The Daily Invitation
Every day, we have an opportunity to discover more about God and respond to his invitation to live in love and experience freedom. The Daily Invitation outlines the many ways Scripture calls us to know and follow God. By reflecting on these promises, believers are called to receive God’s gift of grace, seek him earnestly, and surrender their lives completely to him.
Grace Abounds Even More
Grace is not a payback plan, it’s a door. God’s grace can be seen as an interruption to the destructive path of sin to offer a new way of freedom. Grace is glorious not because it fights back against sin—grace is glorious because it completely disarms death and starts a celebration of freedom.
“Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The Christian life is filled with hope because of Jesus’ victory over sin and death. Freedom is a gift from God, and it is gracious and glorious. The power of the gospel can overcome the weight of sin. Instead of being burdened by the reign of death, we have the privilege of living under the rule of Jesus. His kingdom is a realm of freedom, achieved through grace.
Paul’s argument in Romans is methodical, and he concludes chapter five by bringing together the opposing forces trying to claim our soul: sin and grace.
Sin is the corruption and perversion of what God designed as good and holy. As much as we try to counteract sin’s influence, we get caught and follow the path to destruction and hopelessness.
Grace is God’s gift to his people through Jesus, and it is our only path out of bondage.
Exposing The Need For God
God’s grace can be seen as an interruption to the destructive path of sin to offer a new way of freedom, but sin must be exposed before it can be dealt with. Paul explains that God’s law was designed to draw the line between what was right and what was wrong, but paradoxically, the law that showed humanity how to be holy only exposed how unholy we were.
Paul says it “came in to increase trespass.” Why would God do something that made sin increase? It seems like the law only makes a bad situation worse, but condemnation is not the end of God’s story for his people.
The truth is that we can grasp the idea of holiness, write out every standard, even convince ourselves that we are doing a good job at being a good person, but true holiness will always be out of reach. God gives the law to show us how good he is and how guilty we are of rejecting him. The point of the law was not to prescribe behavior but to compel repentance, and God’s response to repentance is grace.
We repent because we recognize that we are broken and separated from God. The pattern of Adam is repeated in every generation as all people live in sin and disobey God. Despite the good intentions of the most devout followers of God, only Jesus could break the curse and start the revolution of grace.
Grace Is Better
Grace is not a neutralization for sin that gets the record cleared. It is not a payback plan, it’s a door. Grace is the narrow passage through the condemnation of the law into a life of freedom. And it is only accomplished through Jesus, the gift of grace.
Maybe you expect the Christian life to be a “get what you pay for” situation, but God is too abundant in life to ration grace.
Jesus offered his very self, broken and poured out for the world's sins. The cost was unmistakably higher than any of us could imagine, but Jesus paid it, and in his victory, he offers grace to all who believe in him. The only way you can be holy is if God redeems you, and the only way you can be redeemed is through Jesus.
When you get into God’s family, you discover that his power and holiness abound even more than the compounding nature of sin and death, because God didn’t just cancel sin; he brought life! Maybe you expect the Christian life to be a “get what you pay for” situation, but God is too abundant in life to ration grace.
Respond: Only Through Jesus
Have you seen the increasingly destructive nature of sin at work in the world, your community, and your life? God’s grace is the only hope. Hope starts when we stop trying to grapple with sin and death alone and we come to God in humility, saying, “God, I need you. You are my only hope.”
Suddenly, oppression breaks at the revelation of Jesus. Grace is glorious, not because it fights back against sin, but because it completely disarms death and starts a celebration of freedom.
Recipients of grace don’t wave receipts of self-righteousness to gain admission to God’s kingdom. They party in the throne room with a ticket of grace that says, “Jesus delivered me!”
Reflect & Respond
Are you trying to be holy and live a good life through your own strength? Are you ready to drop the act and receive the fullness of God’s grace in Jesus?
Ask God to soften your heart, give you a hunger for your presence, and make you excited again about freedom.
God Was Kind To You
Christian faith can only be approached from a place of utter humility. It proclaims that the only thing we bring to the table is a dead heart but what we get in return is an invitation to everlasting life. That’s because God, in his love, was kind to you.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
Desperately Separated
The Christian life can easily move from a place of spiritual desperation to casual maintenance. Routine engagement with church, Christian content, and devotions like this one can leave the impression that Christianity only exists to benefit the life of the Christian. After all, the Bible is filled with life-giving insights and inspiring stories. It’s fairly easy to extract meaningful metaphors and tips from the Bible stories. But the Bible is more than a story about moral idealism.
That frame of mind embraces a message that, yes, sometimes humans mess up, but the truths packed into the Bible are capable of helping steer Christians in the right direction. If we start seeing the purpose of the Bible and spiritual disciplines as only adding to our lives, we’ve missed the starting point of the gospel.
The message of the Bible is that people didn’t just fall back from freedom, they fell away completely. The starting place for engaging with God is a place of desperate separation. Maybe you sing Phil Whickam’s “Living Hope” at your church. It starts with this line:
How great the chasm that lay between us
How high the mountain I could not climb
The song lays out a theology of hopeless desperation before God by confessing that even if we wanted to get back to God (which we often in our sin don’t even want), the distance to cross is too great. This is not exactly an uplifting start for a song talking about a God that is supposed to be hope made alive to people. But hope shines brightest in the darkness.
Entering Into The Gospel Story
Humanity’s standing before God is bleak. We enter into the story of the gospel as offenders. The ones who, despite being made in God’s image, live like we want God to die. To live in sin is to pronounce that God’s truth is detestable to us. That’s the natural inclination of the flesh—it wages war on the truth of God’s word.
But when God enters the gospel story, he does so by his own will in grace and mercy. That’s why Paul can say that Jesus has been kind to us. He offers us something that we don’t deserve.
Switching Perspectives
There is a time to reflect on Bible stories for moral insight, but that approach to the gospel story is an incomplete picture of what God is actually saying to us. If we are only looking for a nugget of truth to apply to our lives, we will probably miss it completely.
Approaching Christianity as a consumer of spiritual goods puts us in the seat of authority. We make the decisions, plan our spiritual growth, and get all the credit for each milestone. Have you ever met someone who is blatantly self-righteous? Anyone with all the receipts for their spiritual growth is probably growing into something other than Christ.
Christian faith can only be approached from a place of utter humility. It proclaims that the only thing we bring to the table is a dead heart but what we get in return is an invitation to everlasting life.
That’s because God, in his love, was kind to you.
Reflect
Do you see yourself in charge of your spiritual journey? Where are you holding tightly to your faith and missing out on God’s grace?
Take a moment to meditate on the kindness of God. Open your Bible to Ephesians 2 and respond to a God that reaches out to you.
Pray
Jesus, thank you for showing me your kindness by reaching out to me when I had nothing to bring to you but a dead heart. Help me see your gospel story as an invitation of grace. I confess that it’s only because of your love and mercy that I get to respond to your truth. So form in me what I can’t form in myself. Work in me what I can’t accomplish in my own strength. Create in me a new heart.
Approaching Grace
Faith can start with an explosion of energy and passion, or it can take the path of slow heart transformation. Working through the complexities of trusting in God is no simple task—much less persisting in faith throughout all the blessings and hardships of life. We can take our sins and sorrows directly to the Savior. God has not only purchased our freedom. He has invited us to the seat of reconciliation and peace. If faith for you feels like a rush of excitement, run to the throne room. If your heart is slowly turning to the Shepherd, look again to the seat of grace.
“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
The Way Back to Grace
Faith can start with an explosion of energy and passion, or it can take the path of slow heart transformation. Working through the complexities of trusting in God is no simple task—much less persisting in faith throughout all the blessings and hardships of life.
Blessings bring opportunities for self-dependence. That is the kind of subtle erosion of trust where God slowly fades into the background, and material hopes move to the forefront. It’s a simple pattern of replacement where, piece by piece, the places we used to rely on God (or even look to him, for that matter) get filled up with anything else that captivates our attention.
Hardships bring opportunities to reject God. After all, it’s hard to think that God is good when surrounded by pain and injustice. The promises of God’s faithfulness can seem dim and distant from the lowest of lows.
Both places can lead back to vivid recognition of God’s grace.
Whether sinking from freedom into hardship or drifting from contentment to self-sufficiency, the way back to grace is through Jesus, the High Priest.
Jesus, The High Priest
All priests exist to minister to God’s people and to intercede on their behalf, but Jesus does it best. His ministry as High Priest surpasses every other human priest, even the greatest ones recorded in the Bible.
Jesus is like the priests throughout the Bible, but he is far greater.
His priestly line is not from earthly families. Because he is God’s son, his right to the role of high priest is based on his nature.
His sacrifice is not temporary. Jesus doesn’t offer sacrifices of animals and offerings from the Old Covenant. He offers himself as the perfect offering for sin and ushers in the New Covenant.
His ministry is never to be passed on to another. Jesus is raised from the dead, lives forever, and ministers before the throne of God even now.
It might be tempting to see Jesus in comparison to the biblical description of Israel’s worship, but it’s better to see the worship described in the Bible as an imitation or shadow of the ministry of Jesus.
This is great news for us today because it means in Jesus we are privileged to bypass any barrier to God. We get to access God through God.
Application: The Posture of Grace
We wander from God toward the pride of self-sufficiency or the grief of hardship when we lose sight of the throne of grace. That throne is the source of all mercy, forgiveness, healing, and hope. We can abide in God’s love at his throne becasue his ministry liberates us from the weight of sin.
We can take our sins and sorrows directly to the Savior. God has not only purchased our freedom. He has invited us to the seat of reconciliation and peace. If faith for you feels like a rush of excitement, don’t wait to run to the throne room. If your heart is slowly turning to the Shepherd, look again to the seat of grace.
How long has it been since you approached the throne of grace?
Grace is not meant to be a one-time transaction, so the fuel of encountering God needs to be sustained through constant engagement with his word and his presence. God knows that we need daily grace to overcome sin and live in the knowledge of God, so even the most hesitant believers are invited to experience grace again by approaching the throne of mercy. Confidence in the approach begins with a timid trust until with assurance we realize we belong to the God of grace.
Reflect
Where in your life are you allowing blessings or hardships to keep you from the throne of grace? Ask God to search your heart and open your eyes.
What does it look like to live close to the throne of grace? Reflect on how you can respond to Jesus as your High Priest.
Pray
Jesus, teach me how to respond to you as the High Priest. I trust you to lead me into freedom through your grace. I give you my burdens, and I lay down anything that keeps me proud. I know that I am safe in your presence and confident before your throne—not because of what I deserve, but becasue of what you have done. I open my heart for you to work in me by your Spirit.