New Morning Mercies for Teens: A 10-Day Gospel DevotionalSample

If you obey for a thousand years, you’re no more accepted than when you first believed; your acceptance is based on Christ’s righteousness and not yours.

Sin is a bigger disaster than we think, and grace is more amazing than we seem able to grasp. Because if you know what the Bible says about sin, you know it’s impossible for someone to rise to God’s standard of perfection. No one can perform his or her way into acceptance with God. What an insane delusion! Yet we all tend to think that we are more righteous than we are. And when we think this, we’ve taken the first step to embracing our own delusion: maybe we’re not so bad in God’s eyes after all.

This is why the reality check of Romans 3:20 is so important. Paul writes, “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight.” If you prayed every moment of your life, you could not pray enough prayers to earn acceptance with God. If you gave every penny of every dollar that you ever earned in every job you ever had, you could not give enough to deserve acceptance with God. If every word you ever spoke was uttered with the purest motives, you would never be able to speak your way into reconciliation with God. Sin is too big. God’s bar is too high. It is beyond the reach of every human being who has ever taken his or her first breath.

This is why God, in love, sent his Son (Rom. 5:8). You see, there was and is no other way. There is only one portal to acceptance with God—the righteousness of Christ. His righteousness is given over to our account; sinners are welcomed into the presence of a holy God based on the perfect obedience of another.

Christ is our hope, Christ is our rest, Christ is our peace. He perfectly fulfilled God’s requirement so that in our sin, weakness, and failure, we would never again have to fear God’s anger. This is what grace does! So as the children of grace, we obey as a service of worship, not in a desperate attempt to do what is impossible—independently earn God’s favor.

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:8)

Reflect: What’s been the biggest hardship of your week? Take a few minutes to compare this hardship with the disaster of sin. How is Christ your hope over all of it?