Grace and the Christian Life on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face.

I am thrilled to be joined this week on the podcast by Dr. Liggin Duncan, the chancellor and

chief executive officer of the Reformed Theological Seminary. We are glad you are with us, Dr. Duncan.

I'm thrilled to be here, He.

And we are, of course, together during the week of the

ACBC annual conference on the Protestant Reformation, and everybody is looking forward to your

talk on Sola Gracia. So we are really glad you're here and to talk to you about this topic

this week on the podcast. Well, anytime someone invites me to preach on grace to a group of Bible

believing folks, it's a happy thing. Well, that's good. We can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Got a couple of questions for you about this topic. First of all, explain the doctrine of

Sola Gracia. What is that? Well, what we're trying to emphasize is that salvation

is something that not only does God initiate, he accomplishes. And that means that we don't look to

ourselves for salvation. As Christians, we don't believe in self-salvation.

We don't look to our worthiness. We don't look to our efforts. We don't look to our works.

We don't even look to our faith as the basis or the ground of our salvation. Our faith is the way

we receive salvation, but we view salvation as a gift. It is a gift. It is a grant of God's love and goodness and grace to His people in Christ Jesus. And so salvation from beginning to end is the provision of God. and it's all of grace. It's a gift.

Now, when we use the phrase sola gracia, that is, of course, a Latin term, which harkens back to a

certain historical context, give us some background on the historical context of this term and why it was such an

important doctrine, particularly at the time of the Reformation. Well, in the Reformation time, there was a

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