Grace is defined as unmerited or undeserved favor. In order for grace to be able to make sense by itself, the recipient must have been in dire need of it. The truth is that grace has totally nothing to do with the one who receives it in the sense of that person’s merit. Instead, it’s completely dependent on the one who gives it. God is gracious to us not because of our worthiness, or what we’ve done that somehow grants us a certain level of acceptability in His sight. 

By the way, if God was dispensing us His grace on the basis of our own worthiness or merit, we wouldn’t have been there today. Nevertheless, He’s gracious to us because of His unconditional love for us as our Maker that compels Him to do something that goes way beyond our human comprehension on our behalf in order to rescue us from the abominable, detestable, and unacceptable state we were once in prior to being saved, which would have ultimately led us to eternal destruction.

That Grace Dispensed to us Comes With a Cost.

One of the key aspects that really stands out in God’s grace dispensed to us through Jesus is the fact that it actually costs Him tremendously. God had no choice but to go to the extreme by sending His only Son to come to die on the cross for us by taking the crushing penalty that should have fallen upon us as a result of our sins committed against Him. Christ’s terrible death truly underlines the severity and seriousness of our sinfulness to a holy and righteous God.

Through Christ grace is bestowed to humanity by God in such an incredible fashion that had never occurred prior to that (John 1:14, John 1:16). Because that grace we’re enjoying in Christ is so costly and precious, we’re then left with the sole responsibility and duty of never taking it for granted by using it for ill means. Our lives should demonstrate an obvious appreciation and gratitude toward what God has done for us. That must be the driving factor that motivates us daily to live our lives only for the One who gave His own life for us in order to make us become who we are today.

God’s Grace is Intended to Help us Come Out of Our Sinful Ways.

With this in mind, God’s grace is sufficient for us (2 Corinthians 12:9). Moreover, everything necessary for us to be able to live victorious and holy lives is part of that grace. That’s the foremost reason that God is gracious to us in the first place. The question is how do we draw the line with respect to our responses to God’s grace? Anyone who truly understands the significance of that grace must automatically realize that they can no longer live the kind of wicked and unacceptable life that they used to live before getting saved.

Our lives must reflect precisely what that grace was intended to accomplish within us. Because God’s grace is the very means by which God reaches His hands down to humanity in order to pull them out of their sins if they’re willing to reach their hands back to Him through faith in Christ. So we’ll take a thorough look at a couple scripture verses regarding why we must not use God’s grace as a license to continue living in sin.

What should we say, then? Should we go on sinning so that grace may increase? Of course not! How can we who died as far as sin is concerned go on living in it? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into union with the Messiah Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore, through baptism we were buried with Him into His death so that, just as the Messiah was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too may live an entirely new life (Romans 6:1-4).

For if we choose to go on sinning after we have learned the full truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but only a terrifying prospect of judgment and a raging fire that will consume the enemies of God (Hebrews 10:26-27).

Sin is a very serious problem that must be confronted head-on because of the massive implications it creates in people’s lives. Sin will always give us a tendency to continue to practice over and over again the same things that we already know that God hates and doesn’t want us to indulge in. The purpose of sin is to destroy, to keep us in bondage, and to further alienate and separate us from God. The enemy thrives and dominates people’s lives by exploiting their sinfulness.

Sin is like a bait that draws the enemy to our lives. It’s also important to realize that sin by itself is a very contemptuous act, or an act that dishonors God, His Word, along with everything that constitutes who He really is. Truthfully, nobody can serve God while living a sinful life. We can’t please God either while harboring in our lives the same abhorrent things that He’s repulsed by, which then render us to become enemies of God.

We Shouldn’t Use His Grace in Vain Through Constant Rebellion.

God didn’t save us in order to grant us freedom for the purpose of doing what we want; otherwise, it would have been totally pointless to give us His Word that lays out how we can live a life pleasing to Him through holiness on the ground of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If that was the case, we would have been left in the world just living our lives by following our own carnal desires.

When it comes down to sinning, we don’t need someone to teach us how to become an expert in that field. We develop our own expertise naturally. Interestingly, we happen to be able to develop great skills in covering up our sins as well. The truth is that you may not have had any ideas regarding how to practice a particular sin; however, once you give yourself over to it, every necessary skills just will come naturally.

But, God through His grace is calling us to live a life far above the kind of life that we used to live. If we come to Christ, we must always look forward because of that incredible transition that has taken place into our lives. We’re no longer a product of our past, but a new creation through Christ. As apostle Paul says in (Philippians 3:13-14), we should forget what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.

We must be willing to renounce the old version of ourselves and take on the new nature and identity that God gives us. Living for Christ means that we have to give up everything such as our own free will, our right, our ambition, and so forth. What matters is what He wants us to do, what He wants to do through us, not what we want to do. When receiving the truth, we have no choice but to do our very best to obey it because God will hold us accountable on the basis of what we’d heard and learned.

Conclusion

In short, the grace of God is so precious; therefore, we must not abuse it. We should not become a free rider in the sense of falsely believing that God is a gracious and loving God; He won’t be that much concerned regarding how we choose to live our lives, or He will keep on forgiving us regardless of our bold unwillingness to repent while repentance is the essence of grace.

There are mind-blowing rewards that await in heaven those who take advantage of that grace by responding accordingly, but there are severe and detrimental punishment that await those who take it for granted to the extent it has become something that God had owed them.