The Daily Word of Righteousness

The "Grace" Mystique, #9

By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? (Matthew 7:16—NIV)

But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned. (Hebrews 6:8—NIV)

Let us drive the sword of the Word of God into this abstract grace, this destroyer of the Kingdom of God. Let us reveal it for what it is—a fantasy that has been arrived at as scholars have taken a few verses out of context and then used them as axioms from which the deadly doctrine of the "state of grace," the unscriptural "dispensation of grace," has been deduced.

The Lord Jesus Christ came into the world that you and I might be delivered from Satan. We learn from the Spirit of grace to behave righteously, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. When we sin we are to confess our sin to God. God then forgives our sin and by one means or another drives the compulsion from us, giving us the upper hand over it.

Let us be real people in a real world practicing real righteousness. Away with this definition of grace as an unconditional amnesty. Sometimes "grace" is employed in the New Testament to mean forgiveness, but often it is used to refer to the Presence of God that enables us to minister or do whatever else God desires we do.

It is time now for the Lord to come to us and enter our personality. He is the Lord of Hosts, ready to declare war on the worldliness, lust, and self-will resident in us. It is the grace of God that declares war on sin and conquers sin.

We are to press forward in Him. The goal is a Church without blemish of any kind. This shall be accomplished in the days to come, in the midst of the age of moral horrors that is at hand.

Our enemies shall abound. The Lord shall set a table before us in the very presence of our enemies if we will lay down our life in His Name and permit Him to sit on the throne of our personality. This table is the true grace of God.

What marvelous things lie before us! Israel stands at the Jordan, so to speak, ready to cross over into the land of promise, the rest of God. Our inheritance is God Himself, and then the saved nations of the earth.

Let us pray to God that this monumental error of Christian teaching will be removed from our minds and hearts so we will be aware of the consequences of our behavior, coming to realize that by the choices we are making today we are affecting the state in which we shall be raised from the dead.

We are going to reap what we are sowing. If we follow the Spirit of God, living in the Spirit, we shall reap eternal life when the Lord comes. But if we choose instead to live in the lusts and passions of our flesh and soul, we shall reap corruption in the day of resurrection. There will be no glorious new body for us if we have not first been transformed morally.

This is what Paul taught by the Spirit of God. This is the true Kingdom of God and eternal life. This is the true grace of God.

The impotent, unscriptural delusion of the "state of grace" must be driven from our thinking. The real Lord Jesus must come and help us so the graveclothes of sins are removed from us by the power of the Spirit and we are released into the kind of person God wants us to be and we want to be. (from The "Grace" Mystique)