Freely

being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. – Romans 3.24-26

Paul is determined to drive home the point that man is hopeless and helpless in attaining salvation. We can’t earn, it must be a gift. We can no more bring our lives into line with God’s standard that if we tried to lasso the moon. Even violating God’s Law in one point makes us guilty of the whole law.

The Law can’t do it. We all fall short. We can’t be good enough. So how do we bring ourselves to where we line up with God’s guidelines?

We don’t and we can’t because we are justified freely by His grace through being redeemed by the blood of Christ.

Wow! That is a power packed statement with buckets of theology. There is far too much to tackle on one little devotional. Basically we have been redeemed, or bought back from the penalty of sin, only through the blood of Christ – we could do nothing about it.

So the grace of God intervenes. By His grace all of, no matter how far short we fall of His standards, can be justified to those standards freely. The fact that we are justified freely means that everyone, no matter how bad, can claim justification because of what Christ has done – no one is too bad for Him.

It is a free gift – and we have a whole world that needs to hear about the gift!