Becoming a Christian
What is grace?
Grace is God’s undeserved kindness. He gives forgiveness and new life freely, to people who have not earned them and never could.
A gift, not a wage
A wage is something you are owed for work you have done. A gift is something you are given because the giver is generous. The Bible says that being accepted by God is a gift from start to finish.
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast.
Mercy and grace
The two words are close but not the same. Mercy is not getting the punishment you deserve. Grace is being given good things you don’t deserve. God does both. He cancels the debt, and then he adopts the debtor into his family.
Not by works of righteousness which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy, he saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.
Free, but not cheap
Grace costs us nothing. It cost God a great deal. Forgiveness is free to us because Jesus paid for it with his life.
For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Doesn’t that mean I can do what I like?
People asked the apostle Paul the same question. If God forgives freely, why not carry on sinning?
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? May it never be! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer?
Grace does not make sin unimportant. It changes the person who receives it. Someone who has really understood what they have been forgiven does not want to go back to the things that put Jesus on the cross.
Grace for every day
Grace is not only how the Christian life begins. It is how it continues. Christians depend on God’s help every day, and he gives it most of all when they are weak. Paul, struggling with a hardship that God did not take away, was told:
He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Most gladly therefore I will rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me.
“Amazing Grace”
One of the best-known hymns in the English language was written in the 1770s by John Newton, a former slave-ship captain who became a Church of England minister in Olney, Buckinghamshire. He never got over the fact that God had forgiven someone like him. That astonishment is what grace produces.