“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.”
We gaze into an eternal fog when we first believe. We know with certainty we are a new person but without understanding the mystery of being in Christ and Christ being in us.
Grace is God’s process of revealing this relationship! Faith is our response to God’s grace. God is love and His agape love grows through this relationship of grace with faith and faith with grace! Grace is a relationship!
It is an unseen truth acting in the believer’s life according to our need and God’s pur-pose. This truth is sourced in an invisible eternal existence. Our temporal perspective distorts its true meaning and existence. Grace flows out from our eternal God in agape love independent of human influence. Grace is within the intimacy of agape love leading us into a glory created within each person new in Christ Jesus. A believer in-hales grace with every breath he breathes.
In some ways the subject of grace directs us to the climax of our earthly salvation; the destiny of God’s creation of man is glorification! We were made in God’s image and we will be restored into the fullness of His glory when our body is glorified in His presence. This is what father Adam removed from us but what our second Adam, Jesus, restored … and so much more … through redemption. He bought us with a personal purpose for each of us!
The above verse reveals we reign in Life with the free gift of righteousness and an abundance of grace through Christ Jesus. This is foundational for being in Christ Jesus. As we move from being justified in Romans 5, to no condemnation in Romans 8, we find detail about a persona in Christ; a believer reigns in Life even in suffering by pro-ducing the aroma of Jesus Christ.
First, we looked at the Law of the Spirit of Life as the operating principle for our glori-ous salvation given to meager human flesh. The Law of the Spirit sanctions His image to be glorified in us. It is providing gospel structure within us and provides a pathway. It enables us to see the beauty of Christ, enabling fellowship with our Father through the Lord Jesus. But it is much more, it is a gift of love transcending imagination into unseen eternity. God’s love is shed in our heart, flooding our own awareness of Him-self. By faith we can wade into it!
Second, A miracle of second birth has occurred giving us a Spiritual Father in heaven. We are both (1) children of God as well as (2) legal “sons” participating in God’s family through Jesus. This birth from above provides us with the Spiritual senses to commune and fellowship with our faithful Lord and Savior. We are sealed by the indwelling pres-ence of the Holy Spirit who continues to work and reveal Christ in us until we are com-plete in Him.
Thirdly, The product of created life was and is the Glory of God displayed and enjoyed! We now turn to grasping amazing infinite grace because through it, God’s glory begins and continues filling into our Life. God’s glory is our missing part. We lost access to the Tree of Life, and with it, we also lost an intimate connection to God our Father. We lost our divine connection loosing also who we are intended to be!
This was not God’s choice. He is pure, just and righteous as well as loving. We intro-duced sin into His righteous, holy creation and abdicated our standing of fellowship. We were created in the image of God to reflect and enjoy God’s glory but we lost this identity through sin. While condemnation is a righteous judgment, we did lose God’s glory and the joy of being who we are intended to be! Living life short of God’s glory is our dreadful and grievous consequence.
Humanity lost God’s glory because of our sin. But in Christ we are created in the right-eousness of God, in His image. This is exactly what we lost through the first Adam. This is the gospel we most often hear but our focus seems always to be on the sin question and not on the lost glory of God’s fellowship. It is glory we fall short of and it is glory we receive through the Law of the Spirit of Life.
Before we were born again in Christ and created as “Sons of God,” we developed a personal culture rooted in a “world view” of life. In our natural circumstances, we do what it takes, to be accepted by others. Loving self is an avocation necessary to pro-tect and secure our future. We learned to defend ourselves and project our best im-age. We compete for the things most important to us and feed our wants which culti-vates our desires. We mold our own personal culture as we cultivate our desires with actual choices. We define our reality out of our personal circumstances and choices satisfying our wants and personal desires.
These things define us and become rooted in our soul. They become rooted in our heart, rooted in our mind, and rooted into the prejudices we choose to serve. When we are created new in Christ Jesus, we begin to modify these desires and choices adapting a “Christian world view.” The evangelical church community has adopted Bib-lical principles giving us a new world view, a “Christian world view.” This church culture modifies our personal culture and we begin a new journey within a body of believers. Our personal culture is still intact but modified enough to fit into our new body life commitment. This sounds like the Christians in Corinth when Paul wrote his letters of correction to them. They were babes in Christ, drinking the milk of the word.
Moving from milk to meat is what we are called to do. We are to give up our “Christian world view” and accept God’s eternal view. We are to see and know ourselves from God’s point of view. We are now both children of God and “Sons of God” but our per-sonal culture is still intact.
When we are created new our identity changes because God births us as a Spiritual Creation. We have been removed from the control of our personal culture in the flesh. We have a new identity and a new source of Life bubbling within us from Life in the Spirit of God. God’s culture of grace is now operational in our life because our Spirit is united in Christ through the Holy spirit of God. We now have access to the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit replacing our personal culture with God’s culture of grace.
This is a life-long task. Much like the disciples who had hardened hearts, we too have wills conditioned to respond to the deep schooling we have instructed our hearts to accept. We have disciplined our minds to see things a certain way. Our self-reliant characteristics define us when we are birthed new in Jesus. It usually takes years to once again be able to accept Truth in Christ like a babe who unconditionally believes in Jesus. This is why it is so difficult for the rich person who has so much to give up, not just in material goods, but giving up who he has become, giving up security in himself.
We must continually expose our personal culture to God’s Truth and make ourselves vulnerable to the righteousness God reveals in His Word. It takes time for us to begin to see ourselves from God’s own eternal point of view. His character and attributes are eternal in nature. They have no time line and He does not change. We cannot comprehend all that God is, in His eternal state, but He gives us grace upon grace so that we begin cognitively to enter into the oneness He has already provided. We will recognize His eternal nature in our own soul through our conscious understanding as He, in gentleness and love, nurtures us to be whom He has already made us to be. Paul prays this prayer for the Thessalonians:
“Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do it.”
The shape of illumining grace is the cross. A price was paid for our sin. God chose to make a sacrifice in human death releasing grace into human flesh through resurrection Life. This is our portal into God’s righteousness and Life itself.
Grace is an organic spiritual cocktail of divine attributes manifesting the power and wisdom of God. It becomes ours by drinking and washing in the water of Life bubbling up within us. This water of the Word is the essence of our new Life. It becomes our ex-perience through disciplined practice of God’s divine provisioning in the Word and our response to His word through choices.
We received not only redemption through death but the ultimate consummate gift, the resurrected living Jesus with all His divine power and wisdom. We are called to a disciplined walk in His complete, perfect Life. Yet, it is not us, but Christ in us, perform-ing His work of discipline, instructing and loving us. This is the essence of His grace. It begins with God; it grows in us by faith and becomes a complete union where we are able to participate in His divine purpose and plan. Grace is a relationship sourced in God Himself.
Grace begins in God’s own heart. Love permeates grace and gives it its fragrance. It has no dimension to be sized, cut or packaged. It is an agape love coming into our ex-perience from outside our boundaries. Agape love is producing grace itself eluding our finiteness until, by grace, we are drawn into its Light. Grace flows out of eternity itself penetrating finite understanding while containing boundless infinities. It is a quality of Life growing into us; it is a knowing surpassing our understanding but producing eter-nal confidence and faith. It begins with God growing us into a personal relationship wherein our human soul receives the vigor of divine truth and communion into His tri-une being.
For many believers, grace is just the act of becoming a “born again” person receiving the forgiveness of sin. This, of course, is true but the gospel includes God’s constant attention to our Spiritual condition and health. Grace includes everything in our life once we are in Christ, adopted into God’s family, being birthed Spiritually by God Him-self. Our ability to access God by faith is through grace. It was grace that sustained Paul in times of difficulty and weakness. Paul exhorts Timothy to be strong in grace so he could endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
Paul writing to Titus:
“For the grace of God has appeared,
bringing salvation for all people,
training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions,
and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age,
waiting for our blessed hope,
the appearing of the glory of the great God and Savior Jesus Christ,
who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and
to purify for himself a people for his own possession
who are zealous for good works.”
In these few verses Paul states the qualitative nature of grace. Grace brings salvation to all people, but to those in Christ, grace restores, confirms, strengthens, instructs and purifies. We are God’s personal possession. He disciplines us into His own image and character through His grace.
Grace is God’s provision for fellowship in Christ Jesus. God purchased grace for us!!
It cost Him the death of Jesus, the Son of Man. But it isn’t just God the Father and Je-sus the Son of God securing grace for us. God the Holy Spirit operates as the divine sovereign indwelling our Spiritual being.
Grace is given so we can begin participating in Life, God’s Life. God’s Life is a culture of grace flowing out of eternal values. God’s agape love for us exceeds our soul ca-pacity so He begins to reshape our “Christian world view” into His Eternal View. He has re-birthed us so we can understand His divine person. He created us for His own enjoyment. He is glorified in us by our participation in His Life. It is not so much about us; it is much more about Him, about His glory; it is a collaborative communion in Him by His grace.
Grace can be seen in the water and the blood. Jesus shed His blood, not for Himself, but for us so He could give us His righteousness. He destroyed death by His resurrec-tion thereby providing His Life in us by faith.
The water is the continual washing required because we are still residing in the pollu-tion of sin and satanic powers. The Holy Spirit takes the things of Christ and reveals them to us. He is dwelling in us applying God’s grace according to our need and God’s calling for us individually.
It was by both blood and water; the blood of Jesus purchased our justification and the washing of the Holy Spirit effects our sanctification.
This is what we see in Romans 8. There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus because we are in His grace. The law of the Spirit of Life is in operation because we are in His grace. We cry “Abba, Father” because we are in His grace. We suffer because we are in His grace and suffering actually leads us from one degree of glory to the next. But the careful reader of Romans 8 will also notice the word “grace” is not mentioned in the entire chapter.
Why then, do we focus on grace when considering Romans 8?
Paul has constructed an argument about the sinfulness of man’s condition in early chapters of Romans. Man is under the condemnation of the law because he is unable to keep the law. The law requires the righteousness of God and this is only available in Jesus Christ Himself. The wages for our sin is death and Jesus paid those wages for us. Because of this, we can become justified, made righteous, and enter in to God’s grace. This is what Romans 5 tells us. We are justified by faith and now we stand in God’s grace, Romans 5:1-2. Therefore, Romans 8! Romans 8 is the therefore resting on Ro-mans 5.
The whole of the divine trinity is participating in our grace culture. All of Romans 8 makes this clear. Read the whole chapter at single sittings and look how we are all participants with each member of the trinity. Grasp the gloriousness of God’s grace culture and consume as much as you can … to make room for more. There is always more!