A Recipe for Truly Living

Jun 20

Read the Text: Romans 4

Memorize the Text:

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 6:23, CSB)

Consider the Text: Romans 4

A recipe offers a map to making food. A standard recipe provides a list of the needed ingredients to complete the task and the steps to put the ingredients together in a proper manner. In life, ingredients are required if we are going to live in Christ truly. In Romans 4, these ingredients are provided by the apostle Paul as he spoke of the life modeled by Christ. Let’s see the needed ingredients for truly living.

The first ingredient is GRACE. Grace is the ingredient of conversion. Grace is the foundation of conversion because grace comes from God’s love and His work of redemption. Grace exists as the movement of extending to someone something undeserved. In love and his work of redemption, the Lord extends grace to us undeserving sinners. Unlike grace-based in humanity, God’s grace is certain and complete. Those who enter a relationship with Jesus are guaranteed recipients of God’s grace because of the promise, character, and work of the Lord. At the same time, the grace of God is complete because it is more than enough to overcome any sin debt in life and offer reconciliation. Thus, grace is the first ingredient.

The second ingredient is FAITH. Faith is the ingredient of connection. Faith is the elusive connection because Christ alone is the bridge that covers the gap caused by sin. Faith in Christ is elusive because no work or righteous life leads to a connection of reconciliation. After all, the connection is exclusively in Christ. The work of Christ constructed the needed bridge to cross to be reconciled to the Lord, and this bridge is crossed only by faith in Jesus. The connection does not last for a second; instead, the connection exists as an eternal connection. Thus, righteous living comes through a faith-based relationship with Jesus that comes as an extension of God’s grace.

The third ingredient is HOPE. Hope is the ingredient of confidence. Hope is the last ingredient because it comes from the others. The hope we hold comes from confidence in God’s promise that he has made a way unto salvation and will keep that promise. Thus we hope not in wishfulness but we hope in certainty. Hope impacts every day because we rest in God’s provision that he cares and provides for his own. This confidence comes because of God’s power and not because of any righteousness in us. Thus, our faith in Christ became available because of God’s grace and impacted our view in life because we gained a proper perspective of living in hope.

The ability for a person to truly live begins by entering an intimate, faith-based relationship with Jesus Christ. The steps to receiving Christ are not complex but rather simple. The ability to use grace, faith, and hope comes from the process of one:

1. Recognizing their sin

2. Confessing their sin

3. Acknowledging Jesus as Lord and Savior

4. Seek forgiveness

5. Surrender all to Christ

6. Letting the Holy Spirit indwell

Are you letting the three ingredients of grace, faith, and hope dominate your life?