Question:  Dear Greg,

            If salvation is through grace alone and if all people, even baptized Christians, are sinners, then why can I not be a Christian if I continue to live with and have a sexual relationship with my same sex partner?

            Would Jesus deny us the grace of his salvation?

            Derek

Answer:  Dear Derek,

1.      Salvation is through grace alone.

2.      Though forgiven, justified, reconciled, redeemed and sanctified, Christians remain sinners, in practice, as long as we live in this body of flesh.

3.      Christians, by biblical definition, no longer walk as they once walked, according to the flesh.  Christians, by biblical definition, are not one with the world but one with Christ.  Therefore, while Christians will at times slip, stumble and fall, they will not habitually continue a lifestyle of sin that they may have before they accepted Jesus Christ.  Whatever sins might have defined our lifestyle, we will renounce those for Christ.  It is Christ who forgives us, but he also tells us, as he told the woman taken in adultery in John 8, to “go and sin no more.”

4.      If any of us choose a lifestyle of sin over Christ, it is not Jesus who denies us salvation—that would be our choice.

            In Christ,

            Greg Albrecht