Saved by Faith!

In the last devotion I wrote about a woman whom I had stopped to help on the side of the road. If you haven’t read that article yet, you need to at a minimum go back in time a day and read that first paragraph. Now, why did I stop to help this woman? As I stated in the previous article, most of the time I consider myself “too busy” to stop. Rarely is this really true, most of the time I just don’t feel like it. In this particular case, I just felt like stopping to help.

But now I want to examine things on her side of the white line. She obviously knew something was wrong with her car, or she wouldn’t have been sitting there in the first place. Think for a moment to yourself if there was anything that she could have done to MAKE me stop? If she had jumped out into the busy street waving her arms, she might have been hit. She could have put on some sort of show on the side of the road, or even used sign language. But none of that would have made me stop if I had not already decided to stop in the first place.

Now we know that we were once sinners, and that Jesus died to forgive us of our sins, but is is there anything that we can do to earn our salvation? Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace that 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.” So nothing we could have possibly ever done would have gained us the salvation that is now given to us by God through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. The only thing we can do for salvation is the same thing that everyone else has to: make Jesus the ruler of our lives, believe that God raised Him from the dead, and ask Him to forgive us of our sins.

You can’t buy yourself a gift from someone. Can I take a gift from the One who I have made Master of my life and say, “I earned this.”? If I earned it, then it’s not a gift, it’s a payment. If I could have earned my salvation or paid for it myself, then the sacrifice of Christ’s death on the cross is meaningless; I could have my salvation without Him. If there were some thing that we could do to be saved, then we would be equal with Christ; we would have to be spotless and without sin. This would be contrary to Romans 3:23’s statement that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

Instead of being prideful, and instead of bragging about how great we are that we are saved, we should do as the Bible says in 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14: “But we ought always thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”