1 Corinthians 1:4-5 I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge.
Merit is the opposition to grace. Human merit is an
endeavor to pay our sin debt through personal strength. God does not require us
to pay him for our salvation because grace is perpetual and unalterable from
God’s point of view. We will never acquire any personal debt in God’s sight
because Jesus paid it all, and all to him we owe.
If we were required to earn our forgiveness, grace would be
of no value, and in God’s sight, human attempts to earn our salvation is a
fool’s errand (Romans 4:4). If there were the slightest possibility that we
could pay for our sins, our salvation would be to our credit, not Christ Jesus.
If we win some contest through our effort, we rightly deserve the due; winning
was through our hard work and effort. However, grace comes to us because of the
work of another. The gospel of Christ Jesus is good news because it depends on
God, and He always gets the glory.
When God places us in Christ, grace is ours in perpetuity.
God’s grace is and always will be limitless, infinite, and undeserved. It is a
promise that we have by faith. There is not an avenue available to us in which
we can pay for our sins. Only one being can and did pay our sinful debt: Christ
Jesus. We must separate limitless guilt from our desire to attempt to pay for
our sins. We must receive Christ’s payment for sin to function appropriately in
the domain of the grace of God. Our admitted guilt does not constitute a
conviction of sin; that only occurs when we accept that we are guilty and ask
for His forgiveness. That is the impartial guilt of accepting what separates us
from daily fellowship with God. All God expects us to do is confess our sins
under the authority of Christ’s death on the Cross, and then we can walk freely
with God.
It is essential to keep our guilt in line by accepting the
ultimate payment for guilt by Jesus on the Cross of Calvary. Violations of sin
we perpetrate as Christians were paid for by Jesus at his crucifixion. If we
harbor any doubts that Jesus fully paid our sin debt on the Hill of Calvary, we
live with disbelief that God truly loves us. We will always live as spiritual
paupers if we fail to comprehend the spiritual riches of God in our lives. Many
wealthy folks refuse to live up to the standard that their wealth affords them.
This can be true in the lives of a child of God as well; God expects that we
spend the spiritual wealth He has bestowed upon us. There is no way that we
will ever exhaust the spiritual resources He has endowed upon the lives of
people who have surrendered to Christ Jesus. We generate a great hindrance to
our checking account when we do not stop to assess the balance. We cannot spend
spiritual truth until we grasp it.
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