What's So Amazing About Grace?

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Bible Gateway interviewed Philip Yancey ( @philipyancey) about his award-winning book and video curriculum, What’s So Amazing About Grace? Participant’s Guide with DVD, Updated Edition (Zondervan, 2021). If we say we do not bear the guilt of sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. 1:9 But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous, forgiving us our sins and cleansing us from all unrighteousness. 1:10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us (1 John 1:8-10). You sometimes hear the accusation that this kind of free-grace breeds license. Part of the answer to the license issue is that grace does not leave us as we were before salvation, but becomes the very foundation for the Christian life (see Rom. 5:1-2). With grace comes the motivation and ability (by God’s grace, of course), to produce good works. This is part of the aim of God’s salvation by grace as expressed in Ephesians 2.

Philip Yancey Quotes About Grace | A-Z Quotes Philip Yancey Quotes About Grace | A-Z Quotes

Regarding his previous and wretched spiritual condition, Newton said, “I was capable of anything. I had not the least fear of God before my eyes.… I not only sinned myself, but made it my study to tempt and seduce others.” 3 Surely, being redeemed out of such a wretched spiritual state, as the hymn described it, helped Newton see and appreciate the matchless grace of God. Later he wrote, “I needed someone to stand between me and a holy God who must punish my sins and blasphemies. I needed an Almighty Savior who would step in and take my sins away.… I saw that Christ took my punishment so that I might be pardoned.” 4 Philip Yancey: Grace breaks all the rules. Most people live with a sense of life that’s akin to karma. Do good, get rewarded; do bad, get punished. Along comes this incredible good news that God loves us not because of who we are but because of who God is. No matter what we’ve done, forgiveness is there for the asking. We expect the worst, and get the best. That’s rather amazing, no?Let me be clear. When you come to Christ, you do not come to give, you come to receive. You do not come to try your best, you come to trust. You do not come just to be saved, but to be rescued. You do not come to be made better (although that does happen), you come to be made alive!

What’s So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey (Review What’s So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey (Review

But “when the kindness of God our Savior appeared and his love for mankind, 3:5 He saved us not by works of righteousness that we have done but on the basis of his mercy, through the washing of the new birth and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, 3:6 whom he poured out on us in full measure through Jesus Christ our Savior. 3:7 And so, since we have been justified by his grace, we become heirs with the confident expectation of eternal life.” (Tit. 3:4-7). Grace Can Be Received For by the grace given to me I say to every one of you not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think, but to think with sober discernment, as God has distributed to each of you a measure of faith (Rom. 12:3; see also Rom. 12:6; 15:15; 1 Cor. 3:10; Gal. 2:9; Eph. 3:2, 7, 8). Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. 14 Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure (literally, “the good deposit”) which has been entrusted to you.(2 Tim. 1:13-14, NASB, emphasis mine). Grace, then, is the free and undeserved provision and love received from another; it especially epitomizes the characteristic attitude of God in providing salvation for a sinful world. For believers in Christ, the term grace is virtually synonymous with the gospel message of God’s gift of unmerited salvation in Jesus Christ and includes everything associated with our life in Christ from beginning to end. Grace Governs and Empowers the Christian LifeThere is no division of doctrine that is not related in some way or another—often vitally—to the concept of grace. Inspiration, sin, salvation, Christian living, even future things are but a few examples of related doctrines. Here Paul reminds us that this message is both a treasure and a trust. And what is this message? It is the message about the Lord Jesus that brings men into a vital relationship with the eternal God of the universe.

Grace: Why It’s So Amazing and Awesome | Bible.org Grace: Why It’s So Amazing and Awesome | Bible.org

For this is the way God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16, emphasis mine). Philip Yancey: Grace gets down-to-earth and personal, and is best encountered in a group setting. So often I’ve seen long-buried feuds come to the surface. I’ve attended recovery groups based on the 12-step model, where raw humanity gets confessed and dealt with in a spirit of honesty and support. I wish church demonstrated that same kind of radical honesty. Instead, we tend to put on a false front that “everything’s just fine, thank you.” Everything is not fine, and we need a safe place to deal with the assaults of life. In a number of places, the New Testament speaks about the believer’s freedom or liberty in Christ, but what exactly does this mean biblically speaking for the Christian? Our ideas about liberty may be skewed by our society. For instance, the first definition given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition is that liberty is “The condition of being free from restriction or control .” 33 The first definition in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines liberty “as the quality or state of being free,” but then gives the following as the first sub-definition of liberty, “the power to do as one pleases.” 34 But dictionaries do not provide us with an accurate definition of Christian liberty according to the New Testament.I recently heard an actor on TV comment that he was striving for grace. While the context didn’t give much indication as to what he meant, the idea of striving suggests struggle, toil, work, extreme exertion. In other words, striving suggests doing something to gain grace. While one might strive to promote and defend God’s grace as a fundamental truth of Scripture or strive to be a gracious person, the phrase striving for grace is really a contradiction in the fundamental meaning of grace as it is used in the Bible, theologically speaking. It only takes a minute to create your own Bible Gateway free personal account and you’ll immediately upgrade your Bible Gateway experience. Do it right now! And if it is by grace, it is no longer by works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace (Rom. 11:6). If God’s rescue program had included our efforts, grace would be diminished and salvation would not be wholly the work of God. “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace” (Romans 11:6). Some things can exist together, but human works and the grace that brings salvation cannot.

Grace: An Interview with The Shock and Scandal of God’s Grace: An Interview with

A beautiful illustration of the amazing aspect of God’s graClearly, we all need the grace of God in view of every person’s spiritual state. “Just as it is written: ‘ There is no one righteous, not even one,’” (Rom. 3:10). The Distinctive Marks of Grace 15 Grace Is Epitomized in Jesus Christ Let us suppose that you have two corpses. Is one more dead than another? Does one need a bigger miracle to be restored to life? Fact is, the good person who lives next to you and the criminal you read about in the newspaper are essentially in the same predicament—both need the life that only God can give. 26 One dictionary defines legalism as “strict, literal adherence to the law or to a particular code, as of religion or morality.” 35 As just stressed, liberty is not the absence of restrictions or of law. Under liberty, Christians are under the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2) or as Paul defines it elsewhere, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:2). Just so, legalism does not simply mean the presence of law. Swindoll defines legalism as an attitude. He writes: C. S. Lewis, a strong defender of Christianity, came in late, sat down, and asked, “What’s the rumpus about?” When he learned that it was a debate about the uniqueness of Christianity, he immediately commented, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.”