Our salvation comes as a gift of God’s grace and appropriates by the response of faith. To understand the process of salvation, we must understand these two words. They are like cousins. They relate to each other.
Saving faith is faith in Jesus Christ and God’s requirement for receiving His gift of salvation. Faith is what we believe about Christ, and our hearts respond of trust that causes us to follow Him as Lord and Savior. The New Testament conception of faith includes four main elements.
Faith means family believing and trusting in the crucified and risen Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. It involves believing with all of our hearts, yielding up our wills, and committing our total selves to Jesus Christ as revealed in the New Testament. Faith includes repentance with the sorrow of turning from sin to God through Christ. Saving faith is always a repentant faith.
Faith includes obedience to Jesus Christ and His Word as a way of life inspired by our faith, gratitude to God, and the regenerating work of the Spirit. Therefore, faith and obedience belong inseparably together. Saving faith without commitment to sanctification is impossible and includes a heartfelt devotion and attachment to Jesus Christ. Faith expresses itself in trust, love, gratitude, and loyalty. Trust in something cannot be outstanding from love. It is a personal activity of trust and loving self-giving directed toward Christ.
Faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior is both the act of a single moment and a continuing attitude that must grow and strengthen. Since we have faith in a specific person who died for us, our faith should become better. Trust and obedience develop into loyalty and devotion; faithfulness and commitment develop into an intense feeling of personal attachment to and love for the Lord. The faith in Christ brings us into a new relationship with God: and exempts us from His wrath; through that new relationship, we become dead to sin.
Grace in the Old Testament reveals that God shows His love to His people, not because they deserved it, but because of His desire to be faithful to His covenant promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Justice is getting what we deserve; mercy spares what we deserve; grace gives what we do not deserve. The New Testament emphasizes the theme of God’s grace in the giving of His Son on behalf of undeserving sinners. God’s grace multiplies believers by the Holy Spirit imparting acceptance of power to do God’s will. The whole movement of the Christian life from beginning to end is dependent on God’s grace.
God gives a measure of grace as a gift to unbelievers, so they may be able to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. God gives grace to believers to be free from sin as described in Romans chapter six verses twenty and twenty-two, respectively. Grace is the will to do His good pleasure, pray, grow in Christ, and witness for Christ.
God’s grace must be diligently desired and sought. Some of His ways by which God’s grace receives are by humbling ourselves before God, studying and obeying scripture, hearing the proclamation of the gospel, praying, fasting, worshipping, being continually filled with the Holy Spirit, and participating in the Lord’s supper.
The grace of God can be refused by others, as stated in Hebrews, chapter twelve, verse fifteen. It can receive in vain: as stated in Second Corinthians chapter six verse one, put out as declared in First Thessalonians chapter five verse nineteen, set aside as prescribed in Galatians chapter two verse twenty-one, and abandoned by the believer as in Galatians chapter five verse four.