“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the Lord’s commandments and His statutes which I am commanding you today for your good?”
Do we do that? …Does God still expect us to?
The New Covenant acknowledges our inability to keep the law but does not remove the requirement of holiness. Perfection is still demanded, to commune with God, and faith in Christ is the only way to fulfill that requirement.
Deuteronomy clarifies that loving God with all your heart and soul incentivizes you to begin “Serving Him, walking with Him, striving to keep His commandments”… Since you can’t perfectly keep His law, grace should cause you to chase holiness out of gratitude.
Unfortunately, instead of allowing God’s grace to change us we tend to emphasize God’s mercy to the exclusion of His Holiness. Since grace is free, we see obedience as sacrifice, thinking of ourselves as social martyrs, giving up the “fun” of sin for salvation.
That is foolishness because sin is lethal. Countless men’s lives have been utterly ruined because they pursued what the world calls “fun”. It is essential to understand sin’s deadliness to be changed by God’s grace .
Christ’s brutal death at Calvary is the most expensive display of love in all of history. Yet we nonchalantly shrug at the price. We claim to embrace the Cross – yet it does not affect our conduct. That is incompatible with the assertion that we love and walk humbly with God.
You are saved by faith alone – but your faith should never be alone…. The best way to be sure that tomorrow is secured by your faith - is to see that your life today is transformed by it.
It will change you when you understand that salvation has not been discounted. Jesus paid your debt in full …because He loves you, and you couldn’t pay the price yourself. Let thankfulness for God’s unmerited love make you strive to be more like Jesus every day.
“It is no accident that the 10 commandments were smashed and then re-written exactly as they had been before….no matter how often we break His commands – they do not change.” - Anonymous
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