100 Days of Right Believing: Daily Readings from The Power of Right Believing (16 page)

I
love the apostle Paul’s description of God’s grace:
free
and
undeserved
! When you truly experience this free and undeserved favor and love from God, you don’t have to worry about performing. His love and unmerited favor within you will flush out all the wrong thinking and wrong believing, and you will produce good works—true fruits of righteousness that are lasting, sustainable, and enduring!

You may have heard a teaching going around where grace is defined as “divine empowerment.” Be careful about defining grace as merely empowerment—that is diluting and reducing what grace truly is.

Grace produces divine empowerment, but in and of itself, the essence of grace is His undeserved, unmerited, and unearned favor. When are you in your most undeserving state? When you have failed. Unmerited favor means that when you have failed and are in your most undeserving state, you
can
receive Jesus’ favor, blessings, love, and perfect acceptance in your life. Let me tell you, when you understand and receive grace as God’s unmerited favor, not only will you be empowered, you will be healed, and you will be changed from the inside out.

The real danger with defining grace as just divine empowerment is that we can unconsciously flip grace around and instead of seeing it as God’s work in our life, we make it our work. From being centered on what Jesus has done, the erroneous definition of grace as “empowerment” swings it to being about what
you
must do and how
you
must perform now that you have received this grace, this “divine empowerment.” Can you see this? With such a definition of grace, the onus to live the Christ life falls back squarely on your shoulders.

My friend, make sure that what you believe in your heart always points you back to Jesus and Jesus alone and not to yourself. Remember, it is all
about His work, His doing, His performance, and His love in our lives. It never points back to you. Don’t be hoodwinked by those who move away from the pristine definition of grace as God’s unmerited favor and end up making it all about you and what you need to do. That’s not grace. Grace is God’s doing—from inception and all the way to the end.

Today, receive His abundant grace—see that God has already started a good work in your life and He alone will lead you to and give you the victory in your area of need.

I
’d like you to picture a strong and healthy tree. A strong and healthy tree does not worry about producing fruit or getting rid of the dead leaves on it. As long as it receives the right amount of sunshine, water, and nutrients, it will have healthy sap flowing in it that is brimming with all the right nutrients and that naturally pushes out all the dead leaves. And as long as its inward life—its healthy sap life—keeps flowing, new leaves will spring forth on this tree and good fruits will naturally grow and flourish on all the branches.

My friend, as you begin to receive the sunshine of God’s favor and take in the water of His Word, as you begin to feed on Jesus’ forgiveness in your life and your righteous standing in Christ, the dead leaves of guilt, fear, addictions, and every type of disorder will begin to be pushed out by the new life of Jesus within you. The transformation you will experience, when it is not based on your own discipline and self-control, is truly effortless. It is no longer, “How will I overcome this anger problem?” or “How will I beat this cigarette addiction?” or “How can I curb this habit of overeating when I am stressed and insecure?” Instead, it becomes, “How will
Jesus
in me overcome this anger problem, this cigarette addiction, this habit of overeating?”

The fruits of your success will be effortless. One by one, the addictions, dysfunctions, and negative emotions will begin to drop off from your life like dead leaves, and new leaves (new positive thoughts and attitudes), new flowers (new desires and dreams), and new fruit (new behaviors and habits) will begin to flourish in your life.

Jesus’ word to you today is simply to “abide in Me,” and you will bear much fruit.

I
t’s so important that you understand, believe, and abide in the truth of God’s unmerited favor and forgiveness in your life, even when your behavior is not perfect. Why? Because it frees you to enjoy your relationship with God, to enjoy spending time with Him, and to expect good from Him. It frees you to enjoy peace and rest, good relationships with others, a life of wholeness, and to confidently expect a bright future.

Imagine for a moment that you are a businessperson. Through some bad decisions and some things beyond your control, your business got into serious debt. You’ve made a habit of avoiding your company’s ledger because when you open it, all you’re going to see is red, which is a screaming reminder of how much you owe and how unhealthy your business is. You can’t help thinking about the ledger, but the more you think of it, the more it fills you with dread.

In the same way, if you keep believing and thinking that there is still unsettled debt between you and God, you can’t breathe easy. You become consumed with thoughts of how to pay off your debt. In fact, just the thought of red in your ledger makes you afraid to go to Him or expect His help for anything.

But say a good friend finds out about your business debt, and of his own free will and out of his own pocket, he pays off the debt. Furthermore, knowing that you can’t ever pay this debt on your own, he doesn’t want you to even try to pay him back. Now (after you’ve gotten over this incredible news), you’re not afraid of your ledger anymore. You can throw off your despair and laugh and look forward to life again. Rather than fear the ledger, you’re quite happy to look at your ledger because it declares you are now debt-free and how good your benefactor is.

My friend, this is what Jesus has done for you, and much more. You are perfectly forgiven and righteous through Jesus’ finished work. Being the Son of God, He is an overpayment for your sins. And He didn’t just cleanse you of your entire life of sins, but He also gave you His very own righteousness and favor. Why? So that you can be free to enjoy being with God and receive all His blessings, with no more consciousness of debt standing in the way. You can live life with a confident expectation of good. There is no red in your ledger (see Col. 2:13–14).

Once in a while, though, because of the force of habit or doubt, you may wake up fearful that you’re back in debt. But all you have to do is open your ledger and look at it. It will show you how debt-free you really are, no matter what you feel. Similarly, should you ever experience days when you doubt that God has forgiven you, all you have to do is open the Word of God and see in it how the price has been fully paid, the judgment executed, and every bit of condemnation already meted out on the body of Christ!