Are Christians Still Sinners, But Saved By Grace? Part 2 Series

NOTE: New Light Faith Ministries and Barry Johnson Ministries, founded by Rodney V. Johnson and Barry O. Johnson, respectively, are partnering to offer Bible studies for Christians who are seeking to grow in their relationship with Jesus. This is a Bible study lesson, not a sermon. The Bible studies teach foundational truth that are designed to challenge, encourage and, most importantly, flame the fire of hunger in the Christian who wants to learn more about who they have become in Christ Jesus. The Bible studies you find on this site contains the written version of the lesson. However, these lessons also include a video and an audio file of the study, a PDF version of the lesson and a sheet for note taking. If you would like any of the additional resources for these studies, please email us at newlightfaithministries@gmail.com or bjteachingltr@gmail.com for more information or contact us at the email provided on both of our Sermon Central pages. Be blessed.

Are Christians Still Sinners, But Saved By Grace? Part 2

(Rev. Barry Johnson and Rev. Rodney Johnson)

Introduction

In our first lesson of this series, we shared with you that the statement, “I’m a sinner saved by grace!”, while popular in the Church today, biblically is not true. A more biblically accurate description of a Christian is, “I was a sinner saved by grace! Now I’m a righteous, blameless, holy child of God!”

This is the second lesson in our series dealing with the question of whether a person, who has accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and is now saved, can continue to live the life of a sinner because they are saved as a result of God’s grace. In the first lesson, we focused on the answer to the following questions: (1) How does being born again change us? and (2) How can being born again change how we live? For the purposes of this series, we identified seven ways how being born again changes us understanding that there are more. The seven ways we discussed in lesson one are:

1) The devil is no longer our father, which we saw in John 8:42-44.

2) God becomes our Father, found in First John 4:4 and First John 5:4.

3) We received eternal life, found in First John 5:11-13.

4) We are free from the power and the authority of darkness in Colossians 1:12-14, which destroys the thoughts that we can continue in sin.

5) We are made holy and just like our Father. (First Peter 1:15-16)

6) Because we are born again, we can now think exactly like Jesus, which we found in Philippians 2:5 and First Corinthians 2:16.

7) And lastly, we are exactly like Jesus with one exception: we are not deity as we saw in John 14:12.

These are the seven ways we are changed after we are born again. Because of this change, we also examined, for the purposes of this series, nine different ways being born again can change how we live, again understanding that there are more. These are:

1) We can choose not to sin, which we saw in Romans 6:4 and 12.

2) We can choose to bless those who wrong us, found in Romans 12:14.

3) We can choose to love God by living by His standards, which we saw in First Corinthians 6:1, 6 & 7.

4) We can choose to have a servant’s heart and we saw this in Galatians 5:13-14.

5) We can choose to share a brother’s burden with him until he is restored, found in Galatians 6:1-2.

6) We can choose to agree with the mind of our new nature, which we found in Ephesians 4:22-32 and Ephesians 5:1-4.

7) We can choose not to worry about anything, which we read in Philippians 4:6, 7 and 11-13.

8) We can choose to forgive people and live in peace with them, which we saw in Colossians 3:12-15.

9) We can choose to stand in the gap for those in authority by praying for them, as seen in First Timothy 2:1-4, 6.

As we ended the first lesson, our plan was to discuss who we are because of Jesus Christ living on the inside of us in the second lesson. And we will. But as we began to put this lesson together, a verse that we highlighted in the first lesson needed a more detailed examination. That verse is Romans 3:23 which says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We’re going to spend a few minutes looking at this verse. We only have to answer one question to understand this verse.

Understanding Romans 3:23

Thanks Barry. For us to understand Romans 3:23, the question we need to ask and understand the answer to is, “Who is the ‘all’ that Paul is referring to in this verse?” When we read verses 9 through 12 and 19 through 22, we see that Paul is talking about both the Jews and the Greeks (Gentiles) and their common spiritual condition – “they are all under sin.” (Romans 3:9) The Jews had the Law of Moses; the Greeks did not. But they did have one thing in common: both were sinners because they did not have the righteousness of God.