Romans 5:2 tells us that through Jesus, we are ushered into a place of grace where we can actually stand, and from there we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory. This is not a shaky, “maybe-if-I’m-good-enough” kind of access, but a settled relationship, secured by Christ. Today, this verse invites us to think about how we enter, where we stand, and what we’re looking forward to.

Grace: The Door That Never Shuts

Paul says we have gained access to God’s grace “through” someone—through Christ alone. “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’” (John 14:6). The gospel is not an invitation to knock on a locked door, hoping God might crack it open if we perform well enough. In Christ, the door of grace has already swung wide. The One who shed His blood has become our permanent Pass and our personal Escort into the Father’s presence.

This access is by faith, not by spiritual résumé. “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 may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Faith is not paying God; it is receiving what God freely gives in Jesus. When your conscience accuses you or the enemy whispers that you don’t belong, you don’t argue your worth—you point to your Savior. Your access is not fragile, because it rests on Him, not on you.

Standing, Not Scrambling

Romans 5:2 declares that in Christ we “stand” in grace. This is the opposite of religious anxiety. You are not hanging by a thread over God’s judgment, hoping your performance will hold. You are planted on solid ground. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). God is not waiting for you to slip so He can push you out of His presence; He has set you in a relationship secured by the finished work of His Son.

Standing in grace changes how you come to God in daily life. When you’ve failed, you don’t hide—you come. “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). Confidence doesn’t mean arrogance; it means taking God at His word. Instead of scrambling to make yourself worthy, you stand on the worthiness of Christ and keep coming back to the throne that is, and always will be for you, a throne of grace.

Rejoicing in the Hope of Glory

“Through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). Standing in grace now naturally leads to rejoicing in future glory. God’s plan is not merely to forgive you and leave you as you are; He intends to share His glory with you. “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Colossians 3:4). The future is not dark or uncertain for the believer—it is blazing with the promise of seeing and reflecting the glory of Christ.

This hope is not wishful thinking; it is a settled certainty anchored in the resurrection. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). A living hope sings in the middle of ordinary days and heavy burdens. As you remember where you stand and where you’re headed, joy stops being an optional extra and becomes the natural response of a heart that knows: my past is forgiven, my present is grace, and my future is glory.

Lord Jesus, thank You for giving me access into the grace in which I stand. Today, help me come boldly, stand firmly, and rejoice loudly in the hope of Your glory, living in a way that points others to You.

ONE BIG PROBLEM IN MANY PARTS of the world today is to learn how to read, and in others it is to find something to read after one has learned. In our favored West we are overwhelmed with printed matter, so the problem here becomes one of selection. We must decide what not to read.

Nearly a century ago Emerson pointed out that if it were possible for a man to begin to read the day he was born and to go on reading without interruption for seventy years, at the end of that time he would have read only enough books to fill a tiny niche in the British Library. Life is so short and the books available to us are so many that no man can possibly be acquainted with more than a fraction of one percent of the books published.

It hardly need be said that most of us are not selective enough in our reading. I have often wondered how many square yards of newsprint passes in front of the eyes of the average civilized man in the course of a year. Surely it must run into several acres; and I am afraid our average reader does not realize a very large crop on his acreage. The best advice I have heard on this topic was given by a Methodist minister. He said, "Always read your newspaper standing up." Henry David Thoreau also had a low view of the daily press. Just before leaving the city for his now celebrated sojourn on the banks of Walden Pond a friend asked him if he would like to have a newspaper delivered to his cottage. "No," replied Thoreau, "I have already seen a newspaper."

In our serious reading we are likely to be too greatly influenced by the notion that the chief value of a book is to inform; and if we were talking of textbooks of course that would be true, but when we speak or write of books we have not textbooks in mind.

The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself. The best writer is one that goes with us through the world of ideas like a friendly guide who walks beside us through the forest pointing out to us a hundred natural wonders we had not noticed before. So we learn from him to see for ourselves and soon we have no need for our guide. If he has done his work well we can go on alone and miss little as we go.

That writer does the most for us who brings to our attention thoughts that lay close to our minds waiting to be acknowledged as our own. Such a man acts as a midwife to assist at the birth of ideas that had been gestating long within our souls, but which without his help might not have been born at all.

There are few emotions so satisfying as the joy that comes from the act of recognition when we see and identify our own thoughts. We have all had teachers who sought to educate us by feeding alien ideas into our minds, ideas for which we felt no spiritual or intellectual kinship. These we dutifully tried to integrate into our total spiritual philosophy but always without success.

In a very real sense no man can teach another; he can only aid him to teach himself. Facts can be transferred from one mind to another as a copy is made from the master tape on a sound recorder. History, science, even theology, may be taught in this way, but it results in a highly artificial kind of learning and seldom has any good effect upon the deep life of the student. What the learner contributes to the learning process is fully as important as anything contributed by the teacher. If nothing is contributed by the learner the results are useless; at best there will be but the artificial creation of another teacher who can repeat the dreary work on someone else, ad infinitum.

Perception of ideas rather than the storing of them should be the aim of education. The mind should be an eye to see with rather than a bin to store facts in. The man who has been taught by the Holy Spirit will be a seer rather than a scholar. The difference is that the scholar sees and the seer sees through; and that is a mighty difference indeed.

The human intellect even in its fallen state is an awesome work of God, but it lies in darkness until it has been illuminated by the Holy Spirit. Our Lord has little good to say of the unilluminated mind, but He revels in the mind that has been renewed and enlightened by grace. He always makes the place of His feet glorious; there is scarcely anything on earth more beautiful than a Spirit-filled mind, certainly nothing more wonderful than an alert and eager mind made incandescent by the presence of the indwelling Christ.

Since what we read in a real sense enters the soul, it is vitally important that we read the best and nothing but the best. I cannot but feel that Christians were better off before there was so much reading matter to choose from. Today we must practice sharp discipline in our reading habits. Every Christian should master the Bible, or at least spend hours and days and years trying. And always he should read his Bible, as George Muller said, "with meditation."

After the Bible the next most valuable book for the Christian is a good hymnal. Let any young Christian spend a year prayerfully meditating on the hymns of Watts and Wesley alone and he will become a fine theologian. Then let him read a balanced diet of the Puritans and the Christian mystics. The results will be more wonderful than he could have dreamed.

That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, that ye may be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inward man. - Ephesians 3:16

It is a miserably inadequate conception of Christianity, and the gifts that it bestows, and the blessings that it intends for men, when it is limited, as it practically is, by a large number - I might almost say the majority - of professing Christians to a simple means of altering their relation to the past and to the broken law of God and of righteousness. Thanks be to His Name! His great gift to the world begins in each individual case with the assurance that all the past is canceled, and that He gives that great gift of forgiveness, which can never be too highly estimated unless it is forced out of its true place as the introduction, and made to be the climax and the end of His gifts. I do not know what Christianity means, unless it means that you and I are forgiven for a purpose; that the purpose, if I may so say, is something in advance of the means towards the purpose, the purpose being that we should be filled with all the strength and righteousness and supernatural life granted to us by the Spirit of God.

It is all well that we should enter into the vestibule: there is no other path unto the Throne but through the vestibule; but do not let us forget that the good news of forgiveness, though we need it day by day, and perpetually repeated, is but the introduction to, and porch of, the Temple, and that beyond it there towers, if I cannot say a loftier, yet I may say a further, gift, even the gift of a Divine life like His, from whom it comes, and of which it is in reality an effluence and a spark. The true characteristic gift of the Gospel is the gift of a new power to a sinful, weak world- a power which makes the feeble strong, and the strongest as an angel of God.

Oh! we who know how, "if any power we have, it is to ill"; we who understand the weakness, the unaptness, of our spirits to any good and their strength to every vagrant evil that comes upon them to tempt them, should surely recognise as a Gospel in very deed that which proclaims to us that the " everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth," who Himself "fainteth not, neither is weary," hath yet a loftier manifestation of His strength-giving power than that which is visible in the heavens above; where, "because He is strong in might, not one faileth." That Heaven, the region of calm completeness, of law unbroken, and therefore of power undiminished, affords a lesser and dimmer manifestation of His strength than the work that is done in the hell of a human heart that has wandered and is brought back, that is stricken with the weakness of the fever of sin, and is drawn again into the strength of obedience and the omnipotence of dependence. It is much to say, "For that He is strong in might, not one of these faileth"; it is more to say, " He giveth power to them that have failed; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength." The Gospel is the gift of pardon for holiness, and its inmost and most characteristic bestowment is the bestowment of a new power for obedience and service.