God's Amazing Grace Part Two

Amazing Grace Part two

Ephesians chapter 2:1-10

Ephesians chapter 2:1-10

Prayer

Last week we started a two week message on God’s Grace. (Same verses)

We saw that these words of the Apostle Paul paints a picture.

It paints a picture of man’s need for God

It shows that without God we are in a lost condition.

It shows us that in that lost condition we are not able to save ourselves without God’s help.

That a person can be physically alive, but spiritually dead.

Spiritual death for a believer is a past condition, and for un-believer it is there present condition.

Man’s condition without God is doomed.

Verse (4)

“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.”

You were not born a Christian.

You did not get to decide if you were good enough for God’s love.

You cannot get their by anyone else except Jesus Christ.

1st point –Man’s condition without God’s Grace and salvation is doomed.

2nd point- We need to embrace God’s Grace

God’s Grace is a gift of God- through faith in Jesus Christ.

Here is where we continue from last week:

Grace is a gift! You have to accept the gift. The way that you accept grace is through faith in Jesus Christ who is the gift of mankind.

So many try to do it by other ways-

You don’t buy it

You don’t earn it

If you cannot remember accepting the gift of Christ in your life, or if you have never had faith in Jesus Christ, you have not received the gift of eternal life, and you are still in the spiritually dead condition before Christ.

The good news! As long as you have breath, you can accept His gift. (Jesus Christ)

Grace is a person- it is Jesus Christ.

You cannot have an encounter with God and not experience a transformation. At ;east a chance for transformation.

There is a radical change in your life that will draw you closer to God, and a desire to please Him.

Life begins once Jesus becomes the reason you live it. ( Repeat )

You did not earn grace, but you can experience grace, and with that comes transformation.

A change- not all about us anymore, but all about Him.

Not perfect, because God is not finished with us yet.

Back to the text

(10)

“For we are God’s workmanship created in Jesus Christ to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” ( Repeat)

In the Greek, workmanship means:

We become a “work of art”, a painting that God is not finished with yet.

It means that when Christ is in it, we begin to see God’s sovereign hand of purpose and planning.

You do not find God’s purpose for your life from a lot of rules, but you can find purpose by God’s grace in your life.

God gave us 10 Commandments; the Pharisee’s turned those 10 into over 600.

God gave us 10 to prove we cannot live a godly life without him, the Pharisee’s desperately tried to fix the outside and had no way of fixing the inside problem of the heart.

God will encourage- living by rules discourages

God wants to work on the inside and we are always trying to fix the outside.

We pretend to that we have it all together.

From the video series on Wednesday, we saw that people really have two wrong thoughts about God and man.

Keeping their distance from God and have a belief that a blob of substance crawled up on a rock and was heated to a point of evolving into man as we know him. (That takes a lot of faith)

#2 Which I think more people fall into is that this life is all about us- my goals, my purpose, my decisions. God as a backup, dial Him up when we need Him or when we cannot fix it.

God’s grace, God’s mercy, changes our focus from self to God and allows God to work in our lives.

The world needs more Andy Griffith, and more Mayberry than reality TV and the ugly side of people.

Some of you do not even know who Andy Griffith is, but all can relate to the dysfunctional families that are on TV that show the ugly side of people instead of people that God is working in.

These verses are telling us that once we come to Christ, that Christ desires to work in our lives, that we become His workmen, we are works of art, we are originals.

We do not work to be saved- we work because we are saved.