Saved by Grace
Notes
Transcript
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.
Introduction
Introduction
Perhaps after John 3:16 and Psalm 23, these verses from Ephesians are the most memorized among Christians at least historically. I’m not so sure about our day and age but at least 15-20 years ago, every new believer was taught the meaning of these verses as foundational to their understanding of Christianity. This morning as we prepare to witness the baptism of two members of our church, I want to draw our attention back to the nature of our salvation and how we are saved by grace alone.
Body
Body
At the root, the truth that we read here is what separates Christianity from every other world religion. In one form or another, every other religion including modern day secularism is founded on a works based righteousness. In other words, the good that I do, the right intentions of my heart, make me acceptable in the eyes of God, or a higher power, or with the force if you are a Star Wars fan. When you boil down all of these different worldviews into its fundamental belief, it comes down to this notion that mankind must earn it’s salvation however one wants to define that salvation. Christianity alone tells us we cannot be saved by our own works, by our own goodness because in reality, in the eyes of a good, perfect, and holy God even the good we do is tainted by our sin.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is such a thing as damnable good works. We all know that it’s possible to do something that looks good but it’s done with ulterior motives. For example, a person who goes to a homeless outreach because they really like someone who is planning to volunteer that day and they want to look like a charitable person. I don’t want to be cynical or jaded but I have my sneaking suspicions that not everything we do is free of impure motives because I am well-acquainted with the evil in my own heart. If I had to place the burden of my salvation on my own good efforts, I would be absolutely terrifed of what is to come.
This past summer, Mira and I had a chance to walk with a friend who was on the last stages of her battle with cancer. We’ve tried sharing the gospel with her for many years and though we believe that she accepted Christ into her heart at the end, it was too late for her to fully understand or believe in her heart that she was saved by grace. And as she neared death, she would hold onto my wife with such fear in her eyes and ask the questions, “Have I been good enough? Have I done enough?” She could not get past how she had lived her entire life, trying to earn the acceptance of God and others through her own efforts. By the standards of the world, she was a good person, she had adopted two orphans and had poured out her life for these children, but even she knew that in her heart of hearts this was not enough.
Obviously, someone’s death bed is not the place to go through the Westminister Cathechism and try to teach the deep doctrines of the Christian faith so we just emphasied over and over again, trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, He is enough. (I can’t beleive so much has happened during this pandemic). On the surface, the notion of grace seems so nice, benign, and easy for us to believe but when you dig a little deeper, the biblical understanding of grace offends every human heart because it tells us that in the realm of the most important matter, your eternal destiny and your acceptance before God, there is nothing you can do and there is no room, not even a small corner of your life that will justify your existence before His perfect goodness. Ouch!
We are truly more sinful than we could possibly imagine but more loved and accepted than we could dare dream of. And what makes those two completely incongruent things possible is the grace of God. Now I realize this is hard to this conceptually, so let me try to illustrate it with more of a real life example. Think of the person that you might most despise, the most evil, hateful human being, someone that stirs your heart to anger. Given the rash of hate crimes and mass shootings in recent weeks, it’s not too difficult to imagine the ugliest sides of the human condition and it’s only right that we are angry and demand justice. But as a Christian, there is a second question that you must ask yourself. If you had an opportunity, how much would it take for you to love that person and accept him/her as friend? That distance from a person’s sinfulness and your ability to love can only be covered by the amount of grace in your heart.
And honestly speaking, at that point, most of us will simply admit that we don’t have enough grace to cover that gap. And we tend to feel this way because we often measure morality in relative terms. In other words, the fact that we would never do something like that or even conceive of such evil, makes us feel justified to hold righteous anger towards such people. However, someone who is on death row for similar crimes would not carry the same indignation, nor do they have a right to do so. We might even say this is only right and fair except oddly enough when it applies to God.
And this fact begs a follow up question: If it is fair for us to have righteous anger against those who are more sinful than us, how much greater does a holy God have a right to hold us accountable since we are infintely more sinful than He is. Daily we do things that He would never do, think thoughts that he would never think, utter words that he would never say. It’s easy for us to place ourselves at the top of the standard of righteousness and judge downward, it’s very difficult for us to recognize there is a much higher standard than ourselves and that only his judgment is true. But unlike most of us, in God’s case, there is one big difference. The question of love that most of us cannot answer in the affirmative, which is to think of the person that seems most morally bankrupt to you and then dare to love them, is a question that God answered with a resounding yes on the cross. Through the cross Jesus tells us, “I will not only dare to love, I will supply every ounce of grace to make that love possible.”
In our therapeutic culture, we reject everything that is a threat to our self-esteem and sense of worth and obviously being considered sinful in the eyes of God would fall in that category unless that is you have realized the saving power of His grace personally in your life. When your self-esteem and worth are built on the riches of God’s grace, there is no amount of failure, mistakes, or temptations that can keep you down for very long. Strangely, His grace become sufficient. But before we can get to that place, first, it’s necessary for the Holy Spirit open our eyes to our true condition.
Near the end of his life, St. Paul gave this assesment of himself which I have always marvelled at which is so contrary to the therapeutic version of the gospel that we hear. After years of pouring out his life for others, living out the gospel as boldly as any person could, and even penning some of the greatest verses on love, he writes:
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
I don’t think Paul struggled too much with his self-worth because in acknowledging who he was, he was able to build his life on the unwavering foundation of God’s grace through Jesus Christ. By grace, we are saved, justified, sanctified, and even glorified by our heavenly Father. Whatever good we have in our lives, it is but the grace of God that made that good possible, nothing else. And if we could just see that, all boasting would stop and we would experience more deeply the tranforming power of the Gospel.
And sometimes, our conscience needs to be pricked because we often forget about the grace that was given to us. King David, after having an affair with Bathsheba and then having her husband killed to cover up his sin, completely forgot what he had done before God. Almost a year after the fact, Nathan the prophet comes and perhaps fearing this king that had gone wayward, he addresses the matter in the third person. He tells David a hypothetical situation of two men in a town, one rich, one poor. The rich man had thousands of sheep and cattle. The poor man had but one little lamb that he cherished and prized because that is all that he had. One day a guest came to the rich man’s home and needing to feed this guest, the rich man didn’t kill one of his own sheep of which he had plenty but he seized the poor man’s ewe and offered it instead. And even before Nathan could finshish the story or ask David what he thought, David becomes indignant and burning with anger, he said:
2 Samuel 12:5 (ESV)
Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!
Knowing that this was his chance to point out this area of forgotten sin, the prophet simply states, “David, you are the man!” And he certainly did not mean it in a good way. What he meant was, the man that you have just pronounced judgment on, that person is you. In the gospels, Jesus gives us the concrete principle that we can take from this story.
For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
And King David had one of two choices, either humble himself and receive the prophet’s words or kill him for daring to accuse him of such sin. Fortunately, we know the choice that David made becasue it’s written down for us in one his greatest psalms:
Psalm 51 (ESV)
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
Beyond an exercise in humility, David also recognized that his experience of God’s grace was the only platform by which he could dare teach other sinners to return back to God. Understanding the grace of God keeps us from from the damaging effects of self-righteousness, hatred, bitterness, and unforgiveness and instead, brings with it the hope of reconciliation, mercy, and love to a world that has become increasingly graceless.
Conclusion
Conclusion
As a society we have largely rejected the grace of God for what amounts to the exact opposite. If we think cancelling one another for every sinful word spoken, calling each out for every moral failure is going to bring a more just, more united, more loving society, than you are reading the wrong Bible and worshipping the wrong God. In the weeks to come, we will look at how the gospel breaks down the walls of hostility caused by boundaries of race and culture. After all that has happened in this past year, I am more convinced than ever that the grace of God is not only the hope of our own salvation but the only way to rescue our troubled society.
It’s rare to see God’s grace on display in human form but when you see it, it’s quite undernerving, uncomfortable, almost scandalous. Right before the pandemic, there was pretty high profile case involving an off-duty police officer in Texas, Amber Guyger, who somehow accidentally walked into an apartment thinking it was her own and killed the man who lived there, Botham Jean, thinking that he was a burglar. It was the latest in a series of murders of innocent black men whose lives were taken either by police or overly paranoid neighbors. If there was a reason to be outraged, this was the case that should have incited the nation’s anger.
The Dallas police department dragged their feet in terms of arresing the off-duty officer. Although Botham was a successful analyst for PWC, prosecutors tried to tarnish his image by bringing in inconsequential evidence of marijuana use, at first the defendant was only charged with manslaughter which was only later changed to a count of murder. The list of grievances go on but at the time, none of those details actually caused that much of a scandal. The greatest scandal from the entire trial occurred after Botham’s brother, Brandnt Jean gave his victim impact statement. In this statement that you can watch on youtube, Brandnt forgave this woman who killed her brother, told her that he loved her, and asked her to give her life to Jesus Christ.
It was one of the most powerful human displays of the Gospel that I’ve ever seen and amidst the sound of sobbing in the courtroom, Brandt hugged this woman who just a year ago had taken the life of his brother. In the 24 hours after this incomparble act of grace, there were so many people who picked that impact statement apart even going so far as to say that Brandt did the wrong thing, he offered his forgiveness too easily. In fact, it caused a greater scandal than the case itself. It was almost as if Brandt had done something morally wrong with such a lavish display of grace and it felt like collectively as a nation we rejected the very thing that could have brought both justice and reconciliation, the gospel of Jesus Christ. It really was a foreshadowing of things to come in our nation.
There is a reason why the grace of God offends our natural sensibiliities, we want the right to treat others differently than the way we have been treated by God, we don’t want vengeance to belong to God nor for our enemies to recieve the grace that was given to us. Jesus gave us a number of parables that highlight the discrepancy of grace in the human heart. And for non-Christians, that attitude is expected but for believers, but that young man’s testimony is a shining light in this dark world of what it means to be a follower of Christ.
Galatians 2:20–21 (ESV)
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God....
Brothers and sisters, it is so easy to set aside the grace of God, to nullify it with our words and attitude towards one aother, forgetting that the greatest scandal the world has ever known is that by the riches of his grace, Christ died for sinners like us. Today, as we hear the testimony from our two sisters before the baptism, I pray that we will remind ourselves of the grace that was given to us and to ask God to restore the joy of his salvation once again in our hearts.