“In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us. ”
Redemption: to bring back into rightful ownership (restoration to one who possesses a more fundamental right or interest) by the paying of a price, or ransom. Buying back a slave or a captive, making him free by the payment of a ransom.
By the time we are done today, you may feel as though my sermon was misnamed. This is largely a sermon on God’s grace; it is necessary that we approach this subject and handle it carefully and thoroughly. But please remember throughout, that in saying, “...according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us”, Paul is referring to our redemption back to God, through Christ’s blood.
We’ll see the connection as we go.
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There was once a young preacher who was fairly certain he had it all figured out. He had a pretty good handle on the scriptures. He could clearly see the enormous gap between what the Bible said about how things should be, and the actual condition of the world around him.
He took some measure of pride in the fact that since his salvation, he had stopped all of his bad habits from his former life. He no longer smoked, never used any bad language, and hadn’t had any alcohol to drink for a long time.
He taught and preached godly living. Christians should live like Christians and not be the bad witness that they so often proved to be, in their un-Christ-like behaviors.
When this young preacher counseled it was without compassion. When he preached it was with fervent, impassioned exhortation to put away sin and stand up for Jesus.
He didn’t know how much people were hurting inside. He didn’t realize that in the privacy of their own homes ~ their own hearts ~ they were sad and weary and uncertain of their acceptance with God.
He didn’t realize that so many of the things he was exhorting them to do, they themselves wanted to do but were finding themselves weak and unable to do consistently, and their failures plagued their burdened minds and had many of them ready to throw in the towel and give up.
Then the time came that this young preacher fell from his own high standard. Tired and weak and stressed-out himself, he let himself be lured into one of the enemy’s oldest and most successful traps for men in full-time ministry; and in the end he had no job, lost his wife and family, and found himself on his own.
The same lack of grace that had so characterized his own ministry now followed him like a snapping dog. The church that he served in kicked him out, telling him he was going to lose his salvation. For the next six years the leadership of every church he attended made it clear to him that he would always be a second class citizen there because of his past; and he eventually stopped trying to fit into Christian circles altogether.
Interestingly, he never stopped believing the gospel message. He never for a moment doubted the inerrancy and infallibility of God’s word. But, coming to the conclusion (with the help of the pious, God-fearing, clean-cut pillars of the church with whom he came in contact) that he was no longer acceptable to the church or to God, he went his own way, building a new life and lifestyle that did not include the church at all, and now there was no Christian influence in his life at all, apart from the Holy Spirit, who, it turns out, was always there, guiding, whispering, waiting for just the right moment to begin the healing process.
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In His book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace”, Philip Yancey traces his own search for grace; What is it, really? Where can it be found? Why does it seem to be so lacking both in and outside of the church?
He said, “As I look back on my own pilgrimage, marked by wanderings, detours, and dead ends, I see now that what pulled me along was my search for grace. I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.”
I don’t believe I have to build much of an argument to convince people that there just isn’t much grace being shown in the world today.
When murderers attacked our country and killed so many people one hour in September, for a time there was much grace being shared. People from New York to San Francisco; Corpus Christi to Bangor, came together as one in shock, then in sorrow; in sympathy and patriotic resolve.
The President could do no wrong and nations all over the world pledged their support of us.
But it didn’t take long for things to settle back close to normal. Before long the Democrats were hinting that things aught to be handled a little differently, and soon after that accusations were flying at the White House that information had been held back from the public.
Within the general populace crime began to pick back up, people began once more to whine about the small stuff, the TV comics went back to their coarse, cutting jests, the focus again turned inward, and grace was put back in the box for the next widespread calamity.
Where is grace?
Well, I’m happy to announce that it is alive and well. I’m equally happy to announce that the ungrace of mankind does not nullify the grace of God.
You see, being backwards creatures due to the sin nature, if we take a close look we will usually find that what comes ‘naturally’ to men is precisely the opposite of what God is.
So if you see a dearth of grace in the world around you, then you can be certain that you will find an abundance of grace in Him.
Let’s see what Ephesians 1 has to say to us about that.
THE GLORY OF HIS GRACE
We must understand first and foremost, that all of these blessings God has bestowed; all these things He has done in and for and through us are, ultimately, to bring glory to God.
Now if we were to say this about the motives of any man, the very idea would repulse us. When sinful man does good deeds, acts seemingly unselfishly, apparently sacrifices of himself for another, and then we discover that his primary motivation was to bring attention and applause to himself, we are disgusted and rightly so. Can it be that it is the most selfish of acts ~ to pretend grace and benevolence toward another only for the sake of recognition and reward?
But glory is the very nature of God. Glory is not something God attains to, or draws upon Himself, the way a football quarterback does with clever play maneuvers and outstanding passing; or the way a movie star does, with superb acting, or a political figure with people-pleasing national and foreign policies.
God is Glory, and as the conceiver and maker and sustainer of all there is, the fundamental purpose of His creation is to bring forth praise to His Glory.
The Westminster Assembly met at Westminster Abby in 1647 to develop a catechism, {which is a manual, or a guide for religious instruction}. They finally ended up with two; a longer, and a shorter Catechism. The shorter catechism asks 38 questions of the believer; the first one being, “What is the chief end of man?” (or the primary purpose and goal of man)
and the answer given is, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”
As we learn and by the quickening power of His Holy Spirit begin to understand what is meant by terms such as “...has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ”, and “...holy and blameless before Him...”, and “...predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself...”, and “...the kind intention of His will...”, what springs up in the believer’s breast is pure and spontaneous praise, to the Glory of His grace; or if you will, to His Glory, and His infinite, marvelous grace, which proceeds toward us out of His Glory.
Rephrase it this way if it will help you: “...to the praise of His glorious grace, which He freely bestowed, (or poured out) upon us in the Beloved”.
THE ABUNDANCE OF HIS GRACE
Human thought and vocabulary cannot begin to do justice to the abundance of God’s grace. I dare to say that no one has lived who, while in this life, understood the depths of God’s grace. Some have tried to describe it.
Closing a lengthy and powerful sermon called “The Treasure of Grace”, Charles Spurgeon declared,
“To sum up...the riches of the grace of God are infinite, beyond all limit; they are inexhaustible, they can never be drained; they are all-sufficient, they are enough for every soul that ere shall come to take from them; there shall be enough for ever while earth endureth, until the last vessel of mercy shall be brought home safely.”
The Apostle Paul, it seems, was eager to use this term ’grace’ as often as he could squeeze it in.
He called it: “surpassing grace” in II Cor. 9:14
“the abundance of grace” in Romans 5:17
Peter called it “the manifold grace of God” in I Peter 4:10 ~ and by the way, in that verse, Peter was exhorting his readers to use the gifts God had given them in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. Food for thought...
So can I do better, or even as well as the others, in trying to plunge these bottomless depths and describe for you the abundance of God’s grace? Of course I can’t
Even in the song we sang this morning, the writer, Julia Johnston called it “Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace...” How could I do better than ’infinite’?
Just let me try to stimulate your imaginations with this contrast.
In Ephesians 2:3, Paul points out that we all, before coming to Christ, were by nature children of wrath.
By that he meant that we all deserved the uninhibited out-pouring of God’s wrath because of sin; and indeed, that was all we had to look forward to.
In the third chapter of his letter to the Romans he draws a very clear and unambiguous picture of the state and condition of lost mankind before a holy and righteous God.
The way I’ve said it in the past is that not only did we not deserve Heaven, we did deserve Hell. We were not only undeserving of mercy, we were absolutely deserving of wrath.
But then we read passages such as these:
“He made Him (Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” II Cor. 5:21
and
“For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did; sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us...”
Romans 8:3,4a
and Hebrews 10:12 -14 says,
“...but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time onward until His enemies be made a footstool for His feet. For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.”
Now if you can fathom that all of God’s wrath against sin was poured out on His Son there on Calvary’s cross; if you can begin to comprehend that nothing was held back, but that all of sin for all of time was judged in the body of Jesus as He hung, pouring out His own blood as the one, perfect sacrifice for sin, then perhaps you can begin to understand that in the same way, God pours out his grace upon you, through that perfect and finished work of Christ.
There is no more wrath for you, believer. Jesus paid it all. He took all of God’s righteous wrath on His own shoulders, and took it away forever, for you.
Now there is only grace, and it is infinite
He poured out all His wrath on Thee,
So Thou couldst pour Thy grace on me.
OUR RESPONSE TO HIS GRACE
So what should our response be?
Well, the very first and automatic response, once we’ve become recipients of this abundance of grace and begun to understand it just a little, is to begin to walk like one who has received God’s grace. As a man named MacKintosh wrote:
“The believer does not act in order to get life, but because he has it. He starts on his Christian career with the full assurance of pardon and acceptance in the Beloved. Perfect Justification is his starting post, and glory the goal.”
So we have a duty of love to respond to God’s grace with appreciation, not insulting His gift by going about as though it isn’t quite earned yet and we need to do something to be deserving of it.
The whole point was that we were not deserving of it, and He purchased it for us, then lavished it upon us, in love... “according to the kind intention of His will”
There is no such thing as a ‘good Christian’. You may have heard me say that before, and you’ll hear me again. As soon as I say to you, ‘that man is a good Christian’, I’ve left you with the impression that the man referred to does things, or has done something to earn the designation of ‘good Christian’.
If I exhort you to be a good Christian, I place you under a burden you may not be able to carry; and if you fall, you will go about feeling as though you are not a ‘good Christian’, and in our minds that places Christians on various levels of worth and acceptance with God.
Well Clark, if there’s no such thing as a ‘good Christian’, then what kind of Christians are there?
A Christian is one whose sins are forgiven, who possesses eternal life, and knows it; in whom the Holy Spirit dwells; he is accepted in and associated with a risen and glorified Christ; he has broken with the world, is dead to sin and the law, and finds his object and his delight, and his spiritual sustenance, in the Christ who loved him and gave Himself for him, and for whose coming he waits everyday of his life.
That is the only kind of Christian there is. And he walks by faith, sustained by grace.
Now the second response to God’s grace that should manifest itself in our lives, is that we should be channels of that grace. His grace, flowing through us, to others.
Picture just for a moment, a clear glass tube. It is open at both ends, and as quickly as water is poured into it, the water flows out the other end.
Or even better, picture a soaker hose. It has holes all over it, angled in various directions, so that as water flows into one end of the hose, it squirts out in many directions from the smaller holes and waters a large area.
Does the water change at all? Do its basic properties change because it passed through the channel? No.
So the grace that God lavishes on us, should then pour out to others unchanged. It should be sacrificial, uninhibited and abundant.
Now of course it is not going to be that way, because we tend to be a petty, sinful little people still. But as God continues His sanctifying work in us, conforming us to the image of His Son...making us more like Him... one result will be the more constant and less sullied channeling of His grace through our lives.
This brings me full circle back to the story of the young preacher at the beginning of this sermon, and what I want to say to you today.
If you haven’t already guessed it, I was that young preacher.
I was that one who for 6 years went his own way, feeling rejected of God and God’s people... being treated at every contact with Christians like a traitor to the faith; a second-class citizen; tolerated but not fully accepted in the church.
Then, entirely apart from any Christian influence, according to His grace, He once again infused me with a burning for His word.
I remember one day having the conscious thought, that they might close me out of church, but they can’t close me out of the Bible. So I began to sit down late at night and read my Bible. I again picked up some of the commentaries that had been gathering dust on my shelves for years. I didn’t dare to pray yet. But He spoke to me, nonetheless.
I began to read through Romans, and one night, about 1:30 in the morning, I read that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the Law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through flesh, God did. Sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.”
And then I went for a walk. And as I walked God turned the light on, and for the first time in my life I realized that He was an offering for MY sin. And that there was no condemnation for ME. And that my sin could never be too bad for God to forgive it, because His Son’s blood was sufficient to pay the penalty in full.
Over the following weeks He showed me that He had never rejected me; I had turned from Him. He showed me that like Peter, I could be reinstated and commissioned and used. He lavished His grace upon me, and finally I knew that far, far too many Christians labored under the same weight I had carried, and they needed to be told that Jesus paid it all.
I’m not entirely freed from the consequences. I’ve been rejected by every church I’ve applied to for a pastorate because of my past, and not one of them has ever bothered to ask for details.
I am still treated with ungrace by many in the church, including those in leadership roles.
But I don’t sweat the small stuff. God has given my wife and I more than enough assurances that we’re doing precisely what He has called us to do, and He is blessing; and His grace continues to pour out on my life in rivers and ocean waves.
Those are my credentials, friends. And they give me to right to say what I’m going to say to you now. We have a lot in common; you and me. So listen to what a friend has to say to you today, for your good and benefit.
If we are to exalt in God’s wonderful grace, lavished upon us according to the kind intention of His will...
If we would lift up our praises to Him and joyfully proclaim that He has made us holy and blameless before Him, and that in Christ we have been blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places...
...we must first be prepared to recognize and acknowledge that this marvelous grace flows equally... that the words of Ephesians 1:7 apply equally...
...to those in the church who have hurt us the most.
Their ungrace does not nullify God’s grace; and their sin is paid for by the same blood that paid for yours.
Do you realize, that if we continue to look back at the times we’ve been treated with disdain by ungraceful Christians, and entertain contempt in our minds and loathing in our hearts for them and their ungodly actions toward us, that we become them?
I quoted Philip Yancey at the beginning of this sermon and I’ll quote him again here, close to the end. He said,
“The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative”.
In some cases we may never again see the people who hurt us. They may be dead now. We may never have even known their name. They may never repent of their thoughts and actions toward us. They may go to their grave believing they were right.
None of that should be our concern.
We are recipients of God’s grace, as revealed to us here in Ephesians 1. Nothing will ever change that; it is not something we deserved or somehow brought on ourselves ~ it is not something man can take away. We have Redemption through Christ’s blood, according to the riches of God’s grace, and that will not change.
But if we are to fully enjoy and appreciate the presence of His grace in our lives, we must first release the ungrace of our past, and know that they too are part of the ‘we’ mentioned in Ephesians 1:7
Do you think I ask a hard thing? Even an impossible thing?
Would you say, “Clark! I still feel the sting! The wound has never completely healed, and there has been no reckoning. They got away with it! How can I forgive? How can I find any joy in the thought that they can get away with what they did?”
Well I would answer first that they haven’t gotten away with it. They treated you...treated us like they did in the first place, because they’d never understood or recognized the out-pouring of God’s grace in their own lives.
And next I would say to you that if you go to a quiet place, where there’s just you and the Lord, and ask Him to help you forgive, He will give you more grace.
And when you’ve cried, and you’ve said in your heart that you forgive them, you’ll feel the release; joy will flood your heart; you’ll know the fullness of His grace.
Please don’t let the memory of the ungraceful people in your life hold you back from enjoying the peace of God in your hearts. Ephesians 1:7,8 says,
“In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us.”
and the ground is level at the foot of the cross.
He has plenty of grace for you and for them and it will never run out.
Though you may never see or hear from those people again, who have hurt you the worst; be a pure channel of God’s grace, and let them go ~ and prove yourselves to be good stewards of the manifold grace of God.
May He take the truth of these things and seal them to your hearts today, by His Holy Spirit who was given to us.
“His love has no limit, His grace has no measure,
His pow’r has no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth and giveth and giveth again!”
A. J. Flint
