UNDERSTANDING GRACE; BENEFITTING FROM GRACE.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest anyone should boast.”
*Grace is not earned or achieved by any means humanly possible. Grace is a gift from God. Grace is commonly defined as the unmerited favour of God to humanity. You don’t buy it; you don’t sweat or work for it.
*For the Christian, Grace is sufficient and everything; and without it we can do nothing on our own. Grace brought us righteousness, salvation, healing, protection, prosperity and many more.
*However, and in all of these, we are warned not to boast of this unearned and unmerited favour of God. Rather, we are told in 1Corinthians 1:31 that “. . . He who glories, let him glory in the Lord.”
*If we are to boast about anything at all, it should be about being in the Lord, not the grace of God which we neither worked for nor merited.
*A good Christian is not expected to glory or boast about his or her achievements, let alone unmerited and unearned gift of God, called Grace.
*Even though St Paul laboured most, he said in 1Corinthians 15:10 — “. . . but I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.”
*To understand and benefit from the Grace of God, a Christian should put confidence in the Grace of God and not human abilities.
*How can one fall from Grace, you may want to ask? Galatians 5:4 says that you fall from Grace when you try to work hard to be justified by the law (read).
