God's grace. What could be more beautiful? It's by the grace of our loving and merciful God alone that we have life more abundantly and that we become free to pursue His great purposes for us. Through Jesus Christ, we now all have access to God's grace. And while God's grace is so powerful and overwhelming, it can be abused.
All across the body of Christ, there are Christians who would have to put their hands up and admit to taking liberties with God's grace, even using it as an excuse to keep sinning or justify compromises. This is often on the misguided and completely misfounded belief that because God is loving, He does not take sin personally. 'Sin' is nothing more than a general, vague term, with no specific or applicable meaning to daily life.
But the truth is that God does take your sin personally. That's why He assigned death as the only and ultimate sentence to it and that's also why He had to pay the ultimate price for us to be rid of it - the price of the blood of His own Son Jesus Christ. God takes sin seriously and asks us to take sin seriously as well. Grace abused only proves that we don't understand grace at all.
The sad part is that we can wrongly think that the remedy to licentious behaviour is to teach an extra dose of good works and law. But licentiousness plus legalism does not equate Christian living. We make this mistake because we think of licentiousness as having too much of an emphasis on grace, but the truth is that being lax with our morality and faith principles is really a state of being deprived of God's true grace.
More of God's grace brings more righteousness, not licentiousness
When people use God's grace as a license to sin, it's not that they don't have too much of it, but really because they don't have enough of it. Why? Because if someone truly came to a full encounter of the grace of God, they wouldn't only see it as being the power to pardon us from sin, but also as a power to teach us to get rid of it.
Titus 2:11-12 tells us, "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age."
Jesus also promised to us in John 14:26, "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you."
Jesus' finished work did not just erase our sins, but also gave us access to the Spirit of God that would break sinful patterns in our life.
God's grace is not a license to sin. It is the motivation, enablement and empowerment to be free from the yoke of sin, knowing how deeply offensive our sin is to God. Galatians 5:1 says, "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
