If you have ever been around me at all you probably know that one of my favorite things to share with believers is “Grace perfects us”. I know a pastor who says, “Grace is a person.” That person is Jesus! What a revelation, when you combine the two: Jesus perfects us. This is good news for the one who knows this and who believes in Him by faith. Let me explain!

As believers we know that Christ came and lived perfectly fulfilling the Law in the flesh that He may die in our place for our sins. How many of us earnestly wanting to be like our Savior have desperately tried to imitate His actions to become more like Him? But the whole point to His doing them in the first place was because we could not. Do you realize that if we could have lived perfect Godly lives without Him then He died needlessly (Galatians 2:21)? So why do we try so hard to become like Him after we receive His Grace for salvation?

When calling non-believers to faith in Christ we say all you need is Jesus. Then once they receive Him we call them to a list of spiritual disciplines. To be a good Christian all we need to do is have a daily quite time, pray, read our bibles daily, memorize scriptures, go to church, tithe, serve others, etc. Not that any of these things are bad in themselves, but if we are using them as a means to Godliness then we will most certainly reap failure in our Christian lives (Galatians 3:10).

This type of discipline should not be called spiritual, but would better be described as religious discipline. Religion is man’s attempt to get or stay right with God. This is the one thing that separates Christianity from all other faiths. Christianity does not rely on man’s attempts to get or stay right with God, but rather relies on God for what he or she could have never have done on their own. This was the point that Paul was getting after in Galatians 3:3 “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”.

While I do not believe that Jesus wanted us to imitate His actions, there was something He did want us to imitate. He wanted us to imitate His method for doing the things that He did. Jesus depended completely on the Father for everything by Faith. Think about His words, “not I but the Father” and “I did not seek my own will, but the will of Him who sent me”.

In Colossians 2:6 Paul calls us to “walk in the same way we received Him”. We received Him by faith through grace and not of our own works (Ephesians 2:8,9). Jesus is the only one that ever lived the perfect Christian life and now by faith in dependence on Him we too can live righteously. The only reason that we are dead to sin is because He crucified our old nature. The only reason that we are alive to God is because He has united us with Him giving us His nature in place as our old one. His work makes it possible for us to live righteously, not us working in the flesh by our actions to become righteous. What I have been trying to call us to over this short series of articles is to know what He has done so that we may count on it and walk in it by faith. We as believers only have one goal everyday: to live by faith in Christ.

“The Righteous man shall live by faith”
Galatians 3:11