Note: I developed a set of slides in PowerPoint 10 to use with this sermon. If anyone is interested in having them, send an Email to me at sam@srmccormick.net with the subject “PowerPoint slides - Grace” and I will Email the pptx file to you directly, along with the sermon notes in MS Word with cues for advancing and animating slides. Response will normally be within 2 or 3 days.
THE GRACE OF GOD
I. Introduction
Eph 2:8-9 "...by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Soon after moving to Virginia years ago and becoming associated with a small congregation, I was asked to serve on a search committee to find a preacher, as the congregation did not have a permanent one at the time. In the first meeting of the search committee, when members expressed our ideas of the factors that should guide our search, some of the members expressed that they wanted a preacher who “doesn't preach too much about grace.”
I wondered why the subject of the grace of God must be avoided, at spoken about with moderation.
Why not celebrate it? Why not “shout it from the rooftops?”
Questions started popping.
Is it a hush-hush subject, best avoided?
Mustn't let the cat out of the bag?
Mustn't trust everyone with the knowledge of grace?
Afraid people will misunderstand grace?
Is there a danger we will depend too much on grace (or rely on it wrongly)?
How much talking about grace is OK?
Will people understand grace more correctly if it's not talked about too much?
Do we already know all we need to know about the grace of God, and just need to hush about it?
I wondered if my new Christian friends had at some time heard a barrage of sermons falsely claiming that God’s grace eliminates any duty on the part of Christians who are by that very grace licensed to live an unregulated, undirected life in utter disregard of the Bible’s direct commands, inoculated from the guilt of willful disobedience.
Or perhaps we suspect that with undue emphasis on God’s grace, people will think they need only pay attention to what Jesus described as the greatest commandment and the second which is like it: Matthew 22:37-39
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Since Jesus declared that all other commandments in the law are suspended from these two, people will think we need only to recognize them, disregard any more detailed guidance, and everything else will fall into place.
Upon reflection, I realize that in my lifetime experience, many people who have a desire to please the Lord recoil from any discussion of God's grace apart from explanatory--and perhaps mitigating--qualifiers. It causes uneasiness for some of my Christian friends, and evokes quick counter-propositions to a purely grace-based salvation. It seems that there must be more to it--something more ought to be required. It’s a yes-but response.
My friends were more comfortable, and felt on safer ground pointing to obedience, duty, and works as the avenue to the soul's salvation instead of God’s grace. Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 and other New Testament doctrines seem to support it. Grace was deemed to be risky, and seemed contrary to many of the bible’s commands, all of which clearly demand obedience, and which show disobedience as the avenue to death and destruction.
II. What is grace?
Often defined as unmerited favor, God’s divine influence on the heart and its reflection in the life, divine encouragement or sustenance, God's Riches At Christ's Expense, etc.
• Hebrew: chen (khane) graciousness, i.e. kindness, favor, or beauty (rendered “favor” in the O.T.
• In the New Testament the word comes from three Greek words, all stemming from the same root:
Charis, a n. which is defined as (1) graciousness of manner or act, and (2) the divine influence upon the heart, and its reflection in the life
• Charisma, char'-is-mah a n. (1) a divine gratuity, that is, deliverance from danger or passion; (2) specifically, a spiritual endowment, that is, religious qualification, or miraculous faculty, (3) a free gift.
• Charizomai, khar-id'-zom-ahee, v. (1) to grant as a favor gratuitously, in kindness, pardon or rescue (2) to deliver, forgive freely, to give or grant.
Grace is exhibited in the desire, willingness, and ability to grant favor as a gift where it is not deserved. By definition, it includes graciousness of manner and action. That divine influence is exercised in the heart of God, and his desire is that grace be exercised in human hearts.
III. What does grace do?
Numerous ways grace is displayed to us in scripture:
1. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Gen 6:8
2. The word became flesh…full of grace and truth. John 1:14
3. And the child [Jesus] grew, and the grace of God was upon him. Lu 2:40
4. Great grace was upon them all [early disciples] Acts 4:33
5. My grace is sufficient (strength is made perfect in weakness?) 2 Cor 12:9
6. Paul delivered as of first importance what he himself received (the gospel) and that though he persecuted the church of God, “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.” 1 Cor 15:3-10
7. “stand firm in this grace.” 1 Peter 5:12
8. We pray, “We come to your throne of grace” and such it is, where we find grace to help in time of need (Heb 4:16)
9. Grace is in scores of other ways.
Grace is the attribute of God that displeased Jonah. To Jonah, punishing sin was a higher virtue than forgiving it. Rather than warn the Ninevites and call them to repentance, Jonah fled to Tarshish because “Thou art a gracious God.” Jonah 4:2
Jonah found fault with God’s graciousness or his grace.
To understand what grace does, we must recognize a hard truth.
God justifies the ungodly.
Rom 4:5, “And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”
Woah! “Him who justifies the ungodly!” “accounts an ungodly man’s faith as righteousness!”
Those who oppose the doctrine of free salvation have brought as a charge against God, that he saves wicked men and receives to himself the vilest of the vile. Jesus was criticized for the same.
See how scripture not only accepts the charge, but plainly states it!
By the mouth of His servant Paul, by the inspiration of the Spirit, he takes to himself the title of “Him that justifies the ungodly.”
It is intended that we should wonder at this doctrine, for how and why a holy God justifies an unholy man is a mystery. But we must not doubt it.
IV. How does a person get access to God's grace?
A. Is the availability of God’s grace measured by our performance?
1. A friend I will call Janet once gave her definition of grace: “I get just as close to the top of the mountain as I can on my own, then I just need a little nudge to get me up to the top. That little nudge is grace.”
2. It’s similar to a “yardstick” view (hold up yardstick to illustrates one view of grace). If I can get 35 inches toward meriting heaven, God's grace will supply the final inch?
Is 34” close enough?
Is 18”?
My problem with this concept is that I cannot supply 1/32” of merit. The smallest amount of sin erases all merit.
In these analogies, salvation is seen as a matter of performing some measure of our own righteousness sufficient to enable and engage grace.
Grace is seen as a supplement to our own working, supplying only a small but undefined deficient margin.
The problem is that we have no righteousness of our own. Sin pollutes us. Clean pure water mixed with polluted, nasty, smelly water is a foul mixture.
“All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” Isa 64:6
B. None of us are near heaven in the absence of grace.
We must realize--in spite of our most excellent performance--just how far we are from salvation, without grace. In Janet’s version, she believed herself oh, so close the mountaintop, just needing a little nudge. But without grace she is not oh, so near the mountaintop. She is farther from heaven than the farthest star in some undiscovered galaxy.
It is the same with the yardstick. A million times a million yardsticks cannot measure how far from heaven we are without grace.
B. God provided grace through Jesus, as a gift.
It is a gift that is engaged in humans through faith.
Eph 2:8-9 “by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Rom 5:1b-2 “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
Faith occupies the position of a channel or conduit. Grace is the fountain and the stream; faith is the aqueduct along which the flood of grace flows down to refresh thirsty souls.
From before the time of the fall of Adam and Eve, God had a plan to save the race, and the plan of salvation was grace – favor not deserved but freely given.
Use John 1:14-17 – read
Jesus, son of the Father, full of grace and truth (v14)...grace came through Jesus (v17).
Rom 5:21 “Sin has reigned unto death, but grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.”
He became the righteousness of God in us.
2 Cor 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
How do we get faith? Faith comes by hearing (Rom 10:17), and reading is a sort of hearing.
V. Resolving the conflict
A. Since grace is obtained through faith, yet obedience and works are required, are we not left with a dilemma?
It may seem that since grace is a gift and cannot be earned, our actions do not matter; no matter how vile and harmful our practices are.
On the other hand, do not the scriptures say:
• “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. (Matt 7:21 [ESV])
• "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and not do what I tell you? Luke 6:46
• “He that hears these sayings of mine and does them, will be likened to a wise man who built his house upon a rock.” Matt 7:24
• …and others.
In the presence of this apparent conflict, it may be frightening to talk about grace too much because we might emphasize it to the point we are steered away from obedience and duty?
What my friends in Virginia feared was that an overemphasis on grace seemed to water down another biblical reality--that we are to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” Phil 2:12
B. But this is not to be understood to mean men can obtain for themselves eternal salvation by their own doings; for such a sense is contrary to the scriptures, which deny any part of justification and salvation to be of works, but ascribe it to the free grace of God.
• where is the wisdom of God, in forming a scheme of salvation, and sending his Son to effect it, and it is then after all left to men to work it out for themselves?
• where is the justice of God in accepting an imperfect righteousness in the place of a perfect one, which must be the case, if salvation is obtained by men's works?
• for we are imperfect, even the best of us, and cannot be meritorious of salvation
• Furthermore, if salvation is to be obtained by the works of men, the death of Christ would be in vain, as Paul said, “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, Christ died for no purpose.” (Gal 2:21).
• Paul’s words to the Philippian church may rightly be rendered, "work about, or consistent with your salvation;" employ yourselves in things which accompany salvation.
C. Looking further, we see that God selectively applies grace.
We get some help in understanding God's selective application of grace in the parable of two men who went to the temple to pray.
In “going to pray” they were equal.
One went down to his house justified, the other not.
Both men had faults.
One suspected he was justified and was not.
The other had no illusions, yet was justified.
Wherein lies the difference? Did one man have more or worse sins than the other, or did one do more or superior good deeds than the other?
We cannot discover the answer to that. We see only one difference in the two men.
The difference in the men is their attitude toward God and fellow man.
We can see no other difference. The unjustified man touted his excellence, even pointing out his superiority to the fellow man, the tax collector. The justified man called on God for mercy, and - regarding his fellow man's condition before God - he left it alone.
D. Here is the solution to the dilemma of grace.
We have said that grace is accessed by faith. But we also know that faith works.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, understood as a child, and thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things”… (I put away some things I learned as a child, but I now return to my childhood and diagram a sentence).
FAITH/WORKS
There is no disharmony between the two words. They form a short but profoundly true sentence with a subject and a predicate. Take away either word and you do not have a complete sentence expressing a complete thought.
Hebrews 11 gives us one example after another of the works of faith.
The writer said time fails to talk about the others.
In every single case, faith is associated with action--never a justifying action, but in every case an evidencing action.
Titus 2:11-14 succinctly resolves any difficulty by showing us that it is God’s grace that empowers us to do good works. Read it.
“The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness etc....zealous for good works.”
A boiled-down corollary is in 2 Cor 9:8 And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work
VI. The abuse and loss of grace
Even though God's grace is free, one may fail to obtain it. Grace may be abused in more ways than one. Let us look at some.
A. Let us sin with impunity, then,, for grace is abundant?
Paul anticipated precisely that error.
Romans 6 – “What shall we say, then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?”
This passage was written for the purpose of answering that probable side trail which would impede the understanding of grace. If we take that route in our thinking we are on the wrong road.
Rom 6:16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
We belong to God or to the deceiver as indicated by whom we give ourselves to in obedience.
B. A root of bitterness is a barrier to grace.
Heb 12:15 See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled;
Bitterness is a root that lies hidden in a person's heart, all too often borne of anger and pride. It is a root that is apt to spring up and bring forth bitter fruit, gives trouble and has a defiling nature. It is often the occasion of great trouble in churches. Sometimes, like roots, bitterness lies under the surface, secret and undiscovered but still having a poisoning effect on the souls of those who are thus embittered.
Bitterness is the enemy of grace.
Jonah found it so. God caused a plant to come up and shade Jonah from the sun, but just as quickly it was destroyed by a worm. Jonah became so angry and bitter that when God asked him if it was right for him to be so angry he answered, "Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die."
God pointed out to Jonah that he had pity for the plant, a gift from God for which he had not labored, but had no pity for the inhabitants of Nineveh, for whom he had labored. Instead, he was bitter that they were spared. Jonah put himself into the awful position of objecting to God’s grace.
C. We make ourselves deserving of severe punishment by trampling on God’s grace
Heb 10:28-29 “Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?”
God’s grace, while abundant and free, is not to be trifled with, or made a mockery.
VII. I suggest that there is a powerful connection between God’s grace and the water of life.
I wonder if they are one and the same. Both are free and abundantly available.
Jesus offered the water of life, or living water, to the woman of Samaria, whose life had become deeply entangled in sin.
You may know that woman. You may be that woman, or a man like her.
Jesus said, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." John 4:10-15
Rev 22:17 “…let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.”
The faith that brings us to God’s grace teaches us to obey him in baptism, being born again as a new creature.
As an act of obedient faith, you may enter the kingdom, become part of the body of which Christ is the head, and put on Christ, laying aside your former life in heartfelt repentance, being born again to a new life as a new man or woman, saved by his grace.
If that is your wish we invite you to come.
