Is Grace Really A License To Sin?
A lot of church leaders today are reluctant to preach grace as they are afraid if they say to people all their sins are forgiven and they are guaranteed a place in heaven just by accepting Christ as their saviour, people will use this message of grace as a license to sin.
To an outsider who hasn’t had the complete revelation of grace, it does seem like a license to sin when you say you are saved even if you screw up.
To Clearly Understand Grace, Let Us Consider This Parenting Analogy:
Studies show that children who receive unconditional love from their parents, grow into confident and well-rounded adults.
When do you think your child will feel safer and tend to trust you more?
When you hold back your love saying,
“score 90% and only then will I believe you are worthy of my affection”
or
when you allow them the freedom to be vulnerable and confide in you when they mess up saying,
” It’s okay if you screwed up, you know I will always love you. Let’s learn from this and see how things can be fixed.”
Holding back your love and constant criticism can be the most psychologically damaging thing you can do to your kid.
Merit-based parenting makes your child live with a constant fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough to meet expectations, and losing out on love often ruins them as adults.
Friend, God is our loving father. He doesn’t think like us humans. We need to quit imagining Him as a perpetually angry judge, disappointed by our sins, always waiting to punish us.
God has thrown away all the report cards and only has grace i.e, His unmerited love to offer.
His Grace is not just forgiveness when we sin. His grace is the empowering gift to not sin. Grace is power along with pardon.
Born Again as a New Creation
The minute we believe that Jesus took all our sins on Himself and ended its power over us on the cross, our sinful spirit dies and we are resurrected in Jesus with a brand new sinless spirit. We are born again as a new creation.
Our spirit changes the instant we accept Christ as our saviour. The things of the spirit can’t always be felt in the physical realm, but the change has already taken place within us.
Now, after being reborn we could still choose to sin because we are human, just like Jesus could still choose to sin because He was a human. But did He sin? No. Why not? Because He knew sin wasn’t in His nature. He was sinless. Sinning made no sense to Him.
Similarly, now that we know we’re sinless in spirit, sinning makes no sense to us either. The Spirit of Jesus lives in us. (1 Corinthians 6:19)
Therefore under grace, every time we sin we are filled with guilt and unease because sinning isn’t natural to us anymore. Sin doesn’t feel good anymore.
Experiencing True Grace
True Grace doesn’t minimize sin. No sin that crucified Christ can be small.
Sinlessness is an automatic, spontaneous outcome of grace.
A real understanding of grace leads us to know that sin was so repulsive to God that He had to become man and suffer the most painful death to triumph over it. Grace makes us see the seriousness of sin by looking at the sacrifice it demanded.
Grace is proof of God’s immeasurable love for us. So unconditional, that he willingly took our death penalty upon Himself, despite knowing how rotten we are and that we might never love Him back.
There’d be no point in Christ’s death if we could be perfectly good by our efforts. It’s not the healthy folks who need a doctor.
Christ said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance”
Luke 5:31-32
As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one;
Romans 3:10
Jesus said he’s come for the sinners, not the righteous. At the same time, the scriptures also say no one is righteous. So was Jesus contradicting the scriptures? No. Jesus was sarcastically saying, “If you think you’re good enough to earn your salvation, then you don’t see your weaknesses. Thus you won’t see any need for me.” Jesus can only save people who confront the fact that they are sinners, in need of a saviour.
When we know we are deeply loved despite all our flaws, we don’t need to hide from God and be ashamed anymore. We can boldly stand before God and knowing we are loved, bring our sins to light, asking Him to help us in the areas we fall short.
Only grace can give us the power over sin, offering not only forgiveness but also a gradual renewal of character by partnering with God.
Still Unconvinced?
Friends, people without grace are sinning anyway, so why not show them their divine identity in Christ and then let His Spirit guide them through?
Do you only trust Jesus for His saving blood but not His Spirit to lead you?
Don’t you believe His Spirit to counsel you against bad choices even when you at times, ignore Him?
Do you have more faith in the lifeless tablets of stone than in Christ’s living spirit to transform you?
As for me, all my life I have miserably struggled to keep laws and resolutions, only to meet with failure and disappointment. I now choose to be dead to these burdensome laws and reign in Christ, by trusting His indwelling Spirit to guide me in every good endeavor.
