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<!doctype
html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">Amazing Grace
Ephesians 2:1-10
It
is commonly said that Christianity is supremely a religion of grace. And
that is certainly true. We sing about grace, we write poems about grace,
we name our churches and our children after grace.
Many people never get over
what God has done for them when he saved them from their sins and they
echo the biblical teaching "By the grace of God I am what I am." Yet, for many, even those within the
church, grace is not well understood
and often not really believed. Oh,
we say we believe it, but we talk and act as if we don't believe it. We still think somehow God's goodness
and grace ….is tied to our obedience..,so if something is going
wrong in my life, then it must be that God is withholding his grace, his
goodness, because of sin in my life, or because I am not being obedient
enough..
One
of the reasons that there is this…what I call misbelief in God's
grace is that we do not fully understand who we are in the sight of God.
My hope and prayer this
morning is that as we think about this foundational truth we can fully believe
and trust in God's grace. To that end I would like us to consider four
things biblical truths that help us understand the full nature of God's
grace.
I. The Need for Grace
We
begin with the most important point-the need for grace. Miss this and you
miss everything! Nothing else I say
will matter unless you understand why you personally stand in desperate
need of the grace of God.
Why
do we need God's grace? Because all
men and all women are by nature spiritually dead and separated from God.
We must begin at this basic starting point for biblical theology. Listen
carefully to the analysis in Ephesians 2:1-3.
As for you, you
were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used
to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the
kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are
disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time,
gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its
desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.
This
is God's indictment of the entire human race apart from his grace. It's what he says about you and me as
we stand before him in our natural condition. Three things are true
of you without grace:
You
were dead (v. 1).
You were
enslaved (v. 2).
You were
under the wrath of God (v. 3).
Think
of that. Dead, enslaved, and under the wrath of God. Could there be a
more helpless, hopeless condition?
Dead! Enslaved! Under the wrath of God! This is what God sees when he
peers down upon planet earth. Dead men, enslaved men, men under the wrath
of God.
The "Cool
Part" of Hell
We tend to dismiss this as
not literally true. After all, how "dead" can we really be? We don't
look "dead." To our eyes, we look very alive. Not so. God says
that apart from grace, all men are dead.
Or we tend to think we're
not so bad after all. I doubt if very many Christians would say that we
deserve to go to heaven on our own merit. We know too much theology to
say that. But I daresay that many of us think that we're not so bad after
all. Left to our own devices, we'd go to the "cool part" of
hell and the very bad sinners would get the "hot parts."
There is something in us
that causes us to think we're basically good at heart. It's easy to think that
way, especially when you consider how many murderers and rapists are
running loose in the world. We're certainly not as bad as they are, are
we? And we hope God thinks the same way we do!
Wrong!
The Bible says that apart from grace the whole human race, and each one
of us individually, is spiritually dead, in rebellion against God, under
God's judgment, guilty and unclean, worthy of eternal damnation. We are not
simply unworthy of heaven, apart from God's grace, we are entirely worthy
of hell!!! This is what God
says about you and me. It is also what God says about your husband or
wife, your children, your parents, your grandparents, your uncles, your
aunts, your neighbors, your friends, your classmates, and your business
associates.
Man Without God
is a Beast
Let
me say that again clearly. Not only
are you undeserving of heaven, you are completely deserving of hell. Your
good works, your kind deeds, your charitable giving, your acts of
kindness, when contemplated by a holy God, are nothing more than filthy
rags in his eyes.
These
are hard words. Americans like to
think well of themselves. Pride in our scientific achievements, our
high standard of living, our material wealth, our status as the world's
greatest superpower, our educational system that leads the world. We are
the best of the best, the greatest nation on earth, the greatest that
ever was or ever will be. Or so we think.
Against
that we have these sobering words by Whittaker Chambers, "Man
without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most
intelligent about his beastliness." The airing of Schlinder's List a few years ago should
remind us that the horrors of the Holocaust were perpetrated by a people
with a Christian heritage.
We desperately need God's grace
because we're not as good as we think we are, and in fact we are much
worse than we dare to admit.
II. The Meaning of Grace
But because of
his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with
Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-it is by grace you
have been saved. Ephesians 2:4-5
Please
circle three words in these two verses-love, mercy, and grace. Love
is that in God which causes him to reach out to his creatures in
benevolence. Mercy is God withholding punishment. And
grace? Grace
is the unmerited favor of God.
Think
of it this way. Imagine a vast reservoir of God's love. As it begins to
flow toward us, it becomes a river of mercy. As it cascades down upon us, the mercy becomes a torrent of
grace.
These
two verses offer three words which answer the desperate state of mankind:
Love
Mercy
Grace
Here's a good way to
remember the difference between mercy and grace. Mercy is God not giving us
what we do deserve-Judgment. Grace is God giving us what we don't
deserve-Salvation.
The
picture of a torrent of grace rushing upon us is especially apropos since
grace always comes down from
God to man. Grace never goes up; it always comes down. Grace by
definition means that God gives us what we don't deserve and could never
earn.
There are two
thoughts behind the truth of God's grace:
1. You deserve eternal punishment for your
sins.
2. You do not deserve God's grace and can
never earn it by anything you say or do.
According to Ephesians 2, when
God looks down from heaven He sees dead men, women and children. He does not see our good deeds, not our vaunted
achievements, not our fame or our wealth….all of these fall short
of what God requires to be in his presence…Holiness….we are
unholy. God sees death on every side. He sees
dead men walking.
This
leads to an important truth. Since we are dead, because of our
transgressions, our sin, and we have willfully disobeyed God, - God is not obliged to save anyone! God is not obligated to show mercy to
anyone! God is not obligated to
forgive anyone! God would be perfectly justified in letting us stay dead.
And so if you are alive, then it must be by grace and grace
alone. If you have to pay to be alive, if you have to work to be alive, if
you have to do anything to earn your relationship with God, then it's not grace…. because it's
not free. If grace isn't absolutely free, then it isn't grace.
III. The Implications of Grace
And God raised us
up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ
Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable
riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not
from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can
boast. Ephesians 2:6-9
Now
we discover the effect of grace upon men and women who were dead,
enslaved, and under the wrath of God. Circle these three words in the
text:
Raised
Seated
Saved
That
says it all. He takes dead men and raises them. He takes enslaved
men and seats them with Christ in heaven. He takes condemned men
and saves them from judgment. Grace is thus God's total answer to
the moral ruin of the human race. It is such a complete answer that
nothing else could ever be added to it. And here is the beauty of God's love.
Our Judge Becomes
Our Savior…by bearing the wrath due upon us upon His own son.
Here,
then, are several crucial implications of grace:
·
Salvation is a
work of God from first to last. It starts with God,
continues with God, and ends with God. Anything we do is in response to
what God has first done for us.
·
Nothing you have
done or ever could do can contribute in the least to your salvation. That includes water baptism, whether as an infant or
an adult. That includes the baptism you receive here at First Baptist. I
can hold you down so long that you'll come up singing "Amazing
Grace," but that won't make you a Christian or forgive even one of
your sins.
·
As long as you
trust in your own good works to any degree, you can never be saved. The reason is clear. Those who trust in themselves
will never truly trust in Christ. It's not Christ plus your good works.
It's faith in Christ, plus nothing and minus nothing.
·
Through grace our
Judge has become our Savior. The face of God is changed
from judgment to mercy through the atoning work of Jesus Christ. The One
who would condemn now becomes our Savior.
·
This truth, once
understood, takes away our terror of God's judgment and replaces it with
joy and boundless peace. This is why we sing, we
pray, we praise, we rejoice. This is the only ground of our hope. This is
the reason for our assurance. God's grace gives us peace and fills us
with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
IV. The Demands of Grace
For we are God's
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared
in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10
Now we face the main
objection to this teaching on grace, which is that grace produces careless
living. Many
people fear grace because they think it leads to a "who cares"
attitude. "I'm saved so now I can whoop it up like the people of the
world." To which I reply that anyone who uses grace as an excuse to
sin shows they have never understood his grace in the first place.
But
it may be fairly asked where works fit in. If they don't save, what
difference do our good works make? Verse 9 tells us that salvation is
not by works, while verse 10 tells us that we are created for good works.
Perhaps this little comparison will make it all clear.
We are saved by
grace and not by works.
We are saved by grace unto
good works.
Grace
is the source of our salvation. It is also the motive for living the
Christian life. Good works are not
the ground of salvation, they are the result of salvation. As someone
has said, after you are saved, everything else in your life should be one
big P.S. in which you say, Thank you, Lord, for giving me a relationship
with you.
One
final word and I am done. God's
grace is the guarantee of our salvation. This is a wonderful truth.
Some people believe in getting saved by grace and staying saved by works.
That's patently impossible. What God starts, he finishes. We are not
saved because we hold onto God's hand but only because his almighty hand
holds onto our tiny hand. He holds us, we don't hold him.
Grace
found us, grace will keep us, grace will not let us go. Those whom God saves, He saves
forever. Not one of God's children will ever be lost. All his sheep
will eventually find their way home to heaven.
It
may be that someone here this morning is saying to themselves, "I am
too bad to be saved." If you
would say that about yourself, I have some very good news. Grace
means you can never be too bad to be saved. Grace is God's good news to
you. How far can a person go in sin until God will no longer forgive
them? The answer is, No one knows because no one has ever gone far enough
to find out.
God's grace is truly the
heart of the Christian faith and the sum of our message. It is the beginning,
middle and end of the Christian life. We are saved by Grace, kept by
Grace, taken to heaven by Grace, and throughout eternity "we've no
less days to sing His praise than when we've first begun."
Now I Belong to
Jesus
One song that says it all to me is "Now I Belong to
Jesus." It says I'm his for eternity. Not just for a little while
but forever.
What a gift he has given us all.
Have
you been saved by grace? You don't
need to know the day or hour or the moment. It's not important that
you remember the precise event. But it's all-important that you put your
trust in Jesus Christ alone and be able to say, "I'm saved by the
grace of God."
Grace
is God's gift to you. But a gift
must be received in order to be enjoyed. Have you ever received God's
gift of salvation? Through
grace you can belong to Jesus not for the years of time alone, but for
eternity.
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