By Grace

If you want to understand what it is to be a Christian or believer in Christ, and want to understand how it is that sin is overcome and salvation is given from sin and death, the best answers can be found in the book of Romans.  I believe the Holy Spirit led Paul to write an extensive explanation with detailed examples and explanations for those of us who ponder this question from every angle.  The answers are explained simply, but our desire to re-state them often gets us into areas of misunderstanding.  Read the book of Romans as a Christian or as someone wanting to understand following Christ.  I have recently had to book read to me online so I could listen and ponder it. What a Blessing!  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=NIV

How do we become righteous before God?  We do not become righteous before God by obeying his commandments and earning righteousness.  It is by God's decision to offer us the choice to depend upon Him.  God's decision to do so is called GRACE and our choice to depend upon Him is called FAITH.  To depend upon God is to give Him Glory and to be fully assured that what God has promised, He is able to perform.

For centuries mankind has struggled with the choice to depend upon God in Faith and receive his gift of Grace.  From the first man and woman we began to reject God's offer of togetherness with Him.  Our spiritual and physical lives have been affected by this choice.  We live in a world that has rejected togetherness with God in return for our selfish desires to make our own decisions toward worldly, temporary pleasures and accomplishments.  The Bible is a way of understanding how we have found ourselves in the situation we have today.

God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and other parts of the Law to show mankind how difficult it is to depend upon our own actions to be righteous... in fact it is not difficult, it is impossible.  All of us fall short of perfection.

God then sent Jesus, the Savior, to prepare a path whereby we could fulfill the requirement of righteousness, once again, not by our own accomplishment, but by by choosing to accept God's offer of grace and by depending on him through faith.  Jesus was born to a virgin woman, and as a human, and took upon the task of perfectly fulfilling of the law, which none of us could do.  He was at the same time God among us in spirit, to offer grace and guidance toward a reconciliation from sinfulness in spirit.  Jesus maintained completion of the law perfectly and then took the death penalty that we deserved because we could not keep the law.  God offered grace to us again and credited us with being righteous by our faith or dependence on the promises of God through Jesus who is God's perfect, sinless man and God's Holy Son in spirit.  We praise Him and keep his commandments because of that gift, not in order to earn it.  


Ephesians 2:1-10

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.