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The Good News (Part 3): God's grace and our sinning.

God is gracious, but that's not why his grace is available to you. It's available because God is righteous, just, and compassionate. He is righteous because He cannot and will not tolerate sin. He's just because He's promised His wrath on all sins and sinners. He is compassionate because He's sacrificed His Son to satisfy His righteousness and justness. That's why His grace is available. 

You will never, ever deserve His compassionate grace, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," (Rom. 3:23). You will never, ever  do anything to deserve it because all of us who receive it "are justified freely by his grace," (Rom. 3:24a) You will never, ever love Him enough to deserve it, but He loved you more than enough to give it, proving "His own love for us in that while we were still sinners," in that, "Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8)

God is actually glorified by the greatness of the sin He forgives, Paul writing that "where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more" (Rom. 5:20b). The greater the sin, the greater God's forgiveness of that sin is shown to be: His grace, mercy, and kindness multiplied greater than the greatest sin.

Since every believer is justified only by God's grace and will never be justified by their works, goodness, or righteousness, why should we worry about sin? We know God will forgive it. We know He's actually glorified the more He forgives sin, so "Should we continue in sin so that grace may multiply?" (Rom. 6:1)

Well, what believer would honestly believe that? Since the cost of God's grace covering our sin was God's Son, surely we could never sin again. Right?

If we love Him and have His grace, we will never sin again, never sin thinking He will forgive us, never be caught up in a sin, right?

Wrong. We will not keep the law perfectly until the resurrection. We will sin. We will confess that sin and receive His forgiveness. We will repeatedly confess our sin and be "cleansed of all unrighteousness" (1 Jn. 1:9) until we see Him face to face. We know that, but that is not an excuse for sin or permission to continue in sin. How, then, does the believer deal with their life that is still not where it needs to be? 

Aside from abiding in Christ daily in His word and in prayer, there are three specific things we should do to decrease our sinning, to apply God's great grace in a way that causes us to grow more like Him rather than less like Him.

First, reckon yourself dead to sin. That means making the judgment that you are dead to sin. Sin is not dead to you. It's still very alive in the world, and temptation is a very real thing since you are still in the flesh, but you can and must judge that you are dead to sin. Sin no longer rules you, so when it tells you it does, tell it it doesn't because "You were buried with him by baptism into death" (Rom. 6:3). When you believed, you were buried with Christ, who died for your sin to set you free from sin's power over you. 

Second, preach three things to yourself daily:

1. Preach to yourself that you are dead to sin in Christ.

2. Preach that you no longer have to let sin reign because Christ has set you free from the reign of sin, from its power, which is death.

3. Preach to yourself that you are no longer a slave of sin but a slave of Christ.

Being enslaved to sin is death. Being enslaved to Christ is life. Bob Dylan got it right when he sang, "You gotta serve somebody." 

Third, humble yourself in prayer daily. Don't just pray. Pray recognizing that you are saved only by grace and you survive and attain victory over sin only by grace. God has already given you the prayer.

"Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." (Mt. 6:9-13)

Reckon yourself dead to sin in Christ. Remind yourself at each temptation that you are free from the reign of sin and now a slave of Christ and His righteousness. Pray first and pray often, humbling yourself before your gracious King and humbly asking for His deliverance from every temptation and every evil. 

(Part 3 of 3)

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