Receiving salvation, forgiveness and the Holy Spirit is all by the grace of God, his undeserved favor.
[Romans 3:23-25] All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.
[Ephesians 2:8-10] For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
You don’t have to do religious stuff to earn God’s favor. You don’t have to first reform your life for God to accept you. Come to him as you are and receive his grace in Jesus.
But please understand one thing, and this is something many Christians refuse to understand: once you receive his grace, you are forever obligated to him. He expects you to love and obey him with a grateful heart, trying to please him in all things.
The apostle Paul, who had experienced God’s transforming grace, said:
[2 Corinthians 5:9-10] We make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
If we receive the grace of God, our lives must change.
[Titus 2:11-14] The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
Now take a few seconds to reflect. Do you have a desire to please Jesus? Have you renounced ungodliness and worldly passions? If you haven’t, you are not born again, even if you call yourself a Christian and go to church.
If there has been no change in your attitude and behavior after you believed in Jesus, you haven’t truly repented. You are still a rebel at heart and an enemy of God, a religious hypocrite and a pretender.
Once we accept God’s grace, we must live a life of faith and obedience. God’s grace is not a license to sin. The sacrifice of Jesus does not cover you if you keep on sinning. Please read this warning and take some time to meditate on it:
[Hebrews 10:26-31] If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the know-ledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? … It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
These days there is a lot of deception and misunderstanding regarding God’s grace. Many Christians believe they are saved by grace and that they are right with God, when their lives clearly show they are not. One of the reasons is that repentance and faith are often misrepresented in many Christian circles. Many Christians lower the bar consciously or unconsciously because their main goal is bringing people into their church rather than making them true disciples as Jesus commanded.
In the next two sections I want to correct some misunderstandings and show what repentance and faith mean.