Untitled Sermon (20)

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Read Psalm and Pray

Thanksgiving meal planned for November 12th 2017, If you invite someone which you’re free to do, please tell Layne so he can keep a tally on what to prepare.

Excited to welcome home Hannah back from Africa and rejoicing over God keeping her safe during her time overseas.

Next weekend we have David Miller coming.

The weekend after that will be Josh Sommer.

Fellowship dinner next weekend, let’s make it a pot-providence… I’d say pot-luck but God is Sovereign :)

There is a large number of pots and storage containers and such in the fellowship hall. They’ll be gone by next week.

Introduction

In keeping with what we said we’re going to be doing this week we will be looking at Sola Gratia.

That is that mankind is saved by Grace alone through Faith alone in Christ alone for the Glory of God alone.

With that in mind, please turn with me to .

Read and Pray.

So upon coming to our text for the day, I have to tell you, my excitement about this text cannot be explained.

Of all of the most profound aspects that I have ever learned about God, the idea of God’s Grace is probably the greatest.

Now I’m not down playing any other Christian doctrines.

But for me personally, grace is the most profound aspect of God that I have ever come to understand.

It is not only profound but it is also amazing.

There was a point in my earlier days as a pastor that I was struggling with some weighty matters and sins.

And it was during that period of time that I was asking the question about how it is that God, the holy and righteous King of all the World.

How it is that God could use someone as wretched as I am in the ministry.

Now I know what some of you are thinking.

Well it can’t be that bad you’re the pastor.

That means you’re better than us right?

Better at what?

Sinning!

Yes that would be a true statement but better than you in a righteousness way, not a chance.

My struggle was this:

Why would God take a man that’s as wretched as I am and place me in a position to teach others about Him.

The wretched and deplorable thoughts that would go through my mind and yet here was God, steadfast in mercy and abounding in Grace and using me to serve Him.

I really wrestled with this.

I struggled with this day in and day out.

And it was then that a friend of mine recommended one of the most influential books I have ever read.

Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners by Bunyan.

That book shaped my understanding of Grace in ways that are beyond comprehension.

And it was after reading that book.

After the countless many hours spent weeping over the pages of that book and seeing my own struggle within the life of Bunyan I could see finally see it.

I could finally see that for all this time I had a complete misunderstanding of what this grace truly was.

I, like many of you probably were was brought up into this understanding of grace that told me I must do something.

I must have some form of my own merit!

Now I’m not talking about keeping the Law.

I’m just talking being good.

Doing good deeds.

I compared God’s satisfaction and His love with me with my behaviour for the day.

If on this day I did everything just right and walked in what I believed to be perfect obedience, than by God’s grace He would be satisfied with me for the day.

But then I had to worry about about tomorrow.

I had to be burdened with this idea of being able to do things just right for Him.

And if I didn’t do everything just right, than the wrath of God could be there at any moment to strike me down.

You see what I was failing to understand was that had God wanted me to try to get up on my own, He would have made it possible.

He would have made it possible that I would be able to satisfy Him through my obedience.

Through my own good deeds and merit.

But that’s not what He did.

Instead, while I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me.

He didn’t call me to clean up my plate before He would work with me.

He didn’t call me to come so far and He would then pick up the rest of the slack.

Instead He looked upon my wretched soul and bestowed upon me a grace that is beyond explanation!

And it is with that in mind that I want to look at the doctrine of God’s Grace.

So let me ask you a question.

What is so amazing about Grace?

What is so amazing about Grace?

What is so profound about this doctrine of Grace that we believe in?

Let me first begin by giving you a blanket definition of what grace is.

Often times what we believe to be grace could be summed up like this:

God bestows upon man an unmerited favor.

Maybe one could even sum it up by saying that grace is to be given something that we know we do not deserve but someone gives it to us anyway.

Now both of those could be good blanket definitions of what grace is.

Yet both of those definitions are merely the human aspect of looking at how we should encounter one another.

How it is that we should treat one another.

Someone is completely down in their situation and we take a little of our excess and we share it with them and in a few ways, that could be considered grace.

Yet I don’t think that’s what the Apostle Paul is speaking of here when he talks about grace in a few sentences.

Instead, Paul took the time in the very first part of this chapter to give us an accurate rendering of what grace really is.

Paul tells us that prior to our redemption is Christ Jesus, we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

Now it is clear that Paul is not speaking of a physical death here.

The people he was writing to knew very clearly that this death that he was referencing had to do with something much more important.

Instead what Paul is talking about here is the deadness of mankind after the second greatest tragedy ever known to mankind.

That is the death that occured in the garden.

This is one of the most pivotal moments in all of the apostolic writings in dealing with the question of our own sinful nature.

This passage explains our human corruption in such a way that it casts aside many of the controversies which arose during the early Church.

Now most of you will remember that a few weeks ago we talked about the doctrines that entered into the early Church by Pelagius.

And if you remember correctly I had told you that a basic tenant of what Pelagian taught was that man was not truly sinful until he willfully chose to sin.

That man in and of himself had the ability to choose to do what’s right on the basis of his own moral compass.

And that there is nothing wrong with mankind's moral compass.

That at the heart of every single human being ever born is the ability to seek after God.

To choose to do right.

But this passage debunks that idea.

Paul didn’t tell the Ephesians that once they as the individual sin, they would now have a broken nature.

Instead Paul uses the description of someone who is dead spiritually.

The Greek word is Necros.

It’s where we get the root for the word corpse.

It means nothing outside of the word dead!

Now we still see some remnants of this Pelagian doctrine today.

Many of the Church’s around us teach a semi-Pelagian view of man.

They would agree with you that Pelagian was wrong in the area of man’s sinful nature.

They would tell you that man is sinful but, he has the ability in and of himself to choose God.

This is what is taught in many Church’s.

Now I’m not bashing the other Church’s.

It takes a lot of study and a true recognition of man’s position before a holy and a righteous God to realize this.

And many people cannot see past this and it creates a stumbling block.

Let me give you an illustration of what I am saying.

This semi-pelagian view teaches that man is floating in the ocean and in desperate need of a savior.

Someone who would reach down and give them the flotation device so that they can grab hold of it.

They teach that God tosses them this Gospel message and the person has the choice to either grab the flotation device or to ignore it altogether.

That man’s moral compass is simply cracked and that it still shows them the right way to go but that the screen is just cracked.

But what Paul is saying here is not that the screen is cracked.

What Paul is saying is that in the garden, when God said that on that day that you eat of the fruit of the tree, you shall surely die.

That actually happened.

And it was a spiritual death.

It didn’t merely crack the screen of mankind’s moral compass.

No instead it was like placing mankind’s moral compass under a sledge hammer and hitting so many times that the only thing left for you to see is the tiny bits and pieces.

That mankind isn’t merely floating in the ocean waiting on a life preserver to come their way.

They’re not laying in a hospital bed sick and in need of medicine.

They’re laying on the bottom of the ocean floor as a pile of bones.

Mankind is not merely sick needing medicine or awaiting a life preserver.

They are spiritually dead and in need of a miracle.

R.C. Sproul wrote it this way in his commentary on Ephesians:

“Fallen man is so overcome by the power of sin, that he is like a person on his deathbed, who has no physical power left to save himself. If he is going to be healed he can’t possibly do it through his own strength. The only way he can be made well would be if the physician gave him the medicine that is necessary to restore him. Bu the man is so desperately ill that he doesn’t even have the power to reach out and take the medicine for himself. So the nurse approaches his bed, opens the bottle of medicine, pours it into a spoon, and then moves it over the dying mans lips. But he must, by his own power, his own will and his own initiative, open his mouth to receive the medicine.”

Yet according to Paul, this man isn’t merely sick.

He’s not laying in the hospital bed about to die.

He’s already dead!

Classical Biblical Christianity as taught by the Apostles teaches that man is so fallen that he has no disposition, inclination or bent towards the things of Christ.

That fallen humanity would never respond to the call of the gospel unless first the Holy Spirit change mankind’s heart through regeneration.

Mankind at the moment of conception are born into this nature that is overcome by a sinful nature.

Though we are very much alive in the biological sense, we are dead in the spiritual sense.

And because of that deadness and without a divine intervention, we follow the course of this world.

We follow the internal spiritual nature which is given over to the prince of the power of the air.

And in that time we took every opportunity to satisfy the carnal desires of the flesh.

We followed those desires that come with being spiritually dead.

Those desire that reveal to us the pleasures of this world and the ways that we can twist and distort God’s original design.

And we seek after them!

As someone who was once an unredeemed person, I can resonate with this.

The things of God improperly applied for the fallen man is a lot of fun for the moment.

The women, the drugs, the alcohol.

Living my life to serve the person I had placed on the throne, myself!

All of them are fun for the moment but they are fleeting.

They are fleeting because in the big picture, they are not eternal.

Not only are they not eternal but the farther down the pipeline that you go in that direction of sin the farther you turn away from God.

You see our human nature that we’re born with already separates us from the King of Glory.

Yet when we begin down this road of sin we see the distance between God and ourselves getting farther and farther away.

And because of this, we were by nature children of wrath like the rest of all mankind.

We followed after the direction of our parents, Adam and Eve.

Now I’m not disregarding those of you brought up in the Christian life.

Many of you in this Church today were brought up into godly Christian homes and because of this you heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the moment of conception.

But believe this when I tell you, whether your conversion was so early that you cannot remember it or if your conversion was yesterday.

This was the nature that you were born with.

This was the nature that you had prior to your conversion.

Prior to your regeneration you were an object of God’s wrath.

As Paul clearly states not only were you at war with God but God was at war with you!

Yet here’s where Grace comes in.

You see God is righteous and Holy.

And because of His righteousness and His holiness, He could have separated Himself from us never looking upon our sinful state again.

He could have allowed mankind to live for merely a little while and then at the flood of Noah, rid the world of such evil as what mankind is.

He could have struck down dead Adam and Eve at the very moment of their sin in the Garden.

Yet instead, God revealed to Adam and to Eve just what it would take for them to be restored by slaughtering and animal in their presence.

By then taking and laying upon Adam and Eve a covering not their own.

He shed innocent blood for them and wrapped them in the garment of the one He slaughtered on their behalf.

If there’s not a sermon in that we better stop preaching.

You see, this is what we find in dealing with the character of God.

Paul lay’s it out in this text when he says only two of the most beautiful words to ever be found in Scripture.

But God....

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, made us alive together with Christ.

By Grace have you been saved.

By Grace!

We could have and should have been left in the depths of our own depravity.

Lord knows that as wretched of a man as I am, that’s where I deserve to be!

But it is by Grace that this is not where I am today.

Grace is God’s knowing who we were before the foundations of the world were ever created and still choosing to redeem us!

This is the essence of Reformed Theology.

That it was the overarching and outreached hand of God that brought to Himself a people who not only couldn’t come to Him, but wouldn’t come to Him.

God looked past mankind's rebellion and our deep diving into rejection of Him.

And said this before the foundations of the world.

That person is mine!

If it cost me everything I will bring them into my own.

They shall be mine.

And against all that God would have been right in doing, He reached to His people and He bestowed upon them new life.

That new life that we receive does not come on the basis of anything that we can do but instead comes to us while we are yet dead in our sins.

Think of it this way, if you are a Christian, why are you a Christian?

Is it because you are somehow better than others?

Is it that you had the ability to choose that which was right and your neighbor did not?

Is it because you were more intelligent?

I can assure you that if you believe that the reason that you’re a Christian, than you are stealing the Glory of God.

The New Testament teaches us that in Christ we have nothing to boast about except that Christ has given us new life.

If you’re a Christian it is because God in His righteousness bestowed upon you a gift that you did not deserve.

Beloved you owed to Him a debt that you could never pay and by His Grace He prayed it for you!

This is the Grace of God.

It’s unmerited favor which provides an undeserved benefit.

Grace is the reason and the means by which God transmits the faith that we need to stand Justified before Him.

Instead of God laying upon us the sentence that we deserve, He bestows upon us His Grace.

Instead of God laying upon us the sentence that we deserve, He bestows upon us His Grace.

And we beloved, we should look at the world and realize that if it weren’t for the Grace of God, we’d be just like our lost neighbor!

You know, it is this right here that has always made me ask the question of why it is that some Christians hold up their noses at fallen humanity.

When they look at their neighbor who is still stuck in their sins and trespasses they develop an arrogance about themselves.

And it’s because they misunderstand grace!

Grace is simply that!

Grace is us realizing that it is you and I that stand in the garden with Adam and Eve.

It is you and I that God looks at as being rebellious.

And it is you and I that God must offer a way to cloth us in something besides our own sinful nakedness.

It was the late reformer John Bradford who said this, “There but for the Grace of God, go I!”

What humility it takes for us to look at the rest of unredeemed humanity and realize that if it weren’t for the Grace of God, we’d be much worse than what we are!

We’d be without the good news of the Gospel.

It was Grace that sent Jesus to the cross of Calvary.

It was Grace that poured out the punishment for your sin upon Him.

It was Grace that raised Christ from the dead.

And its Grace that makes you righteous in Christ.

It’s ultimately the Grace of God that acts upon your soul to bring you into His family.

And yet for countless many years people have been trying to take this grace away from God and apply it to man.

In the early Church it was men like Pelagius who would say that choosing God is all upon you.

And therefore it was not by Grace that you were saved but based upon your own intelligence and ability.

In the time of the Protestant Reformation which we’re celebrating this month, it was the Roman Catholic Church who would downplay Grace.

They taught that a persons standing before God was impacted on the basis of their merit.

They taught for countless many years that man had to operate off some form of penance.

That God bestows a small portion of grace upon you and that makes salvation possible.

And as you live your life you must live in obedience and earn your own merit before God.

That God would one day look upon all the good deeds done in your life and then He would weigh it out and if you needed some extra merit, you could borrow some of Jesus’.

And if Jesus’ merit wasn’t enough you could borrow some of Mary’s or maybe some of the other saints who had plenty of extra merit to share with you.

You see this is the distinction that the Reformers fought against.

The great reformers who finally began to study their Bibles and then to teach the people all around them rediscovered what was hidden for a time.

They rediscovered Grace!

They rediscovered that the merit of Christ was not only abundant but was wholly sufficient and completely effective.

When Luther began to correct this corruption within the Church, He began to see Paul’s words in Ephesians and in Romans.

He began to see that anything that you or I could ever do to try and merit favor before God is smashed to pieces by Paul.

Paul here clearly defines Grace as the method and the basis by which we are saved.

Grace is the cause of our salvation.

Grace is truly defined as follows:

Dictionary of Bible Themes 6666 grace

The unmerited favour of God, made known through Jesus Christ, and expressed supremely in the redemption and full forgiveness of sinners through faith in Jesus Christ.

That is the greatest definition of Grace that we should ever know.

That Jesus Christ is offered up on the Cross on our behalf.

And by God’s Grace, we are brought into redemption.

So let me ask you this question, have you experienced this grace in your life?

I’m not asking you if one time many years ago if God did something for you then.

I’m asking you if you’ve been redeemed.

Salvation is a work of God whereby He bestows upon His people His grace through Jesus Christ.

Irregardless of how great or small of sinners you have been.

Though there is no universal atonement, yet in the word there is a warrant given to offer Christ to all mankind, whether elect or reprobate

Corruption is ingrained upon our hearts and interwoven into our very nature.

The weight of this sinks deep upon our soul and that burden that you feel will never be cured apart from a miracle of grace.

Beloved if you’re here today and you have no clue whether you are redeemed or not, cry out to God day in and day out that He would reveal to you where you stand before Him.

Cry out to God that He would redeem your soul through His wonderful working of Grace.

Maybe that’s not you.

Maybe you are just like I was and you look at yourself day in and day out wondering how it is that God could love and bestow Grace upon you.

Listen to me.

If you’ve not heard anything I’ve said to you this entire time, open up your eyes and ears and hear this.

God’s grace in your life is not dependent upon you satisfying Him!

He didn’t start the process with a little bit of grace and is now over here waiting on you to perfect what he’s given you.

It’s completely dependent upon Him!

That’s the whole point of Grace Alone.

Salvation is by Grace Alone, through Faith Alone in Christ Alone for the Glory of God Alone.

Let’s pray.