What Does Grace Demand?

What Does Grace Demand? Pt. 1 By Rev. Res Spears You might recall that when we started this sermon series on the grace of God, I took the unusual step of quoting a rock and roll musician to help illustrate my point that grace and karma are opposed to each other. I said then - and I meant it - that I don't want to make it a habit to quote rock musicians in my sermons, but I found myself drawn to a lyric from an old Bob Dylan song this week, so I'm going to ask you to bear with me once again. You see, all truth is God's truth, and God chooses to reveal His truth in any number of ways. God spoke truth through Balaam's donkey and from the lips of Nebuchadnezzar, the pagan king of Babylon, so it should not surprise us that we can hear words of truth even from a hippie songwriter and folk singer with a terrible voice. In a popular song from his 1979 album, Slow Train Comin', Dylan recorded these lines: "You may be an ambassador to England or France/You may like to gamble, you might like to dance/You may be the heavyweight champion of the world/You may be a socialite with a string of pearls/ But you're gonna have to serve somebody/Indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody/Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord/But you're gonna have to serve somebody." Now, according to Wikipedia - so you know it must be true - this song was the first of Dylan's gospel period that reached its peak with his album Saved. "Gotta Serve Somebody" earned him the Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Male in 1979 and was listed on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart for 12 weeks. As you can imagine, Dylan took a lot of flack from his rock and roll friends for his turn to gospel music. John Lennon, for instance, responded by writing a parody called "Serve Yourself." Truth has never been popular, whether it comes from the mouth of a prophet, from the microphone of a rock legend or from the pages of Scripture. But all truth is God's truth, and whether John Lennon wanted to acknowledge it or not, what Bob Dylan had written when he penned the lyrics to this song was truth that came straight from the Word of God. Today, as we continue our study of grace seen through the lens of the Old Testament, we'll see an early presentation of this theology of service from a familiar passage in the Book of Joshua, and then we'll connect Joshua's famous statement to one of the great New Testament passages on grace, the sixth chapter of the Book of Romans. By the time we're done, I think you will see something important about grace that might be surprising in light of all that I have said about salvation being entirely God's gracious work and about grace being the entirely unmerited favor that God shows to we who have rebelled against Him. Turn, if you will, to Joshua, chapter 24. Now, at this point in the biblical story, the people of Israel - the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - have finally moved into the Promised Land, the Land of Canaan, the land of their being made to be humble. They have by now won many battles against the pagan residents of this land that God had promised to Abraham and his descendants. Under Joshua, who became their spiritual and military leader after Moses' death, the people had seen great victories and had finally settled into the land of promise. And as we pick up in Chapter 24, we see Joshua as an old man, about to die, and he is eager to remind his people that their trust should ever be in the one true God, who had delivered their parents and grandparents from bondage in Egypt. And so, we see him, beginning in verse 1, giving a farewell address to Israel, starting with a reminder of what the Lord had done for them. Joshua 24:1-3 NASB95 Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and called for the elders of Israel and for their heads and their judges and their officers; and they presented themselves before God. Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, 'From ancient times your fathers lived beyond the River, namely, Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods. 'Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River, and led him through all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his descendants and gave him Isaac. Let's stop there for a moment. What made Abraham worthy of God's choosing? Nothing. Abraham, like his father and his brother, was someone who worshiped other gods in Ur, beyond the Euphrates River. He was a pagan who did not know Yahweh, but God in His grace chose him to be the father of the nation of Israel. Then God promised that old Abraham and his barren wife, Sarah, would have a son through whom the nations would be blessed, and Abraham believed, and his faith was counted as righteousness. His faith, which was also God's gracious gift, saved Abraham. And God kept his promise, giving Abraham and Sarah a son, Isaac, when he was 100 years old and she was 90. Now, let's go back to Joshua's account of Israel's history from there. Verse 4: Joshua 24:4-7 NASB95 'To Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau, and to Esau I gave Mount Seir to possess it; but Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt. 'Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt by what I did in its midst; and afterward I brought you out. 'I brought your fathers out of Egypt, and you came to the sea; and Egypt pursued your fathers with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. 'But when they cried out to the LORD, He put darkness between you and the Egyptians, and brought the sea upon them and covered them; and your own eyes saw what I did in Egypt. And you lived in the wilderness for a long time. Who delivered Israel from Egypt? God did, of course. And God led them with a pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night. But they still did not have faith that God would protect them. So when they saw the Pharaoh's army coming after them and their own escape apparently blocked by the Red Sea, the people raised their voices up against Moses and, by extension, against God. From the book of Exodus: Exodus 14:11-12 NASB95 Then they said to Moses, "Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you dealt with us in this way, bringing us out of Egypt? "Is this not the word that we spoke to you in Egypt, saying, 'Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness." What I want you to see here is that the people of Israel were unworthy of the deliverance they had received by God's hand. They had contributed nothing - and certainly not faith - to their salvation. This is the message I have been hammering on for weeks now. If you have been saved by faith in Jesus Christ, it is God who has saved you. Even your faith is a gift of His grace. Now, verse 8: Joshua 24:8-12 NASB95 'Then I brought you into the land of the Amorites who lived beyond the Jordan, and they fought with you; and I gave them into your hand, and you took possession of their land when I destroyed them before you. 'Then Balak the son of Zippor, king of Moab, arose and fought against Israel, and he sent and summoned Balaam the son of Beor to curse you. 'But I was not willing to listen to Balaam. So he had to bless you, and I delivered you from his hand. 'You crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho; and the citizens of Jericho fought against you, and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Girgashite, the Hivite and the Jebusite. Thus I gave them into your hand. 'Then I sent the hornet before you and it drove out the two kings of the Amorites from before you, but not by your sword or your bow. All these battles. All these enemies of Israel. All defeated. And by whom? God gave Israel her victories. Remember the first city in Canaan that Israel conquered? It was Jericho. Do you recall the great military strategy that led to Jericho's fall? "Hey, let's march around the city once a day for six days, and then on the seventh day, we'll march around the city seven times and blow some trumpets and shout and see what happens." What happened was that God delivered the city of Jericho into Israel's hands in a way that made it impossible to count the victory as anything but God's supernatural work. And he continued to deliver Israel's enemies into their hands, but not by their swords or by their bows. Now, verse 13 is the key to this passage: Joshua 24:13 NASB95 'I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you have lived in them; you are eating of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant.' God had given Israel land that it had not labored upon and cities that it had not built. The people were eating from vineyards and olive groves they had not planted. They were experiencing God's grace, the same grace that He demonstrated in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. But that grace demanded a response from the people of Israel. Look at verse 14: Joshua 24:14-15 NASB95 "Now, therefore, fear the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. "If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." You gotta serve somebody. In the case of the people of Israel, the question Joshua was posing was whether they would serve the Lord who had rescued them from Egypt, who had brought them into the Promised Land, who had delivered them from all their enemies, and who had given them peace and comfort in a place where they had not labored for it - or whether they would serve the pagan gods of their fathers and the gods of the pagan people of Canaan. It's important to note here that Joshua says the people should "put away" the gods their fathers served in Egypt and beyond the Euphrates River. The point is that some of the people had brought these idols along with them on the journey out of Egypt and even into the Promised Land. In other words, while they were yet sinners, serving other gods, the one true God, Yahweh, had in His immeasurable grace delivered them. But grace demands a response. So, having received that grace, the people must now choose whom they would serve. Choose for yourselves, Joshua says here. You gotta serve somebody. Now, I want you to keep Joshua's words in mind as you turn to Romans, chapter 6. In the first part of the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in Rome, he explains why we all need salvation, and it comes down to this: All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We all inherit the curse of original sin from Adam, and that curse is death. And furthermore, we all affirm our sinful natures by committing our own sins, our own rebellion against God's perfect law. We sin because we are sinners. The curse of death is physical, in that our physical bodies will die unless we are here when Jesus returns, and it is spiritual, in that our sin creates a separation from God that we cannot overcome on our own. And so, Paul continues in the first part of this letter to explain what God had done Himself in His great grace and mercy to provide the salvation that was out of our own reach. What He did was to send His own Son, the God-man Jesus Christ, who lived a sinless life and then died on a cross, taking upon Himself the punishment we deserve for our sins so that those who believe in Him can have eternal life with Him and the Father. In His death, Jesus gained victory over sin, and in His resurrection, He gained victory over death. For thousands of years, since the first sin of Adam and Eve, sin had reigned in death, but in Christ's death, resurrection and ascension into heaven, "grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life." Where sin had increased, Paul writes in Chapter 5, grace abounded all the more. And so we find ourselves at Chapter 6, where Paul anticipates two questions that might arise from our understanding of the abounding grace of God. We will deal with the first question this week, and we'll look at the second one next week. So let's pick up in verse 1: Romans 6:1-2 NASB95 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? In other words, if our sins enable God to show us His grace, then should we not keep on sinning so that God can be shown to be ever more gracious? "May it never be!" Paul says. I'm not sure how your translation reads, but the Spears translation would be "Of course not, you idiot!" Sin does not die to the believer; rather the believer dies to sin. Now Paul will explain what he means by that. And I want you to see three imperatives Paul brings out in the next 12 verses. He calls on us to know some important facts about salvation, to consider what those facts mean to us, and to present ourselves as those to whom God's grace demands the proper response. Verse 3: Romans 6:3-7 NASB95 Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. The point here is that, just as we all are counted as sinners because of the nature we inherited from Adam, we who have placed our faith in Jesus Christ are counted as righteous because of the nature we receive in Him, the new life we have been given in Christ. Jesus died not just as our substitute but also as our representative. He who knew no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. If you have followed Jesus Christ in faith, then you have been clothed with His righteousness. You are now identified with Him. You are a CHRIST-ian, a Christian. Paul says here that we now identify with Jesus in His death, burial, and resurrection. Baptism itself is a picture of that. Buried - or lowered into the water - in the likeness of His death, raised from the water in the likeness of His resurrection. In salvation, the old man of the flesh is crucified with Christ so that a new man of the Spirit can be born. That man of flesh was a slave to sin, completely subject to it and unable to please God. But we who have been born again to walk in newness of life are no longer to be slaves to sin. We have been freed from that bondage by Christ's death on the cross and by our God-given faith in the sufficiency of Christ's death to bring our salvation. These are the things we should know about our salvation. Now, let's pick back up at verse 8. Romans 6:8-11 NASB95 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Here, Paul is reminding us of Jesus' promise of eternal life for those who would follow Him in faith. Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so will be all those who place their faith in Him. But there's more going on here. If you are a follower of Christ, you have a new life that began when you first believed. You should consider or count yourself dead to sin - it no longer has power over you. But you should also consider or count yourself alive to God in Christ Jesus. You were dead in your trespasses, but now you are alive in Christ, by the grace of God. Israel's slavery in Egypt was a picture of our enslavement to sin when we were lost. And just as God rescued those people from their slavery, even when they demonstrated they were unworthy, so He rescues us through Christ, who died for us while we were yet sinners. God saves sinners by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. But grace demands a response. Look at verse 12. Romans 6:12-14 NASB95 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. Remember that Paul was writing to believers here, so what he's telling them is that when they give themselves back over to sin, they are doing just what the people of Israel talked about doing when they stood on the banks of the Red Sea and suggested they would rather go back to their old slave masters. A generation later, Joshua would tell the people, you gotta serve somebody, and he begged them to serve the Lord, who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Now, Paul says here, you who have followed Jesus Christ in faith are no longer slaves to sin, so you should not let sin become your master again. You gotta serve somebody, he says. You can go back to serving sin. You can go back to serving the illegitimate master, or you can serve God. You can be instruments of the unrighteousness of sin and death or instruments of the righteousness of God. Grace demands a response. You gotta serve somebody. It might be the devil, or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. Today, if you are a follower of Christ, you stand in the same place as the people of Israel when Joshua was giving them his final marching orders. Grace demands a response. Joshua's response was this: "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Joshua was pleading with his people to make a commitment to turn from their idols and serve God. He knew they would serve one or the other, and he knew they could not serve both. What are your idols? What patterns of behavior keep you going back to your old master and presenting yourself as a subject to sin? Will you commit today to turn from your idols and serve God? You gotta serve somebody. It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. Page . Exported from Logos Bible Software, 1:37 AM August 30, 2020.