The Gospel Message
1. God made you.
2. God wants to have a relationship with you.
3. But your sin separates you from God.
4. Jesus took the punishment your sins deserved. Christ perfectly lived the laws of God, died, and rose from the dead to save sinners. He convicts the soul of sin and reveal the goodness of God's love, mercy and grace that calls the person to confess their sin and to repent of their sin.
5. Receive Jesus as your sacrifice to God for your sin.
6. You repent from sins and trust in him for your salvation, you will be forgiven, justified, and accepted freely by grace, and indwelt with his Spirit until you die and go to heaven.
7. Live out the new life in the Kingdom of God by faith. Acknowledgment of Jesus as LORD, crucifying your worldly self and live in the newness of the in dwelling Holy Spirit of Jesus, forsaking your sin in obedience to all He commands.
8. Repenting when you fail pleading for mercy. Trusting in Him, especially his love and mercy.
9. Love God above all-even yourself and love your neighbor as you love yourself. Forgiving others as God has forgiven you.
If anyone shall say that the grace of justification is attained by those only who are predestined unto life, but that all others, who are called, are called indeed, but do not receive grace, as if they are by divine power predestined to evil, let him be anathema." [17]
Christ's passion was not only a sufficient but a superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race; according to 1 John 2:2, 'He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.
While the grace it provided is sufficient to pay for the sins of all men, this grace is not made efficacious (put into effect) in the case of everyone. One may say that although the sufficiency of the atonement is not limited, its efficiency is limited. This is something everyone who believes in hell must acknowledge because, if the atonement was made efficacious for everyone, then no one would end up in hell.
The difference between the atonement's sufficiency and its efficiency accounts for Paul's statement that God is "the Savior of all men, especially those who believe." [22] God is the Savior of all men because he arranged a sacrifice sufficient for all men.
He is the Savior of those who believe in a special and superior sense because these have the sacrifice made efficacious for them. According to Aquinas, "[Christ] is the propitiation for our sins, efficaciously for some, but sufficiently for all, because the price of his blood is sufficient for the salvation of all; but it has its effect only in the elect."
God's enabling grace is only sufficient and is made efficacious by man's free choice rather than by the nature of the grace itself.
Vatican II stated, "[S]ince Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate calling of man is in fact one and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery."
The gift of final perseverance is "the abiding in good to the end of life. In order to have this perseverance man...needs the divine assistance guiding and guarding him against the attacks of the passions...[A]fter anyone has been justified by grace, he still needs to beseech God for the aforesaid gift of perseverance, that he may be kept from evil till the end of life.
It is a RELATIONSHIP.
