God's grace

 
What happens if we try to “earn” our salvation?




   To say “we need to earn it” takes away from God’s grace, making it not grace. This grace is unmerited favor- He saved us because we could not save ourselves Eph. 2:8 "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God". For us to work to obtain our salvation is to lessen the work of Christ for us. He died on the cross because we could not save ourselves by following the Law, Romans 5:20“The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more…” This grace is not a license to sin even though people say, “Does that mean we can sin because we are not under the law but under grace?” That is said to be wrong in Romans 6:15-23 and Romans 7:4-13. The works we do are a sign of our salvation, not a means to it. “Jesus paid it all,” not us. The law showed us that we could not keep it(our salvation could not be met), but that we needed the grace we have. Without God’s grace we deserve Hell; because of our sin. So, we truly have amazing grace and it is well with our souls.



 

Offense

 

What happens if we let ourselves get offended? Being offended at people would do us no good; letting ourselves get bitter would make us start to hate people. If someone offends us we must remember Romans 12:21 "Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good." In our lifetimes we are probably going to get offended, but that does not mean we stay offended. Some people may try to justify being offended by saying, "this person is deceiving people so they will not hear the truth!" Just because we want to help the people being deceived does not mean we should be offended at the person deceiving, but rather try to help them as well. If they do not accept the help we still do not need to be offended at them, but we should just move on (John 12:47-48). Not being offended at them does not mean that we agree with what they are doing or that we would not care about the listeners (Galatians 5:12), it just means we are not angry at them. We must remember to hate the problem (sin) and not the victim (the person). We must remember never to be offended at God for any reason. (Luke 7:23, "Blessed is he who does not take offense at Me.") We also do not need to be offended for His sake. Hebrews 10:30, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." So we know now not to be offended at anyone, because we have no reason to be.

 

 

Thankfulness

What happens if we forget thankfulness?

 

      The first thing we should already know is that we would be disobeying God’s command for us as Christians, 1 Thessalonians 5:18 “in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” In Romans 1:21 the people did not honor God or give thanks and it said “their foolish heart was darkened.” We also must be sure not to pray like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11 who thanked God that he was not like the tax collector, because that would be condemnatory, which is not ours to do. Forgetting thankfulness is not a small issue that does not matter, but a huge one; because thankfulness shows that we had a need (it does not always need to be a great need) that was met and it shows that we appreciate it. If we were to not be thankful, we would become very selfish people, who few people would like, because we would be saying that we don’t need anyone’s help. That is also saying we don’t need God’s help which is deadly error, Titus 2:11, God’s gift of salvation will save us, not our own strength. Christ dying for our sins deserves our greatest thankfulness and we should truly “in everything give thanks”. This is why we should remember to be thankful.

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      I am going to make every post based on the question, "what happens if".