Habit 4: Enjoy a Grace-Based Identity SPREAD HUMILITY AND GRACE
The world teaches us to achieve our way to “salvation” and to build a name
for ourselves. God teaches us that we are dead and guilty in our sinful rebellion against him, that “sinner” is the name we have built for ourselves. God reveals that we can only “receive” our way to salvation. Only God’s gift of grace (undeserved love) expressed supremely through the substitutionary life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus can give us the new life and secure identity we desire. The gospel melts pride and forms a happy humility that’s contagiously freeing to non-believers. The good news of the gospel is not just the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A-Z of the Christian life: We are saved, and we grow, by receiving and enjoying grace—we are new creations in Christ who are eternally secure by grace alone, have nothing to prove, and are no better than anyone else.
MEMORIZE
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. - Romans 3:23-25
“Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect to ever meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.” J.I. Packer
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