[Sons to Glory!]

Mike, I thought to also post the next day from that Hannah devotional, as it is taken from the same book of hers ("The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life") and appears to come right afterwards. This particular read really impressed me, and I'm thinking of sharing it with the Thursday breakfast bros here.

APRIL 26 BEING NOT DOING

We are continually tempted to forget that it is not what people do
that is the vital matter but rather what they are. In Christ Jesus neither
our performance of or omission of legal observances avails anything;
what counts is that we are "a new creature" (2 Cor. 5:17). God is a
great deal more concerned about our really being "new creatures"
than about anything else, because He knows that if we are right in our
inner being, we will certainly do right outwardly. We may, in fact,
sometimes even do right without being right at all, but no doing of
this kind has any vitality in it or is of any real account. The essential
thing, therefore, is character; doing is valuable only as it is an
indication of being.

Paul was grieved with the Galatian Christians because they
seemed to have lost sight of the truth that the inward life, the "new
creature," was the only thing that availed. They had begun on this
plane, but they had "fallen from grace" (Gal. 5:4) to a lower plane,
where the "oldness of the letter" was put in place of the "newness of
the spirit" (Rom. 7:6). Paul wrote, "Christ is become of no effect unto
you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from
grace" (Gal. 5:4).

This passage is the only one in which the expression "fallen
from grace" is used in the New Testament. It means that the
Galatians had made the mistake of thinking that something else
beside Christ was necessary for their right Christian living. Paul warned
them to remember that Christ alone was enough, and that nothing
else must be added. (SEC, 159)