If you’ve been around a minute, you might have seen our 35k-person inside joke about Grandpa Joe living his best, depraved, selfish life in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (we have a whole highlight of memes if you need food for thought!)
With that in mind--have you ever heard the phrase, “there but for the grace of God go I”?
All of mankind is born in Adam into the same state of sinfulness and misery, needing a Savior for forgiveness of sin. There is Christ—holy, perfect, sinless—and there are the rest of us. The difference is that some are covered by Christ’s blood on the merit of His work on the cross—without boast of their own.
Psalm 53 tells us that no one seeks after God and no one does good (on his own accord apart from the enabling of the Spirit).
“…For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”
--Romans 3:23-25a
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith:
On Justification: LCBF Ch. 11, Paragraph 1
“Those whom God effectually calls, he also freely justifies, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ's active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.”
On Sanctification: LCBF Ch. 13, Paragraph 1
“They who are united to Christ, effectually called, and regenerated, having a new heart and a new spirit created in them through the virtue of Christ's death and resurrection, are also farther sanctified, really and personally, through the same virtue, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them; the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts of it are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”
This is the hope of the Gospel for the believer and for the unbeliever.
