TEXT: Ephesians 2:8, 9
TITLE: THE GRACE OF GOD
(A God Who Is Always Gracious)
As kids, we are taught that if you want something, you have to earn it. As adults, we know that if we want a sales award, we’ve got to go out and sell. If we want a promotion, we have to put in the long hours. If we want to succeed – be it vocationally, athletically, or financially – we’ve got to cover ourselves with this work ethic and make success happen for ourselves.
Based on this understanding many have lived their lives attempting to please God by doing good and being good. Their diligence pays off in other areas as well – grades and athletics – so wouldn’t it work in faith? So the question is asked: How does God grade performance? What’s the quota of good deeds, and how do I know if I’m passing or failing?
Many get the idea that if they commit one sin they have to go all the way back to the beginning and start all over again. Or they think that they will never be good enough for God.
What needs to be realized is that even your most righteous acts – your Sunday best – are like filthy rags.
Read text.
We must realize that we are saved by grace and not by performance?
Are you trying to climb a spiritual performance ladder, not realizing that the ladder will never reach to God? If so, I’ve got some great news for you. God is gracious or He is a God that gives grace.
Psalm 103:8 – “The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy.” This Scripture as much as any in the Bible shows us a picture of who God is.
God’s grace can change your life. When people think of someone as being “gracious,” they usually think nice, tolerant, sensitive, that type of thing. “Oh, what a gracious person.” “What a gracious host or hostess.” But what does the Bible mean when it speaks about grace?
Bound up in who God is is an inclination to bestow benefits on undeserving people. “Nice” humans might experience an occasional desire to bestow a benefit on a very deserving person – say a boss gives a productive employee an extra day off; a hardworking student gets an extension on his paper; behaving children get to enjoy an ice cream cone on the way home from Grandma’s.
But God’s grace comes from an entirely different planet. No common blood flows between God’s grace and human grace. God’s grace is an extraordinary as human grace is ordinary. To understand this, you must first understand the relationship of Justice, mercy, & grace.
Example
Let’s say you’re walking down your driveway to pick up the morning paper, and you notice the 15 year old kid who lives a couple of houses away. He doesn’t have his driver’s license yet. He has “borrowed” the family car without permission, and he’s backing out of the driveway in a rushed and careless fashion. You’re concerned because you know he doesn’t have his license, and you’re also concerned because you know there’s trouble in that household.
So you watch and you listen to the tires squeal and you see the car lurch forward; the kid’s head is just barely peeking out over the steering wheel. The car is all over the road, and then it jerks to the right and plows through your mailbox, your bushes, and the fence that you built last summer. As the cloud of dust settles, you see the boy step out of the car with a slightly embarrassed look on his face, and you’ve got a decision to make. You have 3 choices.
Your first choice is to treat him with justice. You can give him exactly what he deserves. “All right kid, you messed up, so I’m going to call the police and they’ll cite you for driving without a license. After that I’ll call your parents to tell them what happened. And then you’re going to have to get a job to pay for my mailbox, my bushes, and my fence.
If you treat the kid with justice, you’re not a bad person. You’re simple giving him exactly what he deserves – no more, no less.
However, you might choose a second option: mercy. Mercy is giving somebody a little bit less that he deserves. You say, “I’m not going to call the police, but I am going to call your parents, and we are going to establish what the mailbox costs, what the bushes cost, and what the fence costs, and you’re going to pay.”
If you do that, the kid ought to be very thankful because, instead of applying strict justice, you are choosing to be merciful. He’s getting less punishment that he deserves.
But it’s possible you might choose a third option. This option, however, doesn’t square with common sense. It’s risky, it could blow up in your face, and some might even call it scandalous. You might choose to treat the kid with grace.
“You messed up, kid. You mowed down my mailbox, you ruined my bushes, and you flattened my fence. It took me half the summer to build that fence. But I’m not going to call the police. I’m not even sure I want to get you in a whole lot of trouble with your family. As for the mailbox and the bushes and the fence, I can fix those. But how about you and me get in the car and find a place where we can sit down and have a sandwich. Then I can find out a little bit more about who you are and what’s going on in your life and what the future might hold for you. Would you do that with me?”
The kid nods.
“There’s just one condition,” you add.
“What’s that?’
“I’m driving.”
What’s your reaction to that last choice? You might say, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. All the kid is going to do is take a joyride the next day and plow someone else’s mailbox down.”
You know what? He might. But that is the risk of grace. But it’s also possible that your grace will touch that young boy at the deepest part of his soul. Your interest in his welfare and future might unlock potential he’s long since forgotten, and you might witness the transformation of another life changed by grace.
Now, for a few moments let’s talk about what you and I deserve. Until we understand that, we’ll never understand the true nature of grace.
Romans 6:23 – “The wages of sin is death.” We deserve death. If we were to get straight justice from God, we’d be obliterated on the spot. God wouldn’t be mean and nasty when He annihilated us – He’d be just. We couldn’t shake our fist at Him and tell Him, “We don’t deserve this” – because we do.
What if we were to receive mercy? Psalm 103:10 says, “He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor punished us according to our iniquities.” Because God is merciful, His policy is not “one sin, one whack.” There is not a one-to-one correspondence between our sinning and dying on the spot every time, because God’s amazingly merciful nature leads Him to give us less than the full punishment we deserve.
But then comes grace. Grace is an outrageous blessing bestowed freely on a totally undeserving recipient. It’s too good to be true. It’s what makes people say, “No, that could never happen.” Yet the Bible says it does happen.
When you know what you deserve yet you get something more wonderful than you could earn in a thousand lifetimes – boom! – the grace explosion happens in your heart, and you will never be the same. This is exactly what happened to the prodigal son in Luke 15. This wayward son took his father’s inheritance and blew it. He did every self-destructive and God-dishonoring thing a young, rebellious man with pockets full of money could do.
When his indulgence, high living, and foolish choices led him so low that pigs’ feed started looking good, he thought: This is justice. I’m dying in a pen full of swine, but this is what I deserve. I wasted the old man’s inheritance – money that he gained through decades of hard work & right living. I’ve trashed my life and I’m crawling around with pigs. If I die like this, it’s not an unfair deal; I got justice.
Yet even though he was standing in a grimy, smelly pigpen, he dared to imagine mercy – not because his sins had become any less odious, but because he had some understanding of his father’s love. He had the faith to envisage the possibility that his dad might be merciful, so he told himself, this is what I’ll do. I’ll go back home. The first thing I will say to my dad is, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” I’m only going to ask for a bunk out with the hired hands & maybe some food, and I’ll work for it.”
Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine what was waiting for him. This delinquent son got a huge love blessing that was completely out of line: the embrace of his father, a ring on his finger, a celebration with his friends and family, the feast of his life. It was irrational.
That kid was forever changed by a stunning assault of grace. I doubt he went out two months later with money in his pockets to the same town to do the same stuff to wind up in the same pen.
His grace is undeserved. It comes from the heart of a gracious God who wants to stun you and overwhelm you with a gift you don’t deserve – salvation, adoption, His presence, His wisdom, His guidance, His love.
The pardon that God offers is an equal opportunity offer. God makes this offer to spectacular sinners, boring sinners, nasty sinners, proper sinners, secret sinners, educated sinners, uneducated sinners, religious sinners, and atheistic sinners. The truth is, God delights in offering His pardon to whoever will receive it.
One last thought. We’ve talked about the transforming nature of receiving grace, but now I want to say a word about the revolutionary aspect of giving grace. We’re pretty good as spreading justice: “You bump me and I bump you back.” Occasionally, when we’re in a good mood, we might flirt with being merciful: “You bump me, and I’ll bump you back a little less forcefully.” But Jesus would like us to unleash outrageous acts of random graciousness.
In Matthew 20 Jesus told a parable of a landowner who hired guys in the early morning to work a full day in the vineyard. And then he went back and hired guys late in the morning, then early in the afternoon, and even late in the afternoon. Finally he hired another crew of guys with one hour left in the day.
When the working day ended, he paid all of them the same amount. And the people who had worked an entire day said, “Wait, You gave us a bum deal!”
And the landowner replied, “Did I? When you asked me if you could work for me, I promised you a full day’s wage for a full day’s work. That’s justice. I’ve kept my word.”
“But what about the guys who just worked the one hour?”
The landowner said, “I just wanted to perform a random, senseless act of grace. I just wanted to give them something that would make them run home to their spouses and cry out, ‘Do you believe what has come my way? I worked one hour and got paid for an entire day. It’s outrageous.”
If we treat each other with justice we are not going to touch one another’s heart or soul very deeply. If we’re occasionally merciful with each other, we’ll warm up the relational temperature a bit. But it won’t be all that transforming.
However, every once in a while, if we perform a random, senseless act of grace-giving we can enter a new dimension of living. If we forgive somebody of something when we could easily hold it against them; if we take an IOU that someone owes us and write a note that says, “Paid in full” (which are the same words that Jesus wrote on the sin list of your life); if we tell that person, “I want to set you free as I’ve been set free,” we’ll discover the power and reality of grace.
Give some of your talent or money away. Embarrass someone with an extravagant gift of grace.
