Lesson 86: Obedience from Gratitude
There is nothing we can do ourselves to warrant or feel secure in our salvation. It is all about God’s grace. “God’s grace is the love He showed us in Jesus while we were yet sinners and His enemies, and by which we are saved apart from any religious acts or moral achievements on our own”. “God, who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for our salvation, will not fail to give us every good thing, to finish the work begun on the Cross, which is our sanctification”. “If God did this for us while we were unbelievers and His enemies, how much more will He do for us after we have received Christ and are saved, and His friends”. And so how are we to live while on this earth? In obedience to God’s commands; not out of fear that He is going to consign us to hell, but out of gratitude for all He has done in taking the initiative to draw us to Himself. “We need to practice our salvation in an on-going process of persistence, humble service, spiritual growth, and maturation, all in active reverence and singleness of purpose in response to God’s grace”. Although “faith without works is dead”, and “we are justified by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone”, and “in addition to our thinking and believing God also demands our actions” we need to guard against making our salvation about our works and righteousness and rely totally on the total sufficiency of Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross to save us. Out of this should flow expressions of love and gratitude toward God as we realize all He has done for us in creating and redeeming us. We do this by focusing on loving God and loving and serving others willingly without feeling we need to out of obligation. We will struggle with keeping God’s commands as long as we live, and so long as we are not sinning defiantly or presuming on God’s grace, but feeling convicted when we have sinned and repenting and trying to please God, we are still loving God. And so because of the total sufficiency of Christ’s death and resurrection and our faith in Him, we are positionally dead to sin and free to live lives of righteous service to God, doing the best we can and resting secure in our salvation through complete trust in Christ’s work. We are helped to do the best we can by constantly reminding ourselves of all that Jesus sacrificed to pay the price for our salvation. Knowing our eternity is secure with Christ in heaven should give us an undergirding peace despite this life’s circumstances. As part of our willing service to God and others, should also come the desire to share with others all God has done for us by telling others when the opportunity is there, and by the example we set in our own lives and in our service to other Christians as well as those outside the faith.