Faithbase

Good morning, we're back thinking about salvation. Ephesians 2 8 through 10 and reading this time from the New Living Translation. God save you by his grace when you believe and you can't take credit for it, it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it, for we are God's masterpieces. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. So this kind of sums up a lot of what we've talked about and remember we laid some foundation talking about who God is and why we need to believe that the God of the Bible is the one true God, talked about humanity, talked about mankind and and his creation and our creation as human beings. Each one of us a unique creation of God and we talked about some different background things but this kind of sums up the whole thought of what is salvation. It is a gift of God. Grace is unmerited favor, so God saved us because he wanted to. He doesn't look for people who do good things and say well that person has made the grade I'll choose them and let's let's save them. It doesn't do that, what it is is God saves us by grace, he saves us because he wants to, as simple as that. It's unmerited favor and it's through faith when we believe and even that is a gift from God. We can't say well I've generated the faith, I've worked it up, so that's why that's why it's so wrong for folks to place confidence in perhaps a an emotional confession that they made at a crusade. Now I'm not saying you can't come to know Christ through the work of a crusade, I'm simply saying that sometimes and I've seen this happen before where people they they kind of get worked up emotionally and they think that they've generated some kind of faith that God has saved them that fashion but just by faith by grace we've been saved when we believe we can't take credit for it. This is all from God. Salvation is not a reward for good things we do including generating faith or whatever so none of us can boast about it. It's not something that we can say I've done this. Gracious salvation means that we simply receive by the power of the Holy Spirit the offer of life from God, the offer of justification that our sins can be wiped clean, that our sins can be washed clean by the blood of Jesus Christ. Now the last thing in this section verse 10 of Ephesians 2 I find very interesting because it's it's part of the whole package. For we or you and I are God's masterpieces. He's created us anew in Christ and Paul talks about this elsewhere that if you were a new creation in Jesus Christ all things are made new. So we've been created anew in Christ Jesus so that we can do the good things that he planned for us long ago. So that I guess you would say is evidence of the new birth, evidence of the new creation, evidence of salvation in Jesus Christ that as his masterpiece we do the good things that he wants us to do, that we work hard to show the results of our salvation, that we work at expressing Jesus Christ. We do that by the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. Remember an episode or so ago we talked about we are by the power of Jesus Christ we have new life by the power of his resurrection we have life and that's that's the life we're talking about that that same resurrection power is working in us to change us to make us more like Jesus Christ and then to express that to the world as we live out the new creation that we are in Jesus Christ. So we're gonna wrap this up next episode but I want to leave you with this thought today what are the things that you can do in your life to show that you are that masterpiece to show that you're created anew in Jesus Christ how can you work hard to show the results of your salvation?