For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8,9
Every true Christian knows that he or she has been born into the family of God by God’s grace alone . . . through faith in Jesus. That truth has been the motivation behind evangelism crusades, social work, and personal witnessing across the centuries. We are sinners. We cannot do a single thing to save ourselves from our deserved punishment of eternal death in hell.
That’s the way of salvation in a nutshell: You and I are saved by God’s grace alone. We receive God’s grace by reaching out and accepting it by faith (which God will give us according to today’s verses). When this happens, there’s a lens change even for the most socially acceptable of us. What we don’t often see is that such a lens shift is the first of many.
Christians don’t have much trouble agreeing that Salvation is completely and entirely a work of God’s grace. However, the Scriptures teach us that Grace does not end on the day that we reach out and receive God’s gift of Jesus. That is only the beginning work of God’s grace. His grace is instrumental in our continued growth and our daily living. The same grace that God offers to save you and me is the grace that God offers to transform our lives into something that Jesus called, “abundant life” (Jn 10:10).
“Living in the sufficiency of Christ” is a term used by theologians to say that God is completely capable of accomplishing all He wants to in each of us as we receive all He wants to accomplish . . . .AND He even supplies ‘all that we need’ to live as He calls us to: “God is able to make all (His) grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work (2 Cor 9:8).
Grace: All thing, all the time, all we need is provided by God to make us overflow with His life.
He supplies all our needs for eternal life; He supplies all that we need for present-day holy living (Phil 4:19). In the Kingdom of God, God supplies all the needs of each citizen of the Kingdom.
The problem is that not one of us was born into God’s kingdom. We were born into the kingdom of humanity. Even as children we learned naturally, through our earliest experiences in life, how to rely upon our own sufficiency rather than God’s . . . How to rely on other people and organizations rather than on God . . . How to rely on anything and everything BUT God.
But as any growing Christian learns, when we move into the Kingdom of God, becoming a Christian, it’s totally different than the kingdom of humanity we come from. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). And we are reminded that His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts; they are as different as heaven is different from earth (Is 55:8). In the kingdom of heaven, we are called upon to live by the sufficiency of Jesus rather than the sufficiency of ourselves and others (which will always be insufficient).
God’s sufficiency is His Grace coming to us. “For our rejoicing is this… that we conducted ourselves in the world in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom but by the grace of God.” (2 Cor 1:12). So, Paul here is telling us that his entire life and ministry is based on God’s grace, not his own ability, connections, and cleverness. The kingdom of heaven calls us to live by the grace of God, not by the wisdom of this world (which is foolishness in the Kingdom of God).
Godly living comes only by the grace of God and we who believe are called to live godly lives. We are called to live in the Grace of God.