produce the fruit. I didn’t ask, but I’m pretty certain the tree had not read a guidebook on the “Twenty Steps for Producing a Peach on Your Limbs.”
It appears that the peach tree was producing peaches because it was… well, because it was a peach tree. It was producing fruit naturally.
Galatians 5 tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. So, if I have the Spirit in my life, He is producing His fruit? Maybe I should throw away that list of steps that tells me how I am to exhibit those qualities. Maybe I should depend on the Spirit to produce His fruit. But if I were to do that, who would deserve the glory?
I recently had a man ask me if I it was true that I believed Christians were no longer under the Old Covenant. I could have gone into an explanation of the Old versus the New, but I took a different approach this time.
“Are you a full-blooded Jew?” I asked. “Are both of your parents Jewish and are all your grandparents Jewish?” “No,” he replied.
“Then you don’t have a choice. The Old Covenant was never extended to you. It’s the New or it’s none at all.”
I did then explain the truths and benefits of the New Covenant. But the simplicity of understanding that the Old never was available to us is illuminating.
The religious message tells us that we are commanded to love other people.
The standard Christian message says that God loves us, so we should now be motivated to love other people.
The grace message is that God loves us and has placed His Holy Spirit in our lives; He now loves other people through us.