God prepared in advance

Wednesday March 21st, Ephesians 2: 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. What good works has God prepared in advance for you to do today? It is true we are saved by grace. The next step however is to reach out and be graceful to others. It is when we move from being recipients only of God’s grace to being the bringers of God’s grace that we really start to get it. In the midst of every crisis is an opportunity. The crisis we are now facing is a crisis of major power change. This ripple in the comfort zone of the haves is getting much more attention than the plight of the have nots has ever gotten. Can we grasp this economic difficulty as an opportunity to work toward the economic changes needed to overturn the direction of the last 30 years and open the door to the poorest in the world? As we cut back on the number of times we go out to eat, can we find an opportunity to allow someone we don’t know to feed their children at home? For the sake of our brothers and sisters in Christ we have never met, and never will meet, can we give up 1% of our future wealth to help bring about an increase in their survival? In the story of the Good Samaritan, who do you want to be remembered as, the one who maintained their righteousness through purity and passed by or the one who was truly righteous in God’s eyes and stopped to help? We are saved by grace it is true, but it is not, as Bonhoeffer would say, Cheap Grace. It is Costly Grace that compels us into action. Not action to be saved, but action because we are saved, because we are the children of God, because we are, like it or not, brothers and sisters in Christ.