Failure and Mercy
Your mistakes don’t disqualify you from God’s love or His plan. Remember, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Your mistakes don’t disqualify you from God’s love or His plan. Remember, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Rarely will one of God’s heroes show up in the Scriptures and have no failure throughout his or her life. ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
If salvation was based on works we’d never know when our good works outweighed our bad works. And we’d never know when we were good enough. We’re saved by grace, and there’s nothing we can do to earn God’s favour. That’s why it’s a gift.
From a pluralist’s standpoint, the exclusivity of Jesus as the only way of salvation is intolerant. It assumes the existence of absolute truth, that it may be known, and it delegitimizes all competing religious claims.
Erosion is a slow and silent process and no one is immune from it. If you don’t stop yourself in a downward spiral, then last week’s wrong choice doesn’t seem so bad this week. And on and on.
Traditions are nothing new. In fact, it’s because they’re not new they hold any value whatsoever.
The word says “there ain’t no free lunch,” but God says “but to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.”
While much of the time our odd traditions don’t cause conflict, sometimes they do collide—especially when these traditions involve family or holidays. It’s in these times I’m learning we must fuse our traditions.
What we received from our ancestors, they received from their ancestors all the way back to the apostles themselves. But what is the content of that heritage, and how can we make grace a reality in our lives today?
Grace is a foreign concept to us because the world doesn’t operate based on grace. It trends towards criticism and judgment. Grace says, “I forgive you...I accept you as you are...I value you.”