Many of us would confess to marital, financial or emotional mountains that need to be moved in our lives; but there is an even more important, negative and hindering mountain for many of us. It is an Old Testament mountain of law, rules and list-keeping. There is a new covenant mountain where we are free from sin and made righteous in Christ. Many of us have a foot on each mountain. We haven't fully trusted, or believed, Christ for the victory He won for us. God wants to shake the mountain of human effort from its foundations and remove it from our lives.

Unforgiveness will rob you of the spirit of thanksgiving. It's one of the many reasons God commands us to forgive others. Whether releasing someone from the pain they have caused you is relatively easy or one of the hardest things you could do, Claude Houde calls us to act on forgiveness. Only till you have done so can you find a true heart of worship and thanksgiving.

In scripture we can see a pattern of our responsibility as Christians, our inability to fulfill those responsibilities in our own human effort, and Jesus' grace which empowers us to be obedient to that which He calls us. Grace is not something we earn through works, but is an unmerited gift from God—made possible by Christ and the cross.

God sometimes suspends the comfort of His people to test His promises in their lives. It is through the testing of God's promises that He forms His living word in us. He plants in us a word of authority and mercy that breaks through the hardened hearts of our generation. It can be a painful process, but God has given us a vision of Christ to comfort our hearts through the dark times that He sometimes leads us into.

In a covenant of grace, what is our responsibility? Many of us freely accept the grace of God that brought us to salvation in Jesus, but after that we fall into a pattern of self-salvation. We strive in our own efforts to try and be pleasing to God, or to be some kind of super saint. Rather than walking in the freedom and grace that Christ won for us on the cross, we try to earn God's love through the law and works. The gospel is not just good news for the lost. Even as believers we need to be reminded daily of the freedom that we have in Jesus. Our responsibility is trusting that He will give us the grace to accomplish the unique calling that He has for each of us.

The Lord loves a cheerful giver. If we are able to sacrifice at all it is because the Lord has provided us the capacity to do so. He gives us the capacity to cheerfully give up those things that we thought were bringing us cheer. The Lord will give us both the willingness and the ability; it is God who is working in us both to will and to do.