The Weight of Grace
Morning Lent Prayer, Day 7
Introduction
There is a moment in every honest person's Lent when the weight becomes real. Not the weight of the fast or the early morning prayer, but the weight of what you are actually fasting from, and why. You begin to sense that something deeper than discipline is at stake. Something larger than a calendar season is happening in your soul.
The season of Lent is designed for exactly this kind of reckoning. It is forty days of looking clearly at two things: the weight of your sin and the weight of God's grace. Most people are familiar with the first weight. We know what guilt feels like. We understand the heaviness of failure. What we often miss, and what the Apostle Paul refuses to let us miss, is that the second weight is far greater. Grace is not a light or fluffy word. It is not a theological ribbon tied around a gift. It is substantial. It is serious. It is heavy enough to carry the full weight of the world's sin.
The passage we bring before us today is Ephesians 2:4-5, where Paul writes, "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." Two small words sit at the center of that sentence and at the center of the entire Christian life: "But God." Everything before those two words is a description of death. Everything after them is a declaration of life. This sermon asks you to sit with both sides of that pivot and to feel the full weight of what grace means.
1. Recognizing Our Spiritual Death
Before we arrive at the grace, we must stay honestly in the diagnosis. Paul does not move quickly past the condition of the human soul before God. In Ephesians 2:1-2, he writes plainly: "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world." Notice that Paul does not say you were sick. He does not say you were weak or struggling or in need of a tune-up. He says you were dead.
This distinction matters enormously, and Lent is the season to feel its full weight. When we say someone is sick, we imply they still have resources within themselves to respond to treatment. A sick person reaches for the medicine. A sick person walks to the doctor. A sick person makes choices toward recovery. But a dead person does nothing. A corpse does not lift its own arm. It does not open its own eyes. It does not call for help. The condition of spiritual death, as Paul describes it, is not an activity problem. It is an incapacity problem. You were not just doing bad things. You were unable to do anything spiritually alive.
Romans 6:23 reinforces this with precise clarity: "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Wages are what you earn. Death is what sin earns. Paul is telling you that apart from God's intervention, the trajectory of a life lived in sin is not improvement; it is a settled, earned outcome of death. Ezekiel 18:20 says the soul that sins shall die, and Paul says every soul has sinned (Romans 3:23). The arithmetic is sobering.
Lent holds up a mirror and asks you to look honestly. The temptation is to soften the reflection. We prefer to think of ourselves as people who are mostly good but occasionally off-track. We prefer the narrative of the patient who needs a second opinion, not the narrative of the person who needs a resurrection. But Paul insists on the harder truth, because the harder truth is the only one that makes the grace make sense.
If you think you were merely sick, you will thank God politely for the medicine. If you understand that you were dead, you will fall on your face in awe that He raised you. The depth of your gratitude will always match the depth of your diagnosis. This is why Lent begins with ashes and the words of Genesis 3:19: "For dust you are and to dust you will return." It is not meant to depress you. It is meant to prepare you for the resurrection that is coming.
2. Marveling at God's Rich Mercy
Now we arrive at the pivot. "But God." Two words that divide every human story into before and after. In Ephesians 2:4-5, Paul writes: "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."
Pay close attention to the order of Paul's language. He does not say God was rich in mercy because we were poor in virtue. He does not say God loved us because we finally found the right posture of repentance. Paul grounds God's action entirely in God's own character. "Rich in mercy" describes what God is, not what we produced. Titus 3:5 makes this unmistakable: "He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy." The source of your salvation is not a sink you filled. It is a spring that was already flowing.
This is one of the most freeing truths in all of Scripture, and Lent is the right season to receive it fully. During these forty days, it is possible to slip into a transactional posture with God. We fast, and we expect to earn something. We pray early, and we feel as though we are making deposits toward divine approval. This is a misreading of what Lent is for, and Paul corrects it at the root. God did not respond to your spiritual effort. He acted out of an overflow of affection before you had anything to offer.
Ephesians 2:4 says He acted "because of his great love." The word in the Greek is agape, the settled, self-giving, unconditional love that does not depend on its object to sustain itself. God looked at dead sinners and loved them not because they were lovely, but because He is love (1 John 4:8). This is what the prophet Hosea was pointing toward in Hosea 2:23 when God says, "I will say to those called 'Not my people,' 'You are my people.'" He calls life out of nothing. He speaks love into the unlovable.
During Lent, there is a real danger that the weight of self-examination moves you from conviction toward fear. Fear of judgment is real and it has its proper place, but Paul wants to move you further. He wants you to travel from the fear of what you deserve to the awe of what you received. Psalm 103:8 says, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love." Abounding. Overflowing. Rich. God's mercy is not rationed. It is not a limited resource managed carefully against the size of your sin. It is described consistently in Scripture as something that floods and surpasses and exceeds. Ephesians 3:20 speaks of a God who does "immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine."
Marvel at this. Do not move past it quickly. A God who was under no obligation to act, who had every legal and moral right to leave the dead in their graves, chose instead to reach down and make the dead alive. He did it, as Paul says, through union with Christ. "Made us alive with Christ." Your resurrection is not separate from His resurrection. It is participation in it. Romans 6:5 says, "If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his." Grace brought you into union with the risen Lord. That is not a light thing. That is the heaviest and most glorious reality in existence.
3. Walking in Unearned Salvation
The third movement of this passage brings the truth to the ground of your daily life. Ephesians 2:8-9 states: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast." Paul has moved from the condition (dead) to the action (God made us alive) to the mechanism (grace through faith) and now to the implication (no boasting).
Consider this scenario. You are at a birthday celebration, and the host presents you with a gift. You reach into your pocket and ask, "How much do I owe you?" The room goes quiet. The host looks hurt. The offer of the gift was an act of affection, and your attempt to pay for it misreads the entire relationship. It turns generosity into commerce. It replaces love with transaction. What was meant to draw you closer has now created distance.
Paul says trying to work for your salvation does the same thing to God. It misreads the relationship. It tells the Giver that His love was insufficient and that you prefer to settle the account yourself. Romans 3:28 says plainly, "We maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law." Justification, your right standing before God, does not come through accumulated performance. It comes through faith, and even faith is not the payment. Faith is the hand that receives the gift. A hand does not earn what it holds. It simply opens and receives.
This is deeply important for your experience of Lent. Fasting is not currency. Prayer is not a deposit. Acts of repentance and mercy are not ladders you climb toward God's approval. If you have understood the first two points of this sermon, then your Lenten practices should feel different. You are not fasting in order to earn God's love. You are fasting as a response to a love you already have. You are not praying to open a door that is closed. You are praying to a Father who already made you His child through the blood of Christ (Galatians 4:7). The practices of Lent are expressions of love and gratitude for a salvation that is already secured, not behaviors designed to secure it.
This shifts the entire emotional register of the season. Instead of anxious striving, you move toward grateful response. Instead of performance for approval, you move toward worship from assurance. Galatians 5:1 says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." The yoke of trying to earn what God has already freely given is a burden you were never meant to carry. Put it down. Walk in the freedom of what has already been done.
Conclusion
The weight of this text is not the weight of guilt, though it begins there. It is not the weight of obligation, though discipline is part of the response. The true weight is the weight of grace itself, and it presses down on you in the best possible way. It brings you low before a God of incomprehensible mercy. It reminds you that you were dead and He made you alive. It tells you that His love was the motivation, His mercy was the source, His grace was the means, and your faith was simply the open hand.
Day 7 of Lent is a good day to let those two words do their work in you again: "But God." Let them sit on everything you know about your failures. Let them answer every accusation your conscience raises. Let them stand between who you were and who you are now in Christ.
You were dead in your transgressions. But God, who is rich in mercy, made you alive. That is not a casual sentence. That is the weight of the world's greatest love, pressed into twenty-four words, and it is enough to carry you through every remaining day of Lent and every remaining day of your life.
Receive the grace. Walk in it. And let your fasting, your prayer, and your service in these forty days be the overflow of a soul that knows what it has been given.
---------------------------------------------------------
NOTE:
Your feedback matters!
If this message resonates with you, please take a moment to rate it on Sermon Central. Ratings help me know what's working and inspire me to keep creating fresh content.
Here's how to rate:
Look for the star rating system above the sermon text. Click the number of stars that reflects your experience (5 being the highest).
Thank you for your time and support!
In addition to ratings, feel free to leave a comment to share what impacted you or ask questions.
Blessings,
Pastor JM Raja Lawrence
Andaman & Nicobar Islands
email: lawrencejmr@gmail.com
Mobile: +91 9933250072
* If you need This Sermon in Tamil with my other personal Notes, please email me, and I will send it to you in a PDF Format. Thank You.
