Christ offers salvation to the lowest bidder, not the one who thinks he's qualified but the one who humbly acknowledges he isn't. Paul saw himself as the chief of sinners! We must realize that we cannot do enough to impress God or make ourselves worthy. We cannot earn, deserve, nor pay back God but must realize salvation is a grace-transaction, not a works-transaction. They say it is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and this is the best way to see it because religionists add merit to grace, works to faith, and the church or tradition to Christ. We must also realize that Scripture alone is our rule of faith and final authority or arbiter of truth, not tradition or any church leader. We must realize though that we can never be good enough, in fact, we can only realize how bad we are when we try to be good and trying to be good.
When we realize we are saved by grace through faith we realize our works do not merit salvation. We are not saved by any work, but we cannot be saved without them either for faith without works is dead and cannot save. If we have no works, our faith is suspect and we certainly are not producing fruit as Jesus said we shall be known by our fruits. James said he could show his faith through his works (cf. James 2:18). Likewise, our works validate or authenticate our faith. As the Reformers taught: "We are saved by faith alone, but not be a faith that is alone!' By definition, grace is getting what we don't deserve, but mercy is not getting what we do deserve; this means God would be perfectly just to condemn everyone to hell and save no one! If God had to save us or was obliged by our deeds, it would be grace but justice.
We are humbled when we see that even a great preacher like George Whitefield said, "There but for the grace of God go I, "after seeing a condemned man to the gallows. Paul had similar thoughts when he said, "I am what I am by the grace of God," (cf. 1 Cor. 15:10) As Paul nearly wreaked havoc on the early church Christ chose him to be a light to the Gentiles. We come to the realization that all we have to offer Christ is brokenness and strife, a contrite heart of repentance as a sacrifice.
We don't have to do anything to be saved; no pre-salvation work. God opens our hearts and kindles or quickens faith within us, even making the unwilling willing and turning hearts of stone into hearts of flesh (cf. Ezek. 11:19). We when we realize Christ is the way it all is clear and we surrender ourselves to Him in faith. That's the gist of it, exercising faith in some way: It differs for every individual; just because someone walked an aisle for instance to receive Christ doesn't mean that it's necessary or the only way. There may be prefabricated prayers of salvation and the common one, the sinners' prayer from Luke 18:13 ("God be merciful to me a sinner)") but none is perfect and certainly not the only valid one. For there can be no perfect, foolproof prayer to grant salvation for God sees the heart and reads the motives. Then salvation would be by lipservice or going through the motions: religiosity.
This is what I mean: we need to know how bad we are to be saved, and we don't know how bad we are till we try to be good or repent of our badness! In other words, we are never good enough to get saved but bad enough to need salvation! We all have a dark side, a side no one sees but God and we all have feet of clay or apparent flaws that are not visible or known by others. This means we are not basically or inherently good but bad or evil without Christ in our hearts. When we really see ourselves for who we are we realize the picture isn't pretty. We are "dead in trespasses" and "by nature children of wrath," "sold under sin." God needs to open our eyes to have faith (cf. Acts 26:18) and especially the eyes of our hearts to see Jesus (cf. Heb. 2:9) in the Bible, which testifies of Him (cf. John 5:39).
When we realize what great sinners we are, we thank God that He is a great Savior! And we are humbled by grace to say, "Why me Lord," and "a wretch like me?" But thanks to the restraining power of the Spirit, we are not as bad as we can be; we are only as bad off as we can be in respect to our ability to save ourselves and therefore need a Savior. Recognizing that God doesn't grade on a curve and has concluded all slaves of sin and spiritually dead, we realize our need for grace for there could be no other way to qualify for salvation in our own right.
In the final analysis, we must be willing to stand up for what we believe (cf. Jer. 9:3) in and that means confessing Christ as Lord or verbalizing our faith, not privatizing it. "Let the redeemed of the LORD say so," (cf. Psalm 107:2). "I believed, therefore I spoke," (cf. 2 Cor. 4:13). And if we don't stand firm in the faith we will not stand firm at all. (cf. Isaiah 7:3). NB: We have nothing to bring to Christ but the sacrifices of praise, thanksgiving, and of a contrite heart (cf. Heb. 13:15; Lev. 7:12; Psalm 51:17). Soli Deo Gloria!
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