Galatians 6:18

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

3^rd September 2011

Paul's wrote a very strong letter to the Galatians. Serious errors need to be addressed seriously and there is a time for straight talking. But at the end of the letter, the last thing he writes shows his love for his brothers and sisters in Christ. He says:

Galatians 6v18
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.

"Grace" means "gift" or "favour". We talk about "the grace of God" because God loves to give. The very essence of Paul's letter to the Galatians is his urgent insistence that they remember that our relationship with God is not something we can earn; it's a gift from God. We have been saved by grace (Ephesians 2v8). When we speak of God's grace to us, we remember that His favour is undeserved, and this should both fill us with gratitude to God and remind us not to try to earn His love.

This principle is as important for us as it was for them. We're not Christians because we behaved well enough to earn some sort of pass mark from God. We know He doesn't accept us because we're good people. We know this because we're not good people. Instead, Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for our sin - our failure to behave well - to give us salvation as a free gift. This is the heart of the Gospel and it's why people like us can know God and be filled with His Holy Spirit.

God doesn't love us because we deserve it. He loves us because that's what He's like - He's the God of love, the God of grace.

In his excellent book "What's so Amazing about Grace", Phillip Yancy writes that he tried to define grace and the best he could do was to say that "grace means there's nothing we can do to make God love us more, and there's nothing we can do to make Him love us less". If we could really believe that, it would change our lives.

Dear brother or sister in Christ, can you live in the good of this fact: God loves you even when you get it wrong? Do you know that you are totally secure in Gods love? Can you say with Paul that:

Romans 8v38-39
... I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

May you know the riches of God's grace. May you experience His love every day. May you be assured of His forgiveness when you need it. And may you never fall into the trap of trying to earn His love. It's a free gift.