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Showing posts with label Grace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grace. Show all posts

February 21, 2016

Reflections: Karma or Grace ? - by RM

"IT CAN ONLY BE BY GRACE"
Interesting sermon today at Church about the difference of Karma and Grace.

Here is the gist of it.

First, how can Karma be defined?

Karma is a Buddhist term which comes from Sanskrit and relates to fate and action.

You alone are responsible for your actions.

Karma is the law of cause and effect, an unbreakable law of the cosmos say the Buddists. You deserve everything that happens to you, good or bad. You created your own happiness and your own misery - even if you are a Syrian refugee. One day you will be in the same circumstances that you put someone else in.

Your actions create your future even when you think they are someone's else actions. What you are experiencing right now is what karma wants you to experience. Every feeling, every thought, has been prepared especially for you, even torture, rape, molestation, injustice, so you can learn from your past.

Karma includes a  reincarnation  process of redemption and purification, which is said to be the ultimate goal in becoming a pure, sinless, "God like person".  

So what  is Grace, and how is it different from Karma?:

Grace may be defined as the unmerited or undeserving favor of God to those who are under condemnation..

In other words no human can ever be without any sin or blemish whatever he does or says, and is also not able to change that by him or herself.

Grace shows us that only by the substitution of  Christ on the cross, who died for our sins, that humans can become free of all sin, and achieve eternal life, 

It is impossible for any mortals being to achieve a sinless life by themselves.with devine, super-natural intervention and substitution.

The reality of substitution is at the heart of the atonement. Christ accomplished all of the above benefits for us by dying in our place — that is, by dying instead of us. We deserved to die, and he took our sin upon him and paid the ultimate  penalty himself for us. 

This is what the meaning us of Christ dying for us (Romans 5:8) and giving himself for us (Galatians 2:20). As Isaiah says, “he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities . . . the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him” (Isaiah 53:5-6).

You see the reality of substitution underlying all of the benefits discussed above, as the means by which Christ accomplished them. For example, substitution is the means by which we were ransomed: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). Christ’s death was a ransom for us — that is, instead of us. Likewise, Paul writes that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13).

Substitution is the means by which we were reconciled: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). It is the means of expiation: “He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21) and “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). And by dying in our place, taking the penalty for our sins upon himself, Christ’s death is also the means of propitiation.

To close: Two implications. First, this process is a very humbling experience.

Second, “Greater love has no one than this, than he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Everyone the freedom of choice - but I am happy to have chosen Grace.

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