For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV
We’re saved by grace. But how?
Here’s what I thought in the past: Our ticket to heaven was canceled because we sinned. But Jesus died for our sins. So we could accept the free gift of eternal life from Him, and our ticket to heaven would be restored.
But then I started reading and rereading the Bible, and I ran into verse after verse that made me uncomfortable. Faith without works is dead. (James 2) If we live the wrong way, we won’t see heaven. (Galatians 5) Not everyone who calls Jesus “Lord” gets into heaven. (Matthew 7) And so on.
It took me a long time to puzzle this out, but it finally makes sense to me now.
Grace fixes things. It fixes everything. It’s like the repair technician from heaven that fixes everything that has gone wrong in our lives. It fixes our identity. It fixes the damage we’ve sustained in a broken world. It fixes our tendency to sin. It fixes our inability to live up to heaven’s standards. It fixes everything.
And if grace isn’t fixing things in our lives, it may be time to ask if we have the real thing.
I take a deep dive into this in my new video: How grace fixes everything
Enjoy!
Dwight
