Ephesins 2:8 - Grace?

 

Ephesians 2:8

NKJV

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God. 

NLT

God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. 

 

In 1829, a Pennsylvania man named George Wilson was sentenced by the United States Court to be hanged to death for robbery and murder. President Andrew Jackson pardoned him, but the prisoner refused the pardon. Wilson insisted that he was not pardoned unless he accepted it. That was a point of law never raised before, and President Jackson called on the Supreme Court to decide. Chief Justice John Marshall gave the following decision. “A pardon is a paper, the value of which depends upon its acceptance by the person implicated. If it is refused, it is no pardon. George Wilson must be hanged.” And he was.

 

As I read this morning’s devo, the above short story was given. It got me to thinking about how I treat the grace given to me. I read in a commentary that the more familiar we are with certain words, the more we have an attitude of a shoulder shrug and “ho-hum”.  Words like grace and saved and faith; we hear them so often we can lose sight of the depth and width of them. Grace is a word that Christians throw around like it’s a frisbee. I’m guilty of the attitude of “I got it, I know what it means”. But do I really get it? Man, if I really understood the idea of grace…would I do some of the things I do? We could discuss grace for pages and pages, but I want to just stick with a little piece of it.

 

George Wilson refused his pardon, don’t know why…but he did. On the surface, I think everyone loves the idea of grace.  Somebody else paying for my wrong doing?  Heck yeah…sign me up. That’s what Christ did for us. Our sin separated us from God; our sin made us stained. God is holy and only things that are holy can be near God.  There was atonement, or payment, that needed to be made to cover our sins.  A The payment for our sins was death, pure and simple. Death. Something had to die to atone for our actions. In the old testament, there were sacrifices that covered their sins. Blood for blood. But they were only covered, each person still had to make atonement daily, weekly, yearly…

God chose a way for us to come completely back to him with a perfect payment for our sins. He sent His Son to not just cover our sins, but to take then away completely; for those that accepted Him as Savior.

 

I did, I accepted Him as my Savior. But for a long time, He wasn’t my Lord. There’s a difference. The difference is what we do with our idea of what grace is. If grace is “somebody else paying for my sins”, which is what Christ did for us, then we must understand deeper what this is. To me, grace is this definition and then some. If I love Jesus and am thankful for what He did for me…am I honoring that sacrifice? Do my actions show that I truly understand the sacrifice that was made for me? To be honest, sometimes they don’t. Someone once told me “when you know better, then you do better”. I want to serve my Lord better; I want to serve other people better; I want my faithfulness to be honoring to God.

 

What will you do with your grace?

 

Faithful today,

cej