Falling from Grace

Falling from Grace

“For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ!  You have fallen away from God’s grace.” – Galatians 5:4 So many times we associate the phrase “falling from grace” to a moral failure.  Someone is caught in sin, makes a mistake, etc., and the next thing you know, “So-and-so falls from grace” is all over the news.  It has become a headline we see way too often. It’s always tragic to see that happen.  Yet the Bible does not consider someone failing morally to be the same thing as falling from grace (nor any sin for that matter).  We only fall from grace when we try to earn God’s love, His favor, and His salvation.  It’s never the “sinner” that falls from grace as much as it’s the self-righteous and proud.  When our Christianity becomes about us, that’s when we start to fall.  We fall from grace because we rely on our merits and efforts more than we do on the grace of God. Our Christianity isn’t based on our performance, but simply on the person of Christ.  We can never make ourselves right with God.  Galatians 2 says that if we can be made righteous by keeping the law, then Christ died for nothing.  Yet it’s so easy to make it about discipline, duty, and what I am doing and not doing in the name of Jesus.  Even when it comes to our identity, it’s much easier to find it in being a leader or a minister or even a Christian.  But the truth is,...