Sculptures have always amazed me. You have heard the story of the man who carved art out of logs using a chain saw. His specialty was carving the shape of an angry bear. He loved for people asked him how he did it. He would answer, “I just cut away everything that doesn’t look like an angry bear.”
In addition to Mt. Rushmore, one of Gutzin Borglum's great works as a sculptor is the head of Lincoln in the Capitol at Washington. He cut it from a large, square block of stone in his studio. One day, when the face of Lincoln was just becoming recognizable out of the stone, a young girl was visiting the studio with her parents. She looked at the half-done face of Lincoln, her eyes registering wonder and astonishment. She stared at the piece for a moment then ran to the sculptor.
"Is that Abraham Lincoln?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Well," said the little girl, "how in the world did you know he was inside there?"
Today, we are going to talk about how God chips away everything from our lives that doesn’t look like Christ.
Eph 2:8-10 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (pray)
We must drop back to verses eight and nine to get a grasp of verse 10. Clearly, our salvation, if we are saved, is done. “Have been” clearly states something that has already taken place in believers. You are not being saved, or hoping you will be saved in the end.
If you are not saved, I plead with you to be saved today. We established last week that the grace of God extends salvation to those who do not nor could never deserve salvation. We reach to that grace through faith in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ; specifically, His death, burial and resurrection. By faith, we trust in Christ to save us, and through that salvation, we receive all that God has promised us.
Clearly, from the text, we see that this is a gift of God. It is nothing that we can glory in.
Illustration: John Nelson, one of the great preachers of years gone by, was witnessing to a man. The man said, “I am good enough. I don’t need a Savior. I try my best, and I will trust that when God judges me, he will see my efforts to be a good man and receive me.”
Nelson said, “You can’t spend eternity in heaven based upon that.”
The man asked why?
He asked, “Do you believe there will be discord in heaven?”
The man answered, “Certainly not. It would not be heaven if there is disagreement and discord.”
Nelson said, “The rest of will be singing ‘Worthy is the Lamb of God who was slain for our sins. By His blood alone we have been washed and made holy.’ “You cannot sing that song. You can only sing, ‘By my goodness, I have made it and not by Christ’s sacrifice. You will cause discord and not be in agreement.’
“When the holy angels hear you singing that, one of the bigger ones will grab you by the nape of the neck and throw you over the wall.”
I believe the point is, if we are going to believe in heaven and salvation as taught in the Bible, we need to agree with what the Bible says about it. Paul states clearly, “this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Your works, or good deeds, will never qualify you for heaven. However, Paul goes on to say that this does not disregard works entirely. It just eliminates them from being involved in how we are saved.
1. His Painting. Workmanship, artwork, not from creation but from redemption.
“For we are his workmanship”
HIS workmanship. He is the artist. He is creating the work that is us.
The word he uses for workmanship is the Greek word from which we get the English word, “poem”. I bet you did not know you were a poem, did you. We are God’s poetry. Since he uses the first plural indicative form for “we”, Paul is saying that we, collectively, make up God’s poem, or artwork.
Illustration: I have a book that has all the English poems ever written. It has all the great documents of our language, and the English translations of every great documents, writings and books ever written. It has every translation of the Bible in it, every commentary ever written.
It is extremely personal, too. It has every letter I have ever written, every sermon I have ever preached. It has every letter you have ever written, every Sunday school lesson you ever taught, or heard.
There is only one problem with this book. It is not in the order of those works. I have it here. It is a dictionary.
You can see the problem here. I can find “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But they are not in that order.
The beauty of the order is missing from all the great works. You can walk into an artist’s studio and go to his closet. You can look at the bottles and tubes of paint and say, “In there is a great peace of art, but it is not on the canvas.”
Some Christians look at their lives as being enough beautiful art to be pleasing to God. However, if you are not in fellowship with other believers and serving with God’s people in a local Church, you are not on the canvas. You are still in the dictionary.
See, we are His workmanship, not our own. We collectively are making His masterpiece. The artist decides where the paint goes onto the canvas. The Poet decides which order and line the word goes on to. If you are not in God’s plan, which is to fellowship, worship, serve and give through a local Church, you are still paint in the paint jar, a word still in the dictionary.
C. The Augmentation…,
Notice that you are a “Work in progress”, not complete yet, but being developed stroke by stroke. Paintings that are not finished are not very attractive and do not make a whole lot of sense.
One of my mentors did Chalk Talks. He was a master at this. He would be teaching and drawing. He put what looked like random lines and marks on the canvas. They didn’t make sense. My thought was that a four year old could do that.
But he kept adding touches, lines, hues to it. Out of the chaos started to come something that began to make sense. Only until after he was near completed did things make sense.
Lots of times in your life may seem like random chaos, that God has forgotten you and that He is not up to anything in particular. Trust me, we are His workmanship, in progress, and it will all come out in the end.
2. His Paint. Created IN Christ Jesus
Galatians 2:20 fits in here….
The text as emphasized that salvation (being included into God’s great work of art) is not of our own doing, but by grace, through faith, in the work of Jesus Christ. He adds this phrase to us being God’s artwork by sticking to the theme, “IN Christ Jesus.”
Christ, the promised Messiah, God Himself. Jesus, son of Mary, human. Christ Jesus is the name of God becoming flesh. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily…”Colosians 2:9.
God created the universe, but the universe is not His prized artwork. God created Adam and Eve, and from them comes every man and woman, boy and girl. But every man, woman, boy and girl are not part of His artistic work.
Only those who are “In Christ Jesus” are seen as the purpose and beauty of the plan of God, the artwork, the poem that transcends all beauty and power.
3. His Plan. “Which God has prepared beforehand.”
Some would like to make a lot of this phrase, and some don’t like it at all. Yet an examination of the phraseology will clarify why this was included and why it is so important for us to grasp today.
The word that is used is one that can be thought of as describing a blueprint. This phrase eliminates the idea of God being reactionary and responding to what happens like a novice chess player. This thought agrees with the theme of the Bible: We are in God’s plan.
Isa 46:8-10 "Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'
Nothing has caught God by surprise. He foresaw what was going to happen before the beginning and has followed His plan. This concept is difficult for us to grasp, and let me illustrate why.
Ill. Seven weeks after he was born, Phil Pezsat went to be with the Lord. All he ever say in his life was the inside of an incubator and the neonatal unit of a hospital in the Northeast. He never knew there was a world outside of that room because he had no reason to believe it. He never saw a tree, a dog, a cow, a kitten or a bird. He never saw the grand architecture that was built throughout the city. He couldn’t imagine it because he had no basis to imagine upon.
We were born into time. We have lived with time and accept it as reality. We have no basis of understanding Eternity, which is different from Everlasting. Everlasting is “time with no beginning and no end”. Eternity means “outside of time” or “above time”.
God created time and He exists in Eternity. Time is one of his creations just as we are one of His creations. For us, time creates limitations, but for God, there are no limitations. We understand decisions on the basis of time, which means, once decided and acted upon, there is no undoing, no unsaying. Galatians 6:6.
We cannot go back and relive yesterday, nor can we foresee what details tomorrow will bring. This is not so for God. Time does not restrict Him, as none of His creation restricts Him.
But in our restrictions, we absolutely can only vaguely conceptualize what it means to live without those restrictions. We can barely conceptualize living so perfectly that there is no need to relive or redo something done.
Yet, for God, not restricted by time, created His artwork, and in eternity, it’s all done. For us, we are still experience the making of it.
We think we can imagine outside the neonatal unit of time, but we have no basis to draw upon except our imaginations. And we know, “Isa 55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
In our text verse, we see His Painting, His Paint, His Plan. Let’s Look at His Purpose…
4. His Purpose. “That we should walk in them.” Put it together…..
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
We are not saved by good works, but God’s hand in your life should produce good works. One has well stated, “Works can never be the engine of the train of your life, but good works must be in your cargo cars.”
The beauty of this artwork of God’s is that He took dead sinners, forgave us, made us alive, and put us into His masterpiece of art. It can only reason that having made us alive, after cleansing us, should make a difference in how we live.
The problem is, although God foreordained, or planned, that we do good works….Although He moved inside us to become our life so He could do good works through us…Although He gave us everything in salvation for us to do His work….…we still resist the development in our lives and we still settle for living like He does not make a difference.
It is not enough that Christ makes a difference when we are soaring in our spirits after a good sermon or lesson. It is not enough that Christ makes a difference when we feel good and everybody is nice to us. It is not enough that Christ makes a difference when our families are well and our health is holding up. That is not where Christ’s message rings the truest for our testimony.
Christ must make a difference in our lives when everything is going wrong, everything hurts, when we are so mad we are about to explode, when life is so frustrating, all we can do is cry, when everyone seems to turn against us, when someone says something to hurt us, when nobody likes us.
Listen to this….
1Pe 2:12-24 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
Does Christ make a difference in your life, in the worst of times?
Ill, In 165 AD, Rome was hit by two plagues back to back. Researchers and historians believe that one of them was small pox.
When the plague was at its worst, the approximation was that 5,000 people a day were dying from it. The villagers left their homes and families to try to avoid it, leaving town in masses. Parents left crying children who were sick. Adult sons and daughters left parents in their sick beds to die alone.
However, something unexpected happened. The Christians stayed in the danger zones to care for the sick and dying. Many Christians from outside the city came in to help. Many of them died, being exposed by caring for people they did not know.
Christian historians believe that the growth of Christianity spread when the word of this courage began to reach the world. Why? Why would these common people who trusted Christ risk their lives for people they didn’t even know? Because these understood, Christ makes a difference.
If Christ does not make a difference in the worst of times, Christianity is not worth much. But if what Christ said was true, His presence in your life should make a difference when everyone else flees.
