Day 954 – Everyone Needs Grace – Meditation Monday

Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 954 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Everyone Needs Grace – Meditation Monday

Thank you for joining us today for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 954 of our trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices.

In my life meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and praying. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and make sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you too will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind. 

Even the most moral and ethically upright person cannot live up to God’s standard of righteousness. Because of this, we need a substitute to take our place. In our Meditation Monday today I want us to reflect on…
Everyone Needs Grace

Unfortunately, much of the world has repeatedly given up honoring the Creator. Most in the world have chased after worthless and depraved things. In addition, even those who seek to honor the Creator have also sinned. However, some of these religious people think that their religious knowledge and rules will save them. Many of the Jews in Paul's day had this belief. Unfortunately, some religious people in your day also have this belief. They think because they have made a religious confession, have read God’s Word, and have gone to religious meetings that they are somehow better. They forget Jesus’s words:

"Not everyone who calls out to me, 'Lord! Lord!' will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. On judgment day many will say to me, 'Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.' But I will reply, 'I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God's laws.'" Matthew 7:21-23 NLT

Paul wrote the parts of Romans that are now chapters 2, 3 and 7 to remind all people — religious and non-religious, Jews and non-Jews — that their deeds, their rules, their book, their religious pedigree, and their church attendance will not bring them God’s grace. Salvation is by the Father's grace (Romans 3, Romans 5). This grace is received through faith (Romans 4). You share in this grace by participating in Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, which is represented through baptism (Romans 6). This grace is empowered by the Holy Spirit, Who brings the Father's will to life in you (Romans 8).

So the collection of verses today is a reminder of what Paul said in Romans chapters 2 and 3. He was emphatic: nothing and no one except faith in Jesus can make you right — not law, not Scripture, not race, not religious pedigree. Ultimately, all of these things have failed to enable people to live up to the God’s perfect standard of holiness. When you fail in one part of law-keeping, you are guilty of all (James 2:10). If you break one law, you are a lawbreaker.

Paul wanted the Roman believers and other believers who came after them to understand that no one can be saved without the Father's gift of grace purchased by Jesus’s death on the cross and empowered by the Holy Spirit. By their failure, all people stand condemned to live righteously without flaw and have missed God’s holy standard. Jews have failed to live up to the full standards demanded by the Mosaic law. Gentiles have failed to live up to the righteous standards of holiness. Everyone needs a Savior. No one can claim religious superiority. Everyone needs Jesus’s grace!
· Verses to Live
 

In today's verses, you will be reminded that without grace,