What is true faith? It’s simply receiving what God has already provided by His grace. Faith is the hand that takes what grace gives. Faith cannot operate outside of the unmerited favor of God. Apart from grace through faith, God’s promises to us are of no effect.
Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace. (Galatians 5:4, KJV)1
My whole life I have heard that falling from grace is falling into sin, but that’s not what the scriptures say. Falling from grace is not falling into sin. It’s falling back into law!
What does “whosoever of you are justified by the law” mean for us today? It simply means that we are trying to be made right by behaving right. So many Christians think that good behavior is what God is after, when truthfully we are missing the whole reason for the cross when we think that way. It’s cheap and cheesy to think that God sent His Son for a moral revolution. We are lowering God’s estimation of what the blood of Jesus has done. Law is lower than grace. To go back to law is to fall from grace.
When we elevate law to a place above grace, it’s as if we are saying we don’t need Jesus. However, we’ll find a very real result of that wrong thinking in our lives: Christ will be of no effect to us. If we are sick or depressed or confused or broke or can’t sleep at night, we need Jesus to be of effect! So often we toss and turn and worry and become self-focused and self-occupied when we face hardship in life. When we take our eyes off of Jesus and His endless funnel of grace, we will come to the wrong conclusions about why we are in need. We will either think God is not good or that sin in some way has hindered the promise of God.
God’s grace is greater than all our sin. Our “receiver” is malfunctioning when we take matters in our own hands and go back to performance again. The power from heaven is always flowing, we just need to turn the switch on.
(from pages 228-229 of Unveiling Jesus)
Want more from Tricia Gunn? Check out excerpts from the Unveiling Jesus 20-part series!
Unveiling Jesus, by Tricia Gunn, is a verse by verse study of the pure gospel of grace. It’s an amazing journey of love, identity, and freedom in Christ.
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1Scripture quotations from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
