This Post features TWO brothers in Christ, Paul Ellis and Brad Robertson, helping us to distinguish between Jesus’ Gospel of Grace and the mixture of Law with Grace that is still taught in many churches, world-wide.

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Paul Ellis //

In churches every week, you will hear one of two messages. You will either hear a mixed-grace gospel or you will hear the hyper-grace gospel.

Do you know how to tell the difference?

A mixed-grace gospel combines the unmerited favor of God with the merited wage of human-effort. “You are saved by grace but you maintain your position through right-living,” is an example of a mixed-grace message. “God gives you grace so that you can keep His commands,” is another. These sorts of messages contain an element of grace but ultimately push you to trust in yourself and your own efforts.

Any mixed-grace message can be recognized by the presence of carrots and sticks. Carrots are the blessings you get for obedience; sticks are the penalties you pay for disobedience.

The mixed-grace message offers the following carrots:

If you confess, you’ll be forgiven

If you do right, you’ll be accepted

If you act holy, you’ll be holy

What happens if you don’t do these things? What are the sticks of the mixed-grace message? Fail to perform according to prevailing codes of conduct and you’ll lose your forgiveness, you’ll lose your fellowship, and, if worse comes to worse, you may lose your salvation.

None of this sounds like good news to me.

Yet tragically this is the sort of message that millions of people hear every week. They don’t hear about Jesus; they hear about the carrots and sticks.

Bite into any mixed-grace message and you will taste a bitter fruit. You will feel the pressure to perform and smell the fear that comes with failure. You’ll make promises to God and then you’ll break them. You’ll resolve to try harder only to fail again and again. You’ll become burned out and bummed out.

Since a mixed-grace message puts the emphasis on you and what you have done, your identity will become defined by your productivity. You will start to think of yourself as God’s servant instead of his beloved son or daughter. Worst of all, you will end up distracted from Jesus and “fallen from grace.”

Don’t swallow any poison that comes with a spoonful of grace. And don’t subscribe to any message that leads you to trust in yourself and your works instead of Jesus and his. To paraphrase Watchman Nee, “You can try or you can trust and the difference is heaven and hell.”

And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. (Romans 11:6)

You may have heard that God gives us grace in order to do good works, but this is misleading. God does not give you grace so that you can work. He gives you grace because he loves you. Period. Those who receive from the abundance of his grace do indeed work and often they work harder than anyone else, but that’s neither here nor there.

The issue is not what you’ll do for God but what you’ll let him do for you. Will you trust him a little bit or will you trust him the whole way? Does his grace merely get you in the front door or does it keep you safe to the very end?

As Jesus said, the only work that counts is the work of believing in the One he has sent (John 6:29).

This is the chief takeaway of the hyper-grace gospel. Adapted from The Hyper-Grace Gospel.

Want more specifics? Here is another Grace-based teacher and brother in Christ that I have connected with who amplifies what Paul wrote above. LR

What Does It Mean To Fall From Grace?   By  Brad Robertson

This is taken from pages 54-55 of my book “Addicted To Grace.” www.gracereach.org

Many believers have been taught that to fall from grace means a person has sinned so greatly that they have “backslidden” or fallen away from God and back into their old lifestyle of sin.

This is possibly what you were taught and have believed.

You may believe you have fallen away from God’s grace because of an addiction or because of immorality. In reality, you have fallen into grace.

Romans 5:20 says that where sin increased, grace increased all the more.

So according to the Bible, it is impossible to sin so much that a person has out-sinned grace, or fallen from grace.

To fall from grace does not mean someone has sinned so much that he has backslidden from God and fallen into sin.

That is not what the Bible teaches at all.

To fall from grace means a person has deserted grace as the means for righteousness (acceptance with God) and is now depending upon religious activity and morality to earn God’s righteousness (a right-standing before God).

Galatians 5:4 makes this very clear. It says,

“You who are trying to be justified (declared righteousness-innocent) by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.”

Those in this verse who had fallen from grace were trying to justify themselves, – to make themselves acceptable to God, through their obedience to the Law of Moses (religious activity and morality).

They had not, in anyway, backslidden into a life of immorality. It was just the opposite.

They were trying their hardest to live a life of morality, combined with large amounts of religious activity, thinking that their morality and religious activity would make them acceptable to God.

In pursuing acceptance with God through their own moral and religious efforts, they were no longer depending upon Jesus and the grace he freely offers for acceptance with God.

Therefore, they had fallen away from grace.

Galatians 2:21 teaches that if a person could gain righteousness – acceptance with God – by obedience to the law, then Jesus’ death was for nothing.

That makes perfect sense.

Think about it.

If morality and religious activity make us acceptable to God, then Jesus’ death was unnecessary.

But the fact is, apart from Jesus, we are all guilty before God in Adam – and no amount of morality and religious activity can make us acceptable to him.

Therefore, we need grace.

That is the point Paul makes in Galatians 2:21 when he wrote,

“I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”

Setting aside grace was exactly what the people of Galatia were doing.

They were setting aside grace as the way to become righteous, or accepted by God, and were seeking to gain acceptance with God through keeping the law.

So rather than receiving the free gift of God’s grace through faith in Jesus as the way to become acceptable to God, they were seeking to achieve acceptance with God through the morality and religious activity of the law.

It is important for us to understand that we do not gain acceptance with God through the Mosaic covenant of law, or any effort of our own, but rather through the New Covenant of grace (the cross of Jesus). It is also important for us to understand that seeking to earn acceptance with God through morality and religious activity is what it means to fall from grace.

If you have been taught that your addiction or sinfulness has caused you to fall from grace, you have been taught wrong. That is not what the Bible teaches.

The Bible teaches that you have fallen into grace.

Hold your head up and hold your hand out to receive God’s grace.

You have not fallen from grace because of your addiction or sin.

You have fallen into grace – God’s unconditional love and acceptance, unmerited kindness, unearned blessings, and unlimited forgiveness freely given to you in Jesus and received by faith.

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If you doubt the revelation in these two articles, remember: morality is synonymous with every belief system EXCEPT Christianity where morality is a by-product of a personal relationship with God our Father. The Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil (the morality tree) was good because God made it. BUT it was NOT good for Adam so God warned him not to eat of it. The New Covenant is not about following a set of rules and regulations like the Israelites were under.

All Christians – whether they know it or not – are under Grace – God’s gift of Righteousness At Christ’s Expense (not your expense.) Mixing Moses with Jesus is no gospel at all. It is committing spiritual adulatory by being married to Jesus – but still flirting with Mr. Law, Romans 7:1-6. We are not under any law that brings condemnation but under the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus which is “righteousness, peace and joy” which is the Kingdom of God, Romans 8:1-2. Rejoice! LR