Salvation is free, a gift of grace. We as God’s children did nothing to earn the gift of eternal salvation. The bible teaches that from the time we are born, our nature leads us to say and do things that displease God, and so fall short of His perfect standards. By ourselves we are helpless to improve our standing before God. The good news, and our only hope, is that God is a helper of the helpless!

Gus Harter studies several passages in Romans 3, a very convincing picture of our inadequacy in God’s sight. Once we understand our lack of merit, and see how far short of God’s standards we fall, we begin to understand that salvation must be free. We have no equity to buy it, and rather than earning favor in God’s sight, we accrue through our evil choices a greater debt of sin each day of our lives. How can we hope to earn God’s favor? We cannot. His favor was freely given.

To illustrate, Elder Harter examines Christ’s encounter with a Samaritan woman fetching water from a well (John 4). With but a few words, He laid bare her sinfulness; yet He had known her condition when in the moment before He had told her she could have within her “a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” This woman realized Christ saw her inadequacy with perfect and unblinking gaze, yet called her His own and put His own eternal Spirit in her broken heart. She abandoned her water jar and ran, ran, ran–crying throughout the town the odd, self-indicting news that a man had told her all of her sins: “is not this the Christ?” she would cry, over and over.

We can share in this woman’s excitement over indictment if we understand two things. First, we are guilty as charged. Second, we are totally forgiven for the sake of Christ alone: when He died on the cross, he satisfied God’s unwavering displeasure with our imperfection. When we fully embrace both truths, we see the priceless essence of free grace. To downplay our guilt cheapens the gift of grace. We also dilute the value of grace when we limit the effectiveness of Christ’s sacrifice by suggesting the task is not done, the covenant not sealed or secured until we speak the proper words or remain faithful over time to some code of behavior.

The Samaritan woman knew she had failed to meet the standard of righteous living. Yet in her brief encounter with Jesus, she had seen her greatest failures tallied, measured against grace, and tossed aside. Let us not make light of our failures to live as we should. Rather, let our failures magnify the Savior whose grace covers them.

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