Amazing Grace

We heard a sermon today about grace and why we need it. The pastor used verses about our condition without Christ to bluntly state that we were dead in our sin, dead — as in no life at all. Dead people, walking around, looking as if alive, but in the reality of Your eternal perspective, no one is alive apart from the life that You offer to us by grace through faith.

Tonight’s devotional reading says the same thing, but in a way that requires some thinking.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jeremiah 31:31–33)

It seems to me that You are speaking here about the covenant of law which calls for total obedience. However, after You took Your people out of slavery in Egypt and promised them their own land, they refused to go into the land when they got there. But that was not their only act of disobedience. They resisted You and Your law and Your leaders for many years.

The reason for this was covered in the sermon. Sin is not about acts of disobedience in the lives of those who wandered in the wilderness long ago, or the “oops” times in our lives either. Sin happens because we are sinners by nature.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:1–3)

No human being, other than Jesus Christ, has ever kept Your Law or perfectly obeyed You. It is impossible because we are sinners by nature, not just by our actions. I sin because I am a sinner, much like a duck swims because it is a duck, or a tulip blooms because it is a flower. Sin is inherit to being human, it is my nature.

That is why I needed a new nature. Salvation isn’t about trying harder, or about doing more good than bad. It is about changing me from what I was, dead in sin, to what I am now, alive in Christ. It is about You putting Your law in my heart and becoming my God. It is about You making me Your child.

And the only reason You did such a thing was because You are a God of grace. Wrath says I should stay dead. Mercy and grace, given because Christ died for my sin. And this is was my sin, not my sins. He died for who I was, not only for what I’ve done.

Because of Jesus, You now call this once dead person Your own. Such amazing grace.