Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
We insist that salvation is 100 percent the work of Christ, and we can do nothing to help save ourselves. But some say that this will encourage people to be lazy spiritually and expect to be carried to heaven "on a bed of roses." People will conclude that obedience to God's Ten Commandments isn't important. But let's read what the Bible says, clearly.
"By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast" (Eph. 2:8, 9). The King James Version says, "all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ," but the New English Bible renders it, "From first to last this has been the work of God" (2 Cor. 5:18). Several times in Romans 5 Paul says that what Christ accomplished as our Savior was a "gift," and the obvious intent is that the gift is total.
Now, does this encourage a "do-nothing" attitude? The answer is a resounding YES if we don't understand the dimensions of the love (agape) that led Jesus to His cross. And that is the reason so many millions of Christians are lukewarm in their devotion to Him, willing to continue in transgression of the Ten Commandments. The apostasy that Daniel, Revelation, Jesus, and Paul warn us against is a falling away from the idea of love (agape; Rev. 2:4).
Paul prays for us, "that [the Father] would grant you [to be] ... rooted and grounded in agape, ... able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the agape of Christ which passes knowledge" (Eph. 3:14-19). When selfish human hearts (like ours) can begin to be stretched to "comprehend" that kind of love that went all the way to hell to find us, that died our second death, that "poured out His soul unto death" (Isa. 53:12), our ugly human pride is laid in the dust. Or at least begins to be. It's just a common sense response.
Morbid? Depressing? No, the opposite. We begin to "glory … in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world [with its glamour and self-admiration] has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal. 6:14). At last we are released from our ugly selfishness, and begin to realize that even more than a hundred years of meticulous conformity to legalism is "counted as rubbish [garbage]," "my own righteousness, which is from the law" (Phil. 3:7-9).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: January 7, 2003.
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