It can feel overwhelming to think about building a relationship with God. For God, everything ought to be right, every part of your life. You ought to pray all the time. You ought to be very careful with every word you speak. You ought to be helping all sorts of people every day. Who can do it all? And if you can’t do it all, then where do you start? It can be overwhelming. You can be tempted to just give up.
Our text for this morning breaks it all down into three elements. They aren’t action steps where you do one first and when it’s complete you move on to the next. None of them can wait. But in our text the Apostle Paul gives us wonderful help to know what’s most important, the most solid foundation for our faith. And when you start in the right place you’re off to a good start.
Please stand for the reading of God’s word, Ephesians 2:8-10.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
The order of salvation begins with God’s grace. When you look deep inside and you ask ‘what business do I have daring to try to talk to God or ask for any help from God?’ the bottom line of the answer is ‘God’s grace.’ He has made it his business. He took the initiative to reach out to us before we reached out to him, to welcome us, to give us better than we deserve. He went so far as to come into our turf and die on the cross for us when we were totally undeserving, and before any of us were born. That’s the foundation, the only foundation for coming close to God. He is gracious. In Exodus 34:6, Moses was up on the mountain top and the Lord said he would reveal himself to Moses and he did it by saying, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,..” Without that grace, we are all lost.
And, unbelievably, good religious people time and time again try to wiggle out of living by grace. We want to be in charge. We want to say we can do it. We set up our own selected list of rules and try to say that if we keep that list then we are OK before God, we don’t have to depend on God’s grace, and we may take deep offense at what the Bible says about us all being sinners, all needing forgiveness, none of us being good enough to earn God’s blessing. But that is what the Bible says. And until we get this foundation set in our minds, that we aren’t good enough, we can’t earn anything from God, we always depend on his grace and mercy, our relationship with God will be unstable. Maybe one day we figure we can earn our own way, but then who really needs God at all if we can do it ourselves and we get independent. And then a day of real honesty comes and we realize we have failed and we feel hopeless and condemned.
Haven’t we all had those moments when we had to say to God, “God, I can’t do it? I just don’t have the strength to handle all the stresses. I have so many things to keep track of. I just can’t keep all the balls in the air at once! I keep dropping stuff. Lord, I try to do right, but I failed you again and I know I’ll fail you again another day. Lord, I can’t do it!”
And I hope you’ve been able to hear in those moments the Lord’s answer, “I know you can’t, but I love you anyway, and I can. My grace is sufficient for you.” Our hope is in God’s grace. That’s the only stable foundation for life.
But God’s grace alone doesn’t make it. You have to build on it. You need to make a response.
And there is a rank heresy that is poisoning our culture today that denies that we need to add anything to God’s grace, that denies that we have any responsibility to respond to God. You hear people all the time saying that God is so good that he’ll just bless you no matter what. And they use that as an excuse to neglect spending any time with God, neglect trying to obey God, to just go out and do whatever they want, to set themselves up as their own gods.
But God’s grace becomes effective in our lives through faith, and that’s our response.
Does that mean you have to have total confidence in God at every moment, no doubts, no fears, and no questions? Not at all. If you can do that, great. But I can’t. That’s why grace has to be at the foundation, because we all have moments when we have to come to God and say, “Lord, my faith is really shaky today, but I’m going to stick with you anyway.” We all have those moments.
To have faith in God is to open our hearts to him, to let him come close, to stand naked and exposed, totally vulnerable before our God. And when the shields and excuses and diversions are set aside, we experience his grace for ourselves. And that radical openness and vulnerability before God is really scary and we can always find other things to use as distractions. But without faith we cannot please God. God’s grace will be wasted on us unless with make the response of faith in him.
And so Paul wrote to the Ephesians in our text, “By grace you have been saved through faith.” It’s by grace, through faith; can you say it with me? “By grace you have been saved through faith.”
And that sounds wonderful, there is this amazing grace in the heart of God and it has now extended into my heart through faith. But we need to go farther. There is one more essential. God’s love doesn’t stop with me. So far we are all warm and lovey-dovey. It’s great for me, but the world is going to hell in a hand basket and God doesn’t just love me, he loves everyone. So we need one more thing to fill it out. By grace you are saved, through faith… for good works. Say that with me.
If I have really trusted that grace is the way to go and I’m glad to receive it for myself, then I need to give it to someone else, more than they deserve, good works. And if I claim to have faith in our wonderful, gracious God, but I don’t start acting like him, then my faith is useless, even dead. In fact the New Testament epistle of James says exactly that, “Faith without works is dead.”
If we have allowed Christ into our hearts, he will change them to be like him, loving and serving. And if everything is centered around ourselves, then something is wrong.
Jesus told the parable of the talents, about a gracious, wealthy man who put a lot of money into the hands of three servants for them to invest and then left and let them do it. When he came back and found that two of them had followed through and earned a return, he rewarded them graciously and generously because that was the kind of man he was. But there was the third servant who denied the graciousness of his master and he buried the money the master gave him and he had nothing to show in return. And that was serious. The master took all the money back and he was punished. Faith without works is dead. In James 2:26, in the New Testament, we read, “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.”
Jesus told another parable about a rich man who graciously forgave one of his servants a humongous debt. But then that servant turned around and refused to forgive a fellow servant a much smaller debt. And the rich man was furious and he changed his mind and required payment in full.
The grace in God’s heart comes into our hearts through faith. And it flows out to others in good works. And when that flow is working, you’re on your way. As you give more grace to others, he gives more grace to you.
And let me just pull out a bit of what the Bible teaches about good works.
First, I’ll repeat, faith without works is dead. If you aren’t reaching out to serve others, something is really wrong. Faith without works is dead. It’s a very simple self test of faith to ask, what have I done this past week for someone else as my service to God.
Second, the purpose of good works is not to impress other people with how good we are. It’s not to bring glory to ourselves. In Matthew 5:16, Jesus said, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” This points to one of the sneakiest sins of good religious people. We love doing good works so that we get the glory. We want the world to approve of us, to think we’re so nice. And it’s like the president of the United States is holding a press conference and some fourth string aide jumps in front of the cameras and tries to impress people. The world doesn’t need us for who we are. They need us to point them to Jesus Christ, and do everything we can to help them see him, and then get out of the way. And if we don’t have that straight then we are stealing the glory due to God for ourselves, and that’s wrong.
We find a third principle in 2 Timothy 2:21. The Apostle Paul wrote to his side-kick, Timothy, “All who cleanse themselves of the things I have mentioned will become special utensils, dedicated and useful to the owner of the house, ready for every good work.”
To be useful for God in good works we need to cleanse ourselves of all sorts of unworthy things. If we let our calendars get filled up with unimportant things then there will be no time left for God. If we let our heart get filled up with longings for things that really don’t matter or that pull us down spiritually, we won’t even notice God’s opportunities. To be useful for God in doing good works, we need to organize our lives around serving him. That’s basic discipleship. And that’s what we’re here for. We’ve stated it out, that the mission of the First United Methodist Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ.
And that’s hard to do. There are so many demands on our time, so many temptations and distractions.
And that brings us to our fourth principle for understanding good works in Hebrews 10:24 and 25 “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” It’s our job to encourage, to provoke one another to do good works.
And this is a point where we United Methodists have a wonderful heritage. The early Methodists would meet together weekly to hold each other accountable, to work together to become true disciples of Jesus Christ, to help each other grow in faithfulness. They set very specific goals, the goals God gave us in the Bible and they would meet together regularly to work on them, to “provoke one another to love and good deeds.”
So one evening in their small group meeting, Carl might say, ‘You know there’s this elderly lady next door whose house has really gotten run down. I keep thinking about offering to do some repairs for her.”
And the next week somebody in the group might just ask, “Carl, how is it going on helping that lady next door?”
And Carl might say, “Rats, I forgot all about that. Thanks for reminding me. I’m going to talk to her this week”
And then, the next week, someone asks Carl again, and he reports, “I did go over there. And you wouldn’t believe what an interesting woman she is, and I did a few things for her and she appreciated it so much. But there’s this one big job that really needs to be done and I don’t think I can do it.”
And some others chip in and say, “We’ll help.”
And next week they report all excited about what they could do for this dear lady. And someone else in the group says, “Watching this happen, I’ve started something similar with a single mom that I work with who is really struggling.”
And a month later that neighbor lady’s daughter shows up at their small group and says, ‘You know, at first I thought, what nice people they are. Then I realized, no, it’s more than that. This is God’s work. I want what you have, tell me about your Jesus. How do you do it?”
And they answer, “We can’t do it. It’s not in us. It’s all God’s grace. And it took us a while to figure that out because we really wanted to do it ourselves, but we couldn’t. And when we accepted that, we discovered that he can. His grace is amazing.”
And we really began to trust in him, that he could forgive us and make us new. And in that faith it only made sense to start meeting together to find his way to become new and we searched the Bible and we found his method to become new. So we get together each week and we work the method. That’s why they call us Methodists. And you’ve seen it for yourself now. God can change lives.
Ma’am, you’ve tasted the beginnings of his grace. We encourage you to respond now with faith, faith in him, not us. We invite you to join us to build a life of good works to the glory of God. It’s great.”
And we’ve written down our method, we call it the Rules of the United Societies. Each week we work on some of these rules together. We work together to cleanse our lives of anything that does harm to ourselves or anyone else. We work together to provoke one another to doing good works. We work together to build skill in using the means of grace, the ordinances of God, the response that we can take to experience God’s goodness for ourselves.”
And the cycle has repeated itself. It starts with God’s grace. We can’t do it ourselves. It takes root in our lives through our response of faith. And it’s expressed and extended to others through good works.
Would you be curious to see the Rules of the United Societies for yourself? I cut them down enough to fit on a bulletin insert so that you can all see them for yourselves. You’ll recognize pretty quickly that the language seems old fashioned to us now. But the principles, the method, is from God and it stands forever. By grace we are saved, through faith, for good works. AMEN
