"Counting The Cost"

To be a child of God, is to understand the price that was paid for our sins to be forgiven; knowing the difference between that which is our role in our salvation, and that which is our Lord's. His role was to make us holy and acceptable; our role is to accept what He has done for us, and then to act accordingly. And a prime resource that we have, within our own strength to be holy, is made possible by counting the cost of what He has done. Instead, we spend more energy on counting the cost of what we do, might do, or have done; which in and of itself is not a bad thing; however, it is not the prime cost to be counting. In other words; by us counting the cost of what Jesus did, we are given over to the powerful work that was accomplished on that cross, which is the essence of our salvation; yet, the flip side of that, is the work that we do, or don't do in response to what He has done for us; which might be important for us to consider, but in no way changes what He has done, or takes away from the salvation which has been provided to us. Do we really understand this? I don't think that we do most of the time; because otherwise, why would we not act accordingly? If we did, then we would walk upright, knowing that we have been made uprightly, in order to do so. To put that another way: to be free from sin, and the power of sin, is only made possible because Jesus has defeated sin in the first place! Now, couple that with the fact that we are made to be without sin by the price that He paid upon the cross, which was not only to defeat sin, but was also to place us in a right standing with the Father, and you have the sum total of what we are in Christ: justified and set apart...