Sermon Tone Analysis

What Makes Grace So Amazing?

Romans 4:4-8

 

This morning, we continue a series of messages on the subject of "grace".

We have been focusing our attention on this one single doctrine, because a correct understanding of God’s grace is at the center of our faith.

It is absolutely foundational.

A clear, accurate understanding of grace will tend to produce a strong, resilient, joyful Christian; while an uncertain or false understanding of the grace of God will tend to produce a weak, fearful, or even a resentful Christian.

It’s really that important.

1.

Grace Means You’re Accepted

But although grace is critically important, it’s also scarce.

For example, perhaps you grew up in a home where grace was largely absent.

What you heard from one or both of your parents was that nothing you ever did was good enough.

You could never perform well enough to gain their approval and acceptance.

It’s not that your parents didn’t love you.

More than likely, they thought they were doing the right thing by withholding praise and heaping on the criticism; they thought they were helping prepare you for life by emphasizing your flaws and failures, instead of your achievements and successes.

Or maybe they were just repeating what their parents had taught them.

But regardless, what you learned was that you’re not good enough.

And when that kind of message gets burned into your mind during childhood, it’s awfully hard to erase.

Or you may come from a church background in which God’s grace was never mentioned.

Instead, God was presented as a harsh, demanding taskmaster who would accept nothing less than flawless obedience.

Instead of delighting in the lives of his people, He spent all of his time sitting on his throne, looking down on the earth, waiting for them to mess up.

Then, with an angry scowl, he would punish them with some terrible misfortune.

Or He would mark their transgression down in his book, keeping track of their sins to condemn them at the Day of Judgment.

And if you messed up bad enough, you would lose your salvation.

You would be rejected by God, cast out, and banished.

What do these types of experiences and ideas produce?

They produce people who feel like they’re on a performance treadmill with God.

And people who feel like they can never gain God’s approval, no matter what they do, no matter how fast they run or how hard they work.

They become people who feel rejected by God; people who are full of pain and shame; people who struggle with anger, and fear, and anxiety.

The good news is that these are distortions of the truth about God, not the reality.

The good news is that God’s acceptance of us is completely unconditional.

His love is offered freely and without cost.

His favor toward us is given without respect to merit or demerit, worth or worthlessness, accomplishment or failure.

We cannot earn God’s approval or his forgiveness, and the good news is that we don’t have to.

Our behavior, good or bad, has absolutely no effect on God’s attitude toward us.

We can’t cause Him to love us more by being good, or make Him love us less by being bad.

His love for us, his affection toward us, and his acceptance of us are perfect and unchanging.

How is that possible?

What about sin? Doesn’t God care about good and evil?

Yes.

God hates sin, including our sin.

God hates evil.

There will be a judgment day, and there is a hell, as well as a heaven.

But the good news is that someone else has already suffered the penalty for sin in our place; someone else has already purchased God’s forgiveness on our behalf; someone else has already done everything necessary to earn God’s favor for us.

That person is Jesus Christ.

And when we place our trust in Christ for salvation, the guilt of our sin is transferred to Him, while the credit for His perfect obedience is transferred to us.

We are accepted by God for Christ’s sake; not because of what we have done, but because of what Christ has done for us.

And that’s why we don’t have to worry about losing God’s love and acceptance.

We didn’t earn them in the first place; Christ did.

His perfect life and His death are the grounds of our acceptance before God, and nothing we do can change that.

Romans 4:4-8, "Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation.

However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.

David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: ’Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.’"

(NIV)

Romans 9:16 says, "It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy."

And Romans 11:6 says, "And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace."

It could hardly be clearer.

Having a right standing before God does not depend on anything we do.

Salvation is given "apart from works"; it "does not depend on man’s desire or effort."

It is by grace, and not by works.

What, then, is grace?

It is "God’s free and unmerited favor, shown to guilty sinners who deserve only judgment."

In other words, the only qualification for receiving God’s grace is to be completely unqualified.

Which includes every person who ever lived, because as Romans 3:23 tells us, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

 

2.

Grace Means You’re Aquitted

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Let’s put this in as stark terms as we possibly can.

Timothy McVeigh.

Six years ago, on April 19, 1995, at 9:01 a.m., Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb which destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

In doing so, he ended the lives of 168 people, nineteen of them children, and became the worst mass murderer in American history.

The suffering caused by this horrible crime, this single act of rage, is incalculable; not only of those who died or were injured, but of the families destroyed, the mothers and fathers ripped from their children, the children torn from their parents.

And to his death, Timothy McVeigh never expressed any remorse, or sorrow, or pity, or even regret.

If ever there was a case deserving of the death penalty, this is it.

In fact, Timothy McVeigh was executed on May 16th 2001.

And if, by some last minute act of grace and mercy, if he had repented God would have granted Timothy McVeigh repentance for his sins, and Timothy McVeigh would have found forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ, so that on May 16th, when the poison was injected into his veins, he would have walked into heaven and been welcomed by God as warmly and enthusiastically as any of us hope to be when we die.

God would not receive him grudgingly, or reluctantly.

On the contrary, God would be overjoyed to receive him.

Why?

Because the basis of our acceptance before God, and of our welcome into heaven, is the finished work of Christ on the cross.

It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with what we deserve.

We can do nothing to add to Christ’s work, or detract from it; all we can do is receive it in faith.

And anyone who comes to God on that basis, even a mass murderer like Timothy McVeigh, anyone who repents of their sin and seeks forgiveness in Jesus Christ, will be forgiven, and not only forgiven, but joyously welcomed, and enthusiastically embraced by God the Father.

Some of you recoil against that idea, that someone as thoroughly evil as this man could, in effect, get off.

It’s morally offensive; it seems monstrously unjust.

The idea that Timothy McVeigh could not only avoid the hell he so richly deserves, but that he could also receive eternal life, and enter into all the riches of heaven, and enjoy God’s love and acceptance too, seems very wrong.

To think that God could treat him, someone guilty of such a heinous crime, in exactly the same way as he treats us, seems outrageous.

Doesn’t it?

When we respond that way, we show that we are finally starting to understand the radical nature of God’s grace.

Grace isn’t just a bit of help, a little assistance to make up the difference between what we’re able to do and what God requires.

Grace isn’t God giving us credit for good intentions.

Grace isn’t for basically good, and decent, and moral people who happen to fall a bit short of perfection (the kind of people we like to think we are).

Grace is for helpless sinners who can do nothing to merit God’s favor, and who deserve only God’s wrath and judgment.

In other words, grace is for every one of us.

Romans 3:10-12, 21-24, "As it is written: ’There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.

All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’ . . .

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.

This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."

Are we guilty of the same crimes as Timothy McVeigh?

No.