text: — Till tamed and tortured into foreign graces, Hark! truth proclaims, thy triumphs cease! She sports her lovely face at public places ; Her heavenly form, with glowing hand,
  Last, the gray dowager, in ancient Rounces, WRITTEN TO BE SPOKEN BY MRS. Siddons.t With snuff and spectacles the age denounces; Yes, 'tis the pulse of life! my fears were vain ;
  Thus woman makes her entrance and her exit; -To drop all metaphor, that little bell Call'd back reality, and broke the spell.
  At once lights up the features of the soul ; * This remarkable event happened at the siege and Unlocks cach thought chain'd down by coward art, sack of Jerusalem, in the last year of the eleventh century. And to full day the latent passions start! Matih, Paris, p. 31. † After a tragedy, performed for her henefit, at the
  
  Because Paul could not make himself righteous or acceptable to God through obeying the law – the law itself had shown him that it was too hard for anyone to keep – he had given up trying to keep the law, or as he says, he had died to the law. He no longer tried to respond to the demands of the law. When a person is dead to something, he no longer responds to its demands. Because of this being dead to the law Paul is free to live for God. Jesus supplies the will and the energy to live as God would have him to do. This is living by faith. This is real. Many people because they believe that God wants them to be good will seek the help of the Lord in being good so that God will in turn accept them and love them. God does not want this. God does not want us to seek good. That does not work. God wants us to seek God. Remember it is relationship, relationship, relationship. Even with God’s ‘help’ we cannot be good enough to please God. When we seek God Himself, we automatically get better without hardly noticing it. That is the easy way.
  The object of the whole thing is for us to change. In order to change we have to have life-changing power in our lives. Grace, outrageous grace, accomplishes just that. The secret is that we as believing Christians never get what we deserve. If we believe that we get what we deserve, then we are locked into a never-ending loop of frustration and failure. Even if we seem to improve and then fall back again, we are again locked into the loop of failure. With outrageous grace, which is the same as amazing grace or just plain grace, the loop is broken. It is just that we have to realize the amazing and outrageous nature of just plain grace.
  We get only what Jesus deserves, which is the very best of favor and goodness from God. When we fail and sin, we get what Jesus deserves not what we deserve which is condemnation and punishment. We have to root this out at the deepest levels, or rather the Holy Spirit has to root this out for us, but we need to realize His task and try to cooperate as much as possible. Our repeated failures are what defeat us more than the occasional ones. We feel that we deserve to be punished by God. Sometimes we actually feel like we want to be punished then we can feel that we have earned the return of God’s favor. But we cannot play this game with two sets of rules. It is one or the other. If we try to change the rules away from outrageous grace, then the failure loop is in place again in our lives.
  A loop, just as in computer usage, just brings us back around to the same place to start over again and again. There is seemingly no escape unless this loop is broken. The loop of condemnation and guilt only brings about more failure in us because we are expecting failure and we do what we expect. If we believe that we deserve failure, then we will no doubt fail. We will not measure up to God’s desires for us or our own desires to please Him. Grace breaks the loop every time.
  Actually, in God’s eyes the loop was broken once-and-for-all when Jesus finished his work in the flesh and it broke the loop once-and-for-all for you as an individual when you accepted His work the first time. But the flesh re-establishes this loop again based on our experience of failure upon failure to measure up to our own expectations of growth and holiness. The person who does not want to please God has less of a problem here. I say less of a problem because his or her goal is not set to please God. But deep down they still know that they are failing their creator. But the sincere believer is constantly faced with the record of his or her own failures.