Because of sin, man is separated from God and has tarnished the image of God in him.
Man now has true guilt before a holy God and the only hope to absolve that guilt is by God's grace through faith in the finished work of Christ alone – plus nothing.
That's Paul's point in his letter to the Galatians.
When we are reconciled with God through the righteousness of Christ alone, we pass from death to life; from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light; and in that moment, fellowship with our Creator is once again restored—the very thing we were created for in the first place—and we are, individually, children of God.
Now, while this new birth is necessary in the beginning, it is just a beginning. Once reborn, the important thing now becomes living out our lives in the fullness for which we were created and now redeemed.
After a Christian is newly remade into a new creation in Christ, that person often formulates a list of things, primarily negative and depending on their particular life context, that they shouldn't do since they are now “Christians.”
But even though the list may contain some things that Scripture clearly does prohibit, we must be careful to emphasize that true spirituality in the Christian life is more than refraining from a list of forbidden things.
Schaeffer calls the last commandment, not to covet, “the hub of the wheel” (p7). That is to say, that coveting is an internal sin—a sin of the heart—from which all other sins listed in the remaining 9 flow.
The other nine are external sins; they are outward acts against God. We commit them because we either covet against God or we covet against our neighbor.
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