Grace and Justification

The People of God Set Priorities
Bearing One Another's Burdens
A Community Forgives

Romans 5:15-21 The Message

^15-17 Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do! There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, sovereign life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?
^18-19 Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.
^20-21 All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

 
For Reflection

"You can't legislate morality," goes the old saying.  And yet, in the human circumstance we labor to do so with only limited success. 

Doing righteousness is an unlimited spiritual act.  Forming and enforcing law is limited by our secular capacity.  We are beguiled by the power of temporal acts in a material world, fooled by assuming the occasional success is representative of perfection, ignoring the inherent imperfection of self-determination.  The answers to life's most important  questions, unknown in the secular common place physical world, resides only in the spiritual places of uncommon understanding.

 

Pray

for the wisdom to follow God's  law of love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.