Saving grace
<p>The following from the New Unger's Bible Dictionary; highlights from Don: “Grace is what God may be free to do, and indeed what he does, accordingly, for the lost after Christ has died on behalf of them” (Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, 7:178). It is thus apparent that God’s grace is to be distinguished from His mercy and love (Ephes. 2:4-5), “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).”
Mercy is therefore the compassion of God that moved Him to provide a Savior for the unsaved. Had God been able to save even one soul on the ground of His sovereign mercy alone, He could have saved every person on that basis, as Lewis Sperry Chafer points out, and the death of Christ would not have been a necessity.
Divine love on the other hand is the motivating plan behind all that God does in saving a soul. But since God is holy and righteous, and sin is a complete offense to Him, His love or His mercy cannot operate in grace until there is provided a sufficient satisfaction for sin. This satisfaction makes possible the exercise of God’s grace.
Grace thus rules out all human merit. It requires only faith in the Savior. Any intermixture of human merit violates grace. God’s grace thus provides not only salvation but safety and preservation for the one saved, despite his imperfections. Grace perfects forever the saved one in the sight of God because of the saved one’s position “in Christ.” Grace bestows Christ’s merit and Christ’s standing forever (Romans 5:1-2; Romans 8:1; Col. 2:9-10); “for in Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete.” Grace thus obviates any obligation to gain merit, and the law as a merit system is no longer applicable to a believer, since he is no longer “under law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14).
The problem of a holy life is met in the gospel of grace by the fact that the saved one has an entirely new position in grace instead of in Adam (Romans 5:12-20). And being baptized “into Christ” (Romans 6:1-11), he is “dead to sin, but alive to God.” Knowledge of and faith in this glorious in-Christ position (Romans 6:11) is the key that makes it actual in the believer’s everyday experience. Rewards for faithfulness and practical holiness of life are to be dispensed, but this is a truth not to be confused with an unforfeitable and unmerited salvation.</p>