Description
The Greatest Gift: Understanding God’s Grace Through Ephesians 2:8
Reflect on the most extraordinary gift ever received… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? If you are a Christian, the answer must go back to what Jesus did when he came to earth and lived and died as a man. This advent season, we focus today on Ephesians chapter two, verse eight. For by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God.
This thing, it’s not our own doing. If we look back to what happened in the Old Testament, that system of sacrifice and punishment, this was all about what the Israelites did in order to become righteous again. And what that really showed them more than anything else was that they could never do enough. They would never remain righteous.
So it had to be the case for us to be saved completely, that it couldn’t be our own doing. We are not strong enough. We are not sinless enough. It has to come as a gift from God.
And of course, the gift to us from God is Christ arriving as a baby, living as a man, and dying on that cross. This is grace of course, grace, because we never could have deserved it.
And we receive this gift by putting our faith in Jesus and saying, I accept that for me, that struggle is over. I cannot redeem myself. I cannot make myself righteous. I cannot do any penance that would sufficiently atone for everything that I’ve done in the past and everything that I’m yet to do. We put our faith in Jesus and thus we are saved as the best gift we can ever and will ever receive.
This Christmas period I encourage you to focus on that gift and to thank God for it. Or if you’ve not yet received that gift to seek it, to ask him for it, and to make Jesus your own personal Saviour.
As someone who has walked this life hand in hand with Jesus for over 40 years, I would say that is the best gift I have ever received. I have not for one minute regretted choosing Jesus as my Saviour.
