But not everyone sees it this way. Other religious traditions question how merely proclaiming faith in Christ can act as an excuse for bad behavior. Even within the Church, divisions often arise about the role of good works in establishing righteousness before God.
These questions about grace vs. works are not new. When the Church was being formed, it grappled with its own historical connection with God's law as a standard of righteous behavior. In writing to the Church in Rome, the apostle Paul considered the whole controversy (at Chapter 6 and thereafter) as follows:
What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? … What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! … For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
If we are to be honest, each of us needs God's grace, because one way or another, we all fall short of the mark of God's righteousness. By thought, word, deed or omission, all have sinned, and fall short of God's glory. As James has written (Chapter 2), "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it."
Coming to grips with our inability to bridge the gap between our unrighteousness and God's righteousness, frees us to appreciate how the sacrifice of a sinless Jesus satisfies once and forever our need to be reconciled with God. At even our shining best, none of us can offer an unspotted sacrifice to God in atonement for the separation from God's holiness that sin creates.
What is so amazing is that God has provided a solution that is not so much our achievement as it is His gift of a holy partnering with Christ. The apostle Paul testifies to the Church in Corinth (II Corinthians 12) of Jesus' own words to him: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
To the Church at Ephesus, Paul writes (Ephesians 2): "For it is by grace you have been saved, though faith -- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast."
The dilemma with works is that what good deeds can establish, bad deeds can destroy. With grace, God in His sovereignty has entirely resolved this dilemma.
