Last Sunday many of you may have seen the article titled “’Lord’ is fading at some churches” on the front page of the Arizona Daily Star. The article focuses on two practices that have become common in these churches – leaving the word “Lord” completely out of their liturgy and their services, and making all references to God “gender-neutral.” Let me read just a couple paragraphs from the article. I’m going to delete any references to the names of the churches or the people so that it won’t distract from the message they are conveying.
A lifelong [denomination], retired middle school teacher [name] calls the reduction of “Lord” usage she’s heard at the Come and See service “refreshing.” She also likes the references to a genderless God, because that’s how she’s always viewed the divine.
“I’m a great advocate of change, but not just for change’s sake,” said [name], 78. “A lot of people are turned off by traditional liturgy because it sounds like they have to literally believe these credal [sic] statements. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Faith is very personal.”
There is certainly a problem with removing the word “Lord” from the services. Our English translations use that word over 7,500 times and although I didn’t have time to check out every one of those references this week, my guess is that at least 7,000 of those uses of the word “Lord” refer to God the Father or to Jesus. And then there is this verse that needs to be dealt with:
That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Romans 10:9 (NIV)
That seems pretty clear to me. If you want to be saved, you need to confess Jesus as “Lord”, not as “love”, “soul”, or “light”, the words frequently used in place of “Lord” according to one of the pastors that was interviewed for the article.
And then there is this whole effort to make God gender-neutral. Now it is true that God is not a man. He is spirit. But in every single place that God is described as God the Father in the Bible it is unambiguous – the term is always masculine and means “Father”, not “mother” or even “parent.” There is a reason for that. When God is described as a Father, it helps our limited human minds to understand something about His nature.
If God wanted to describe Himself as a mother or a parent, he could have easily done that. In fact there are a few places where God describes Himself as being like a mother when He wants to convey that aspect of His nature.
But as important as those issues are, there is a deeper, more fundamental attitude that underlies these efforts. Let me read those two paragraphs once again and listen carefully to see if you can pick up on it.
A lifelong [denomination], retired middle school teacher [name] calls the reduction of “Lord” usage she’s heard at the Come and See service “refreshing.” She also likes the references to a genderless God, because that’s how she’s always viewed the divine.
“I’m a great advocate of change, but not just for change’s sake,” said [name], 78. “A lot of people are turned off by traditional liturgy because it sounds like they have to literally believe these credal [sic] statements. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Faith is very personal.”
Anyone care to venture a guess about what the root problem is here? [Wait for responses.] That’s right, the fundamental issue is that the people involved have imposed their own ideas and thoughts about what they want God to be like and how they want to worship Him.
I guess we shouldn’t be so surprised. If our culture today has an overall theme, it has to be “It’s all about me.” Most of you have probably seen people like this [show picture] walking around with a t-shirt that reads “It’s all about me”. Just a few weekends ago, the Little America Hotel in Flagstaff had an “All About Me Weekend”. There’s a book titled “All About Me” that promises to help you discover who you really are. And then there is this set of posters that you can order that pretty well summarize our culture today:
• I just don’t listen
• I know how you feel, I just don’t care
• Let’s focus on me
• It’s all about me. Deal with it.
Unfortunately, we’ve taken that theme and even applied it to our relationship with God. So in many cases, even in our churches it has become all about me and not about God. And so I get to pick which attributes of God that I’ll accept. In the Star article, one deacon commented, “the way our service reads, the theology is that God is love, period.” Well God certainly is love. But He is also holy, righteous and just. But since this particular church doesn’t wan to deal with those aspects of God’s character, they have made the conscious decision to just ignore those parts of the Bible.
The Ephesian culture of Paul’s day wasn’t all that much different. There were many different religions and many different gods. And the people had engaged in the process of syncretism in which they would pick and choose the elements from among these various religions that they liked then tried to reconcile them into their own religion. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But if there is one overall theme in what we’ve looked at so far in Ephesians, it has to be that everything about our relationship with God starts and ends with God, not with us. I think Paul emphasized that fact because he was dealing with a culture that was much the same as ours. And as we come to our passage today, Paul emphasizes again the importance of a God-centered relationship. Let’s read that passage out loud together:
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 2:8, 9 (NIV)
This has to be one of the most familiar Scriptures in the entire Bible for many Christians. In a sense, it is the essence of what Christianity is all about. And yet, as we’ll see this morning, there seems to be either a lack of understanding or a complete disregard for what Paul is writing here.
Earlier in the service, I asked all of you to complete a brief, one question survey. That question was exactly the same question that was asked of 1,004 Americans in A Newsweek poll in august 2005:
Can a good person who isn’t of your religious faith go to heaven or attain salvation, or not?
In going through the answers that you handed in, it seems like about [insert results]% of you answered “yes” to that question and the other [insert results]% answered “no.” Just for comparison purposes, in the Newsweek poll 79% answered “yes” and only 12% answered “no”. And among those who considered themselves to be evangelical Protestants the results weren’t much different - 68% of that group also believed that it is possible for a good person of another faith to attain salvation.
But regardless of the opinions that you expressed this morning or those of the people who participated in the Newsweek poll, the Bible couldn’t be more clear: It is impossible for anyone, regardless of their religious faith to attain salvation based on his or her own efforts and good works.
That’s the first thing that stands out to me when I look at this passage. Paul wants to leave no doubt about that fact. So he uses three separate phrases to drive home the point that no one can earn their own salvation:
…and this not from yourselves…
…not by works…
…so that no one can boast.
After reading everything else up to this point in Ephesians, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Paul has already described what we were all like before God entered into our lives. We were dead, dominated and doomed. And we were utterly helpless to do anything about that condition. It is only a result of God’s actions in our lives that we have been delivered from that hopeless estate.
Completely apart from any merit on our part, God poured His spiritual blessings into our lives. He chose us and predestined us to be adopted into His family. He redeemed us from bondage to slavery through the blood of Jesus. And He gave us the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of the future blessings of our inheritance in Christ. And, as we saw last week, it was God who made us alive, raised us up and seated us with Jesus in the heavenly realms. All of that is God’s work and none of that is dependent on me.
But in spite of the indisputable evidence from God’s Word, it seems that we really struggle with the fact that we can’t earn our own salvation. I guess that’s because it goes against everything else we’ve learned in our lives, especially the way that grades are determined when we go to school.
This week, I found this description of how various departments of one university determine the grades of their students:
DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS:
All grades are plotted along the normal bell curve.
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY:
Students are asked to blot ink in their exam books, close them and turn them in. The professor opens the books and assigns the first grade that comes to mind.
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY:
All students get the same grade they got last year.
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY:
What is a grade?
LAW SCHOOL:
Students are asked to defend their position of why they should receive an A.
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS:
Grades are variable.
DEPARTMENT OF LOGIC:
If and only if the student is present for the final and the student has accumulated a passing grade then the student will receive an A else the student will not receive an A.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE:
Random number generator determines grade.
MUSIC DEPARTMENT:
Each student must figure out his grade by listening to the instructor play the corresponding note (+ and - would be sharp and flat respectively).
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION:
Everybody gets an A. (I wish I was here)
But when it comes to our grade as it relates to our relationship with God, it is God who gets to set the admission standards and God who determines the grades. And God has determined that none of us measure up to His standard of sinless perfection. So we all fail based on our own efforts.
Even though Paul uses three separate phrases to emphasize what we can’t do, he also tells us in this verse what God has done. Let’s look at each element of God’s work in our life as Paul describes it in this passage:
1. God has saved me
…you have been saved…
I guess the first logical question we need to ask is “Saved from what?” As Christians we throw that word “saved” around so much that I wonder if we even think about what that means. And certainly as we speak with those who are not Christ-followers, they must be wondering what we mean by that.
If you’ve been with us in our journey through Ephesians, the answer to that question should be quite obvious by now. The helpless condition of man that Paul described in the first three verses of Chapter 2 is certainly a state from which all of us need to be saved. But as we’ve also seen, we can’t save ourselves from that condition.
We could also look at salvation in terms of restoration. When Adam and Eve sinned, they impaired their fellowship with God. So one aspect of salvation is that it restores that fellowship and relationship. We experience that restoration in part right here and now. And we will experience it to its full extent in the future, when, as Paul writes, all things are brought together under one head, Jesus Christ.
There are two important aspects of our salvation that are communicated by the verb that Paul uses here. The first thing we see is that this is what is known as a passive verb. In other words, we are passive in the process of salvation. It is God who saves us completely independent of anything we can do. It is God, and not us, who is doing all the work.
The other thing we notice is that the verb is in what is known as the perfect tense. In Greek, that indicates an action that has been completed in the past, but that has continuing effects in the present. In other words, God has already done everything He needed to do to secure our salvation when Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. But that completed action obviously has a continuing impact in our lives.
2. God has saved me because of His grace
For it is by grace…
God chooses to save us, not because we deserve it, but because of His grace. And the sentence structure here makes it clear that this is not just a reference to grace in general, but to the kind of grace that Paul has just described in the preceding verses. It is the kind of grace that gives us a new disposition when we are made alive; the kind of grace that gives us a new environment when we are raised up; and the kind of grace that gives us a new intimacy when we are seated with Christ.
And as we’ve seen previously, the entire concept of grace means that God gives us something that we don’t earn or deserve.
3. God has saved me because of His grace through faith
…through faith…
Since our salvation is totally God’s idea and God’s work, He also gets to decide how that salvation is made operational in our life. And God has ordained that we accept the salvation He makes available to us through our faith. That’s another one of those words that we toss around a lot without thinking about what it means.
In a general sense, faith just means belief, or trust. But the kind of faith that Paul and the other Biblical writers describes is a process that requires three distinct steps:
• Knowledge
The first step in our journey toward faith is that we need to understand what it is that we need to believe. Paul certainly understood that principle.
Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.
Romans 10:17 (NIV)
We’ve spent nearly 4 months now looking at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And if you’ve been here for even a small part of that journey, you have been exposed to enough of God’s Word to provide you with the knowledge that you need to have faith. But knowledge alone is not faith. Once I have knowledge, I also need to have…
• Belief
Not everyone that hears the truth believes it. That is pretty obvious from the result of the poll I shared with you earlier. I think it’s fair to assume that most of the people in that poll that described themselves as Protestant Evangelicals have at least been exposed to the truth that salvation is not a result of works. And yet, 68% of them believe that a person can earn their way to heaven. The only logical conclusion is that they don’t believe what they know intellectually. The writer of Hebrews wrote about the importance of belief:
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Hebrews 11:6 (NIV)
But knowledge and belief alone still don’t constitute Biblical faith. There is one more crucial element:
• Trust
True saving faith requires more than just knowledge and belief. It requires action. It means that we live our lives trusting that what we know and believe is true. It is the kind of faith that James describes in his epistle when he writes that faith that is not accompanied by works is dead. Paul also described that aspect of faith:
However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.
Romans 4:5 (NIV)
Do you catch the significance of what Paul is saying here? He makes it really clear that the person who continues to try to earn salvation by his or her works is not exercising true faith. Our faith is always demonstrated by our actions.
C.H. Spurgeon’s definition of faith wraps all three steps into a neat little package:
Faith is believing that Christ is what He is said to be, and that He will do what He has promised to do, and then to expect this of Him.
It is at this point that we are tempted again to claim that we do in fact have some part in this process of salvation. Even though it is dependent on God’s grace, don’t I have to have faith in order to receive that salvation? And isn’t the process of knowing, believing and trusting something that I must do? That seems like a fair question – one that leads us to our last point:
4. God has saved me because of His grace through faith – that is God’s gift to me.
…it is the gift of God…
We need to ask one more important question this morning – “what does the word “it” refer to?” There are really only three possibilities:
• God’s grace. There is no doubt that God’s grace is a gift to us, but I’m not sure that is what Paul has in mind here.
• Our faith. There are many commentators who try to make the case that Paul is referring to our faith here. After all, that is the noun that is in closet proximity to “it”. That’s true even in the Greek. And again, I think that is true. Even our faith is a gift from God. But Paul has something more in mind.
• The whole process of salvation. I’m convinced that is what Paul means here. Without getting into a Greek grammar lesson, the forms of the words and the sentence structure pretty well preclude connecting “it” with either “grace” or “faith”. Paul is saying that everything he has written about up to this point – all of our spiritual blessings, what God has done in our lives to redeem us from our hopeless condition – it’s all a gift from God.
It ought to be pretty apparent to all of us that a gift is not something that we ever earn or deserve. By definition, when someone gives us a gift, it is not a result of anything that we have done. However, we do have to choose whether to accept that gift and put it to use. I’m sure we’ve all received gifts that we either didn’t really like or couldn’t use. And so they either end up in the back of a closet somewhere or we “regift” those items to others. And when we do that we don’t get any benefit out of those gifts.
When we begin to re-define God to match our own ideas of who we want Him to be and when we begin to base our worship on our own preferences, we have in fact rejected that great gift of salvation that God want to give to us. In effect we’re saying to God, “I don’t want or need your gift. I’ll do it my way instead.”
Because I care about all of you, I’m going to be brutally honest with some of you this morning. If you are one of the people who answered “yes” to the survey question this morning, I’m greatly concerned for you. Because if that is what you believe, you’ve been trapped by our culture that cries out, “It’s all about me.” You’ve either been deceived or you’ve intentionally chosen to ignore the truth of God’s Word that we’ve been looking at for the past four months.
And while it’s not my place to determine whether or not you have in fact been saved, it is my place to very lovingly, and yet very firmly, to warn those of you who have chosen to try to come to God the way you want, rather than the way God has provided. But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to the words of Jesus:
"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
John 14:6 (NIV)
It’s NOT all about me! Jesus is Lord, because God has determined He is Lord, God is God the Father because that is how He has chosen to describe Himself. And our salvation is the gift of God because that’s how God decided to make His salvation available to us.
