v. 4 – For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Devotional:

The world we live in is a world where feelings have become god,even among many who claim to be God’s people. The mantra of modernity is that if it feels right then it must be right. This is the symptom of a cheap grace gospel which is intended to make us feel better, but in the end, if this is believed, it will cost us our souls.

I can’t think of a worse indictment than that of being accused of perverting God’s grace. Perverting God’s grace into sensuality is to submit ourselves unto our feelings as our own master, and in so doing we reject Jesus as our Master. In essence, this means we end up accepting as truth a grace we bestow upon ourselves. But true grace is a grace given to us, without any doing of our own, not a grace we create so our lives can be lived inside the realms of a false sense of peace. Perverted grace is a grace without cost, as the faith hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in his masterpiece, The Cost of Discipleship. “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace
without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Any measure of grace which does not begin and end with Jesus Christ is no grace at all. The soul-truth that grace is infinitely costly on the part of Christ is the foundation of what grace is really all about. It cost Him everything and it is this grace we need and it is this costly grace our souls are after. In fact, we want it so badly we would abandon all the measures of this world’s success in order to have it for even one second.

In Jesus Christ alone, we receive the full measure of God’s grace. A perverted cheap grace points us toward ourselves as the solution to our soul’s desires by teaching us to look at our feelings for the answers to soul questions like “Who am I?” and “What on earth am I here for?” But let this not be so of us, my friend.

Let us not look unto ourselves, and thus pervert the grace of God, but let us set our eyes on our Christ Jesus the Lord in and for all things. God’s grace given to us through Jesus Christ is what eternally sustains us, and as we experience it we are able to walk in His freedom, mercy, love, and peace.

REFLECTION:
In what ways have you settled for a cheap grace in the past? If there is something you need God to cover with His endlessly perfect grace, write it down and commit it to prayer today.