God's Grace Alone, God's Glory Alone
Notes
Transcript
Family Matters:
Family Matters:
Thanksgiving potluck after… Sunday School starting up Dec. 4th @ 10:00 am adults and kids… Membership class...
Call to Worship
Call to Worship
1 Timothy 6:15-16 “[God] is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.”
Prayer
Prayer
Adoration: God of power which lifted us up from spiritual death and seated us in heaven with Christ
Confession: Fear—we forget your power; idolatry—we regard other things as more precious than direct access to You through Christ
Thanksgiving: You forgive us; You defend us both from hell and also in day to day struggles, You don’t give us more than we can bear; you care for us.
Supplication: That our hearts be bound together; Arthur’s TV spot and persecution for speaking out against paganism and the prosperity gospel; Youth, lost and unloved; POTUS Biden
Benediction
Benediction
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.
Sermon:
Sermon:
(Read Eph. 2:7-10)
Deconstruction. It’s a common word these days in Christian circles. It means, basically, to go through a process of questioning everything you have been taught—everything you once assumed was true, from a Christian perspective—with the result of either abandoning the faith altogether or maybe selecting a version of Christianity which has been updated to match the culture.
Now, you need to know that asking questions—probing questions—about your faith can be a normal part of the Christian life. And doubt is also a normal part of the life of faith. You should not be afraid to share doubts and ask questions, especially when you are really looking for answers. Remember what the father of the demon possessed son said to Jesus?
“I do believe. Help my unbelief!”
And Jesus responded by healing his son. We all have questions and struggle with doubts. That is a normal part of faith, and not quite the same thing as deconstruction, as we will see.
But what comes to your mind when you hear the term deconstruction? Probably a collection of thoughts and emotions. Maybe sadness: someone you love has waked down this path. Maybe fear: why are so many people leaving the Christian faith? Why do so many people describe a long process of evaluating Christianity, which ends in abandoning the faith? Indeed, the surface-level description of deconstruction usually goes like this: it’s a long, honest process of asking questions, which finally leads to abandoning Christianity.
Sometimes, meeting a person like this is like looking out your window after an ice storm and seeing your favorite tree, snapped at the trunk, lying on the ground. It looks, for all the world, as if the ice was simply heavy enough to break the tree.
But as you gaze out your window, you begin to wonder: you have other trees of similar shape and size, which appear to be completely unharmed. What happened? Well, when you actually walk out into the cold to examine the tree, you find what was previously undetectable: the tree may have looked good on the outside, but it was rotting away on the inside. The ice merely exposed it for what it was.
In the same way, someone can profess true faith, and appear to be living for Jesus for a time. But there can be a certain rottenness at the center of the wood, and all that is needed to expose it is a little extra weight: maybe a desire to behave in a way that God prohibits, which suddenly makes the Bible inconvenient. And so someone walks away. Or perhaps more often, today, a way of imagining, of understanding the world which runs contrary to Scripture, but which can go undetected for a time until it comes into direct conflict with God’s Word. But when that conflict occurs between deeply held, subsurface beliefs and God’s Word, it launches the process of deconstruction, seemingly out of nowhere.
And what is this false way of seeing the world that often triggers deconstruction? Now, I need to warn you, I am definitely over-simplifying something which can be very complex. There are certainly other factors that come into play. But there is also this re-occuring theme in deconstruction stories: human-centeredness. Think about how we sometimes present the gospel: “God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Think of how a dead, selfish heart responds to that: “Really? Well, I’m interested, because I also love me, and I also have a wonderful plan for my life. I like this God fellow. Sign me up!”
Now, the phrase, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” is true, if rightly framed by other biblical truths. But a fraction of truth, like that, lifted out of its context and presented as the heart of the gospel, can be as dangerous as a lie. It is entirely man-centered. And the seed that you plant is often the plant that you get. Sow a man-centered gospel, grow a man-centered congregation. And then, do not be surprised when they deconstruct.
But the problem is deeper than that. On top of our (sometimes) weak gospel presentations, and on top of our man-centered culture (which is the water we swim in), on top of these is the self-centered condition of the heart. That heart-based self-ism simply defines us in one form or another prior to redemption. And after redemption, we are no longer enslaved to it—but we still wrestle with it.
But, the good news is that there is an antidote to these things, a truth which is effective medicine for self-ism. And the truth is this: salvation is by God’s grace alone, and therefore, by design, gives glory to God alone. Salvation is designed, ultimately, for God’s glory, and not for ours!
Look at verse 7 of Ephesians 2. It says, speaking of the reason why God saved us:
so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
God’s ultimate reason for saving us was to “show”—that is, to display or to direct attention toward—the immeasurable riches of his grace. In Christ, he has disclosed—he has made known—something of his infinite power and divine perfections. And he has done this for the glory of his own name. We’ve seen this before:
He has done these things, Ephesians 1:6, “to the praise of his glorious grace...”
He has done these things, Ephesians 1:12, “so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.”
He has given us an inheritance, Ephesians 1:14, “to the praise of his glory.”
And so, this is a very God-centered redemption. It is accomplished by God, and it is accomplished for his own glory. But to what extent is this the case? The human heart might say, “Well, sure. It is largely accomplished by God, and largely to his glory. But I have a part in it too, and so, maybe I receive a little bit of recognition for this also.”
And that’s a fare question. Because I’ve said that salvation is by grace alone, for God’s glory alone. But Paul hasn’t quite said that—yet. So, up through last Sunday, we might think, perhaps Paul left the door open a crack, to allow for a little bit of human effort in salvation and a little bit of credit to us as well. But then we run into Ephesians 2:8-9:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
In this verse, Paul begins with the word “for” because he is reconnecting to the nearly identical phrase that he wrote at the end of verse 5, which explains that God:
even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
So, in verse 8, Paul is reconnecting to what he explained there in verse 5. You were spiritually dead. Lifeless. Your heart was overrun by your own evil. Then, God acted. He made you alive by uniting you with Christ in Christ’s resurrection. This is the basic definition of salvation by grace. And we should remember: this form of death did not mean that you were spiritually inactive, but rather that you were in willing rebellion against you Maker. But in the midst of such evil, before you had any desire for God, he drew near to you in grace beyond words, and planted life in your heart.
But going back to verse 8, Paul adds, “through faith”. Why does he say this? Why these two little words? Because there are different ways that you could try to twist this passage to allow for human works to contribute to salvation, even just a little. But just as grace means that we do not have any part in causing our own redemption, so also does faith.
Grace means we don’t contribute to our redemption because redemption is all a gift of God.
Faith means we don’t contribute to our redemption because the one thing we “do” to be justified is trust someone else to do it!
If you think about it, you can only either trust someone else to do a thing, or work to accomplish that thing yourself. You can’t do both. You can’t both seek to earn your own salvation and also trust Christ to save you. To the extent that we try to earn Gods’ favor, we are forgetting our faith in his grace. Working for God’s favor and trusting in Christ are incompatible.
And so, faith is an extremely God-centered thing. It is downright humiliating. We are called by the gospel to abandon all hope of earning God’s favor, because we are totally unable to do so. We are helpless. But by the gospel also, we are called to surrender and trust in God who freely gives his favor to wretched sinners like us, through his Son Jesus.
And so, the fact that faith is all we can “do” to be saved is humiliating—it completely strips us of all spiritual pretensions, any thought that we have any traction or credit or leverage with God. But then, faith is also the place of divine blessing:
“Faith, then, brings a man empty to God, that he may be filled with the blessings of Christ.” —Calvin
And so we urge you, unbelieving neighbor, to turn away from all other attempts to justify yourself, or to earn God’s favor, or to find satisfaction on your own: surrender to God, and place your trust in his mercy to save sinners by his Son’s death.
But here, our hearts might try another trick on us: “I don’t understand why other people don’t also put their faith in Christ.” And most of us won’t say something like that out loud, but we begin to think in that way: “The fact that I’ve trusted in Christ is proof of my superior spirituality/intelligence.” And I have actually heard, several years back, someone speak basically this same thought, in so many words.
And so the problem is that someone might object to Paul, even subconsciously: “If faith is something that each believer personally exercises, then doesn’t that mean that we can take a small about of credit for our salvation, even if God did pretty much all of it? After all, it was my personal exercise of faith that justified me.”
How would we answer such an objection? Just look at the next part of verse 8: “And this is not your own doing...” What is not our own doing? The whole thing. Salvation by grace through faith, is all from God. None of it is our own doing. None if it is ultimately from us.
Do you remember what Paul said about God’s gracious gift of wisdom to us chapter 1 verse 8? He lavished his grace on us, “in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will.” In other words, when I was blind to the glories of the cross, God opened my eyes so that I could see its divine wisdom, so that we could grasp the gospel, and respond in faith. So then, even our faith, ultimately, springs from God’s own gracious work within us. Faith is simply how a new heart responds to the gospel. As the early church father Jerome wrote:
“[Paul] says, therefore, that [God] will show the abundant riches of his grace in kindness in the ages to come because you have been saved by grace by means of faith, not by means of works. And this faith itself is not from yourselves but is from him who has called you. Now so that the secret thought, “If we have not been saved by means of our works, perhaps we have been saved by means of faith, and it is in another manner that we saved ourselves,” [so that this secret thought] not sneak into our thinking by chance in reference to this, he thus goes on and says that faith itself is also not of our will but is the gift of God.”
So then, Paul continues in chapter 2 verses 8-9, “it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. So, it is not just that you shouldn’t boast, is that if you do try to boast, you won’t have a scrap of truth to stand on. If you are saved, you accomplished exactly none of your salvation.
We humans love to boast, to claim glory for ourselves. But here is Paul’s logic: salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, and therefore the glory of it goes to God alone: human boasting is utterly excluded. And why is Paul making this point? Because the ultimate purpose in salvation is to display the glory of God’s grace—and our view of that is threatened if we think that we can boast even a small contribution to redemption.
But there are two further objections that someone might bring against Paul at this point. First, if God acted ultimately for his own glory, then doesn’t that make God prideful? Selfish?
At first, this accusation seems reasonable. We would certainly say that about any human being who did things for his own glory. But the problem is, in order to make such an accusation, we have to sneak in a subtle but fatal error. When we talk that way about God, we are not picturing him as God at all. We are picturing him as some great soul that hangs out in heaven—very powerful, but ultimately, just a much more powerful version of a human person, minus the body. And so, he doesn’t have the right act for the glory of his name.
But God is not like us at all—he is completely “other”. All of creation, seen and unseen, goes into one category: created, and God, by himself, goes into the other: uncreated, eternally self-existing. R.C. Sproul was fond of saying: there is far more similarity between a worm and the highest archangel than there is between that archangel and God. Or listen to how Paul described God in another epistle:
who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
As it turns out, the very most foundational reason that pride is wrong is that it makes itself a competitor with God for glory. And the most foundational reason that selfishness is wrong is because it takes creatures designed to live for God and makes them live for themselves.
So then, it is part of the very definition of being God that it is right, good, and even necessary for our God act for his own glory. The universe was also created in his love and for his glory: the display of his glory is the goal of the universe. For him to put anything above the glory of his name would be a violation of his own integrity and of the design of his creation. It is so right for us to worship him: his person is infinite and his perfections are utterly unstained; he is the sole creator of all that exists; and he alone is the author of our salvation.
It is so right to worship God. But how bizarre is the thought that God would respond to our worship in any other way than graciously receiving it by the blood of his Son, our Great High Priest? He most certainly does not respond by turning around and worshiping us!!! The glory of all Creation rightly goes to him, and him alone; and so does the glory of our redemption.
Our human pride often makes us uncomfortable with this thought, because we crave glory for ourselves, apart from God’s gift, and because we have forgotten that his own worth is beyond human calculation. But in truth, it is simply fitting that God act for his own glory. And, when we see the truth about who he is, we can see that it would be unfitting for him to act for any other ultimate motive.
So then, in redemption, God acted ultimately for his own glory, but also, in his love. Astonishingly, he gave us his love through an unexpected act of mercy in Christ: he gave up Christ to be crucified that we might be made alive, able to behold his glory and worship him in joy forever.
That is the answer to the first objection.
But someone might bring a second objection against Paul: “If salvation is by grace alone, and human works are so utterly excluded from causing our redemption, then no one will care to do good works anymore, since good works do not earn heaven. They will have no motivation to do good works. Good works will be an optional part of the Christian life.”
This is the objection brought against ‘salvation by grace alone’ by Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, and others. And like the first objection, this one also seems reasonable at first glance. Won’t people stop caring about obeying God, if obedience isn’t what earns heaven?
But there is a subtle mistake here, too—a misunderstanding of what good works really are. What does Paul say?
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
We are God’s ‘good work’. So, Paul once again shifts the focus from us to God. The critical work is the work that God does, not the work that we do. Before we ever do any true good works, God himself first does his work, and makes us new.
And what Paul is talking about is this: if you belong to Christ, you are, he says, “created in Christ Jesus,”—you are a new creation in him. And that is an astonishing thought. We typically think of the New Creation as a future reality, and rightly so. One day, Jesus will return to make all things new. But here, it says that this New Creation has already begun with us: inwardly, we have been raised up with Christ, and so we have been re-created in him. Inwardly, we are already part of the future New Creation.
And we have been created new, Paul says, “for good works.” In other words, our hearts have been made alive for good works. This implies that good works were never really even an option for us before Christ. Sure, we could do nice things. We could be nice friends, good neighbors, decent citizens. But true good works—deeds which really please God—must flow out of a heart which loves God. And this is impossible before salvation:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—
Those who are spiritually dead walk only in sin, and not in true good works. So then, before Christ, we walked in sin. But now, in verse 10, Paul says that we have been made new, “for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” So then, it is God who makes a wretch alive from spiritual death, who makes his heart new so that he will turn from walking in sin to walking in good works. It is all from God, all of grace. And he even says that the good works themselves were prepared before hand by God.
So then, salvation is all from God, from start to finish. From that first gleam of spiritual life that takes root in a dead heart, all the way to the good works themselves which are the practical result of that new heart. Salvation is by grace alone, and therefore, brings glory to God alone, by God’s own design.
And this truth gives the gospel a very sharp edge: you cannot be saved by your works, and you cannot be saved for your own glory. Are you considering faith in Christ? You need to understand this: you were not created for your own sake, but for God’s glory; you do not live in a world that was created for you, but for God’s glory; and you are not being offered a salvation which is primarily centered on you. But the God of matchless grace and power offers you a redemption whose ultimate purpose is to display the glory of his own grace, to the praise of his name. In redemption, you are being invited to return to the purpose for which you were made: to glorify God and to commune with him in worship.
Salvation is not about therapeutic happiness, or satisfaction in this life. Salvation is about restoring humanity to our original design: to know and worship God, and to live for his glory.
So then, it turns out that God does have a wonderful plan for your life: a plan which involves the pleasure of worship, and the pain of self-denial; the comfort of God’s presence, and the sorrow of suffering; new life in Christ, and a violent struggle against the remaining sin in our hearts. Indeed, a wonderful plan—but not in the way that many think.
So the next time that you hear someone say, “I left Christianity because the Bible won’t let people be who they want to be. It won’t let them be who they are. The God of the bible won’t let people express themselves as the truly feel that they are,” what should you do? Be kind and patient. Mourn for the lie which has been believed. Persevere in prayer and love, and seek God’s help. But, don’t be shaken in your own faith. Many leave behind an outward profession of faith, because inwardly, the version of the gospel they professed to know was laced with the fatal flaw of human-centeredness.
But then, by the same truth, we should check our own hearts as well. How very quickly we fall into this same error! In fact, the American church, even among true believers, is laced with human-centeredness, and we should not think that our own congregation or our own hearts are free of it either.
For example, how do we talk about outsiders? How about the governor of this state? Or the next governor? They are both avowedly pro-abortion. They both ignore the lives of the unborn. Do we look down on them for that? If we really believe that our redemption is by grace alone and for God’s glory alone, then we cannot look down on them! What do we have, that we have not been given? Nor can we look down on anyone who is in the throws of the gender revolution. Not one part of our redemption, or anything truly good in our lives, originated with us. And so, grasping salvation by grace alone for God’s glory alone should humble us, to the point where we can humbly invite the world to experience the life-giving grace of the cross.
And finally, this should affect the way we, ourselves, live: if we have been re-created to walk in good works, then we have the same purpose as the original creation—to display God’s own glory. But this means that, you should not strive for holiness ultimately for your own sake. Now, there is a certain wisdom, a biblical wisdom, which says that righteous living is good for you. There is a proper and biblical kind of self-interest in doing what is right. The book of Proverbs is full of it. And Paul is not trying to push us away from that.
But the point is that the ultimate reason to do good is not for the benefits you may derive from it, personally. The ultimate reason to do good—to love your families, to serve your congregation, to do good to your neighbors in the community—is for God’s own glory; to bring honor to his name by displaying the glory of his grace.
And this gives us a vital puzzle piece for understanding suffering in the Christian life. There are so many different kinds of suffering we could talk about. But since I’ve mentioned deconstructing, I want to zero in on one particular example. It seems that, very roughly half the time that someone turns from homosexuality to Christ, the same-sex desire involved in that is healed. But the other half of the time, it is not. And so, a believer in that position is stuck in a place where he or she will have an unanswered desire, and a lifelong battle with sin, at least to some degree.
Why would God allow such a thing? That is the question which has driven many toward deconstruction. But it is a question based on several misunderstandings.
It misunderstands the purpose of human existence: to worship God, to know God, and to be defined by him, and not by our feelings and desires.
It misunderstands the shape of redemption: God is not our heavenly butler, whose one goal is to give us worldly happiness and comfort. Rather, he lays down for us a path of suffering in this world, which leads to glory in the New Creation, just as it was for Christ. That path is the same for everyone, whether that suffering is tied to same-sex attraction, or gender confusion, or a body which is breaking down, or poverty, or whatever else the case may be.
And finally, this question, “Why would God allow such a thing?” misunderstands the ultimate purpose of God in redemption: to bring glory to his holy name. Do we truly believe that God is worthy of praise? Here is the litmus test: do we think that he is worthy of the glory of our suffering?
How did the apostles react, after being beaten and disgraced by the high priest and his counsel?
Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.
Brothers and sisters, my God so open our eyes to his measureless worth, that we react the same.