June 29, the powerful root of practical love. We know that we have passed out of death into life

because we love the brothers, 1 John 3, 14. So love is the evidence that we are born again,

that we are Christians, that we are saved. Sometimes the Bible makes our holiness and our love for

people, the condition of our final salvation. In other words, if we are not holy and not loving,

we will not be saved at the judgment day. For example, Hebrews 12, 14, Galatians 5, 21,

1, 1 Corinthians 6, 10. This doesn't mean that acts of love are how we get right with God.

No, the Bible is clear again and again as Ephesians 2, 8 and 9 says, by grace you have been saved

through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not of works so that no one

may boast. No, when the Bible says that we are saved by faith, but that we must love people

in order to finally be saved, it means that faith in God's promises must be so real that the love

it produces proves the reality of the faith. So love for others is a condition of future grace

in the sense that it confirms that the primary condition faith is genuine. We could call

love for others a secondary condition which confirms the authenticity of the primary and

essential condition of faith which alone unites us to Christ and receives His power. Faith

perceives the glory of God in the promises of future grace and embraces all that the promises reveal

of what God is for us in Jesus. That spiritual sight of God's glory and our delight in it

is the self-authenticating evidence that God has called us to be a beneficiary of His grace.

This evidence frees us to bank on God's promise as our own and this banking on the promise

empowers us to love which in turn confirms that our faith is real. The world is desperate

for a faith that combines two things, awestruck sight of unshakable divine truth and utterly

practical, round-the-clock power to make a liberating difference in life. That's what I want to,

which is why I am a Christian. There is a great God of grace who magnifies His own infinite beauty

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