If I follow all the restrictions that my church tells me to do, will I be OK with God?
Answer:
The short answer is “No”. This doesn’t mean that you should disobey what your church tells you to do, but to consider the more fundamental question:
How can we be “OK” with God?
The Bible makes it very clear that following rules and keeping church traditions does NOT make your status “ok” with God. Rules and restrictions have a form of godliness but they don’t deal with the issue of removing our sin and presenting us acceptable to God. All men have fallen short of God’s standards.
Romans chapter 3 makes it very clear that justification before God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. It also clarifies that this justification in not based on observing the law (restrictions) but solely on faith in Jesus Christ. Read what this passage of scripture makes clearer.
Romans 3:22-28:
“This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood… he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.”
We are in need of a savior to rescue us from our fallen state. God in his own kindness and mercy sent Jesus to live the life we could not live and carry the burden of sin on our behalf. Jesus, by dying on the cross and being raised to life, paid the price for man’s sin and in so doing has reconciled man to God.
Here are two more verses to emphasize that man is saved by grace, through faith.
Colossians 1:20:
“and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Ephesians 2:8-10:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
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