Devotional Guide
For the week of December 28, 2003
THE GRACE OF GOD
How grace is free
To Read: John 7-9
To Know:
A pastor was given money to help the needy. It was a timely gift. A family
in town was desperate. The preacher picked up the phone and called the home.
No one answered. He dropped by, but no one answered his knock. Days later he
met the wife on the street. "I've been phoning and dropping by since
Monday," he said. "Oh," replied the woman, "I thought you were a collection
agency."
The grace of God is unsuspected. The religious systems of men prove it is
so. Every humanly devised faith is an effort to "pay the rent." Good works
are the coinage of false religion. Fallen mankind worships to pay a debt.
The gospel is free grace. Someone made of the word grace this acrostic: G
God's, R riches, A at, C Christ's, E expense. The ungodly have nothing of
value to God. Even the good works of sinners are filthy rags. Good works
cannot come from an evil heart. A bad tree cannot bear good fruit. (See
Matt.7: 18) The gospel is a call from the God who justifies the ungodly. In
the kingdom of God, the coinage is faith and worship is praise.
To Do:
Gospel means good news. The gospel is the cross, and the cross is the story
of the judicial murder of an innocent man by means of torture. The guilt
involved in the cross was ours, not the one who was crucified. Here is
something truly new, and perfectly good. On the cross, a righteous man
receives the penalty rightly due his enemies. The cross is an act of
stupendous grace.
This new year many will turn over a new leaf. It will be in vain. In vain,
because they will seek to be new, as the same old people, in the same old
way. They will rely on themselves. The gospel is the only truly new thing on
earth. Would you be new? Do this. Go to a lonely place and say to Jesus
Christ, "nothing in my hand I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling." When we
have no hope left in life except the grace of God, we have all we will ever
need.
12293$-123196
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