By grace alone

Romans 11:6. I took this from my first and only Bible. It is a bit old now but I cherish it so much coz this was a gift from my sister last Christmas, two years ago. And this was the best gift to be given to me by someone. The gift that introduced me to God's wonderful plans for my life and to have an incomparable relationship with Him. 

Last Sunday, I woke up 30 minutes passed 5 o' clock in the morning. Our Sunday service at church starts at 6:30 am and my travel takes almost 1 hour for me to get there. I hurriedly took a shower and got dressed. My fingers were crossed, praying I would be able to arrive at church exactly before the sermon begins since I was assigned to operate the powerpoint presentation. I knew I was already behind the time to possibly reach the praise and worship part. So, I prayed and prayed that I would not be late for the sermon at least, though seemed to be very much not happening.

Believe and you will receive. Very true! My prayer was answered right away! I have learned my lesson and I am very thankful for a God who lets me get through. By grace alone.

Speaking of grace, the message for this week was 'We are commanded to do it God's Way'. We were already on the third week of the series, The Shadow of the Almighty: Living under God's authority. On point number one, our pastor mentioned a run down of the different concepts of salvation from various Christian religions existing. He had came up to these three: salvation by works, salvation by grace plus works and salvation by grace alone through faith.

The foundation of our salvation as a church is salvation by grace alone through faith. It was actually mentioned a lot of times in the Bible. Martin Luther often taught that salvation was based on faith alone and no amount of work (referring to good deeds) can bring you salvation. We are saved to work for God, not work to be saved.

Our pastor uttered something that caught my heart indeed. He said that many people would say, "That's it? We just have to believe and we're saved?" out of disbelief. Some would insist, "Can we not do anything or contribute just a part for our salvation?" Salvation was made easy and free by God, that it seems to be so good to be true. We do not have to labor for our salvation anymore because the difficult part was already done by Jesus Christ the day He died on the cross. That is why it's called a gift. All you need to do is to receive it. And what do we say after that? We say thank you. And saying thank you to God would be how we live our lives for Him. Since this life is all we got, every thing belongs to Him. There's nothing else we can offer except every second of our breaths, every beat of our hearts.

This is the very reason why when I think of grace, it often brings me to tears. It is so amazing, you can't help yourself but to kneel down and praise God's name.