EPHESIANS 2 New Living Translation ( NLT )
8 God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. 9 Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. 10 For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
If we can start our year from Mary’s point of view in our last post with our priority focus on God, we will end up with a nice list of goals. Some of the areas in our lives that we plan to help ourselves and others will be straightforward and some will have physical and spiritual gaps that we need to cover to accomplish them. An understanding of the connection of Grace to Faith will be of help to us with all of our plans. Especially recognizing that we will make our plans to the best of our ability but God’s purpose will prevail.
PROVERBS 19:21 You can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail.
Our confession of Faith in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus requires that we believe that confession. While that sounds obvious the belief is in the saving power of God or His Grace. It can be hard for us to reconcile our sin with God’s grace because we often cannot see how we can just be forgiven for all that we know we have done wrong. God’s gift of salvation extends to us His unmerited favor of forgiveness for our debt of sin because we cannot pay it on our own. Our faith in God’s grace provides us the proper perspective for our works of faith to accomplish His purpose. Paul clearly says that our Faith in Grace brings us to the new life God has planned for us so that we will be able to do the good things He has planned for us.