Legitimizing Damnation

That's what "cheap grace" is - damnation. To convince oneself that one is really safe and saved whilst on a bandwagon heading for a steep cliff. To throw oneself back into a raging river over and over again so that Christ may rescue you. To not only play with danger but to immerse oneself in it. To feign ignorance of the saving power of God's grace that leads men to repentance. To disbelieve God. 

There is no atonement without blood, and no salvation without sacrifice. And if truly understand the sacrifice of God that saves us, we would truly be saved. It we value the costliness of grace, then we tap into the power it releases to us.  

It is a self-deception to excuse oneself from obedience. To exclude obedience is to exclude faith.

Cheap grace is an attempt to separate the inseparable - the nature of God within Himself and His message: the gospel of salvation and the gospel of the cross. God cannot be divided, or conflicted. God is wholly One.  To separate God's holiness from His love is to have neither. To separate the salvation and the calling of God is to have neither either. It is a self-deception to believe that any other gospel save that of the cross is able to save.

The implications of the cross are twofold - that Christ died for our sins, and we died with Him. Christ went 100% for us, and calls us to go that 100% with Him.

There are only two possible life choices - light, faith, obedience, the narrow way, sacrifice, and salvation, or, darkness, unbelief, rebellion, the broad way, idolatry, and damnation. One have to decide between the love of God or the love of self. One have to choose between serving oneself or serving God.

There He bore: abandonment, loss, hardship, sorrow, sacrifice, suffering, grief, accusations, rejection, pain, and the burden of others' wrongs.

And He called us to follow Him, to forsake, as He did: life, riches, respect, the world, the cares of this life, the preservation of one's image, self, ambition, family, and career.

To receive, from what He bore, what He received: grace, blessing, life, glory, wisdom, peace, fulfilment, joy, and true liberty.

Self is a burden, a chain, and a hard yoke. To renounce oneself, to take up the cross, and follow Christ is to escape from bondage. The way of the cross is hard to those who receive it, but those who gladly follow Christ at His call will receive His gentle words and His grace. He asks nothing of us without giving us the strength to bear it.

If you live with the world,
You will perish with the world.
If you are married to the world, you will not escape the same judgment of God that will befall all sinners.
If you live as a sinner, you will die as a sinner, and be buried among sinners, and be burned with the rest of sinners.

God demonstrated His love by the cross. 

1) Love equals the cross.
2) Grace equals discipleship
3)  Missions equals forsaking one's nets to be a fisher of men.

Belief absolutely necessitates obedience.
Faith is to follow.

The religion "Christianity" should really be term, "Churchianity". The Sunday worship, the gifts or tithes, the religious observance, can be to a selfish man nothing more than an evasion of God. God must be our bread, our sustenance, upon whom we absolutely depend for our life, or He is nothing to us at all.

Again, Faith and obedience,
Redemption and the Cross are eternally inseparable
because they are central to the indivisible God. 

To be a Christian invariably means that this will be hard life because God's concept is always the Suffering before the Glory, the Shame before the Exaltation. This is not only the pattern of Christ's ministry on the earth and upon the cross, but the pattern laid out for all those who literally follow Him. 

 And why do we follow Him? Because with Him, and with Him alone, are the words of eternal life. No one can go to the Father except through Christ.  And He despised the shame. Are we ready to despise shame?

The Word of God births faith, and faith obedience, and obedience life. Sinful desire brings forth sin, and sin brings forth death. 

Sacrifice is only the inevitable corollary, not the purpose nor the goal nor the focus of our salvation. Sacrifice is a fruit of faith. Our goal is Christ, running towards Him with our eyes fixed ahead, our hands lifted above, and our hearts reaching out. 

 To separate love, grace, missions, etc. and all the Christian and Biblical issues from the cross is to remove all power and thus all salvation from God's Word, leaving us without God and without any Word at all. 

The selfish nature of man cannot be salvaged, let alone pampered. It is wedded to idolatry and to Satan. It has to be obliterated because it is incompatible with our union to Christ.

 There is not cross without the reality o God. Only a genuine encounter with Christ and an experience of His goodness will lead us to say, "Your goodness is better than life!" Life, the life that we leave behind, becomes of no importance because it is exchanged for something which is far better, the pearl of great price. Only when we meet Christ will we hear His call and receive the faith and grace to follow Him.  

There is no purpose to forsaking all if the forsaking of all is the end itself, without the reality of God and desire for God. It is empty, and meaningless. Nothing but Jesus Himself could call the young man to sell all he had, give to the poor, and follow Him. The cross is not the cross unless it is Christ who calls us to follow Him because of His immense love and grace and mercy.