Title: “A Gracious Faith That Works”
Text: Ephesians 2:8-10
Introduction
Finish Line: Each life can/will leave this message with a better understanding of how to apply God’s grace into our daily lives so that it will revolutionize the way that we live!
(How we are getting there?) TURN TO EPHESIANS 2:8-10
How are Paul’s words to the Ephesians here in these verses effective for me today? How was this letter to them, helpful for me?
Paul had lived there for about 2.5-3 years. Paul poured his life into them and was a great friend of theirs. We see in chapter 1 that they needed to know that it was OK to just live! God had transformed them (things that happened in the book of Acts) and they were kind of into this RUT of understanding God’s grace? Do we ever fall into a rut of understanding the grace of God? There could be some of us in here who may not have realized that you have forgotten the grace and love of our God and that nothing you can do is going to put you in better standing with him.
I. Readiness of Grace (v. 8)
A. “It is by grace you have been saved through faith.”
• Paul insists that it is by grace we are saved. We have not earned it, nor could we ever. It is a gift from God and all that we can do is accept it in the faith that it is true.
• It may seem so elementary, But we lose focus sometimes and begin to try to find ways to earn or merit God’s love. (sometimes we need a little reminder in our lives of who he is and who we are)
• There is absolutely nothing that a sinful, finite human could ever do to earn the approval of a sinless, infinite God- that is when we start to see grace more clearly.
• The Father loves us and is crazy about us” He wants to be our friend and extend to us love that we cannot truly grasp. This whole experience of God’s grace and love is His free gift to us!
• Talk about needing god’s grace, I read this story the other day that cracked me up:
A young minister, in the first days of his new church, was asked to conduct a funeral for a man who had just died. Standing before the open casket and consoling the widow, he said, "I know this must be a very hard thing, Mrs. Vernon. But we must remember that what we see here is the husk only, the shell . . . the nut has gone to heaven."
• This message of God’s grace and free salvation is what so many are looking for.
G.W. Knight captures so well the concept of grace when he said this: “When a person works an eight-hour day and receives a fair day’s pay for his time, that is a wage. When a person competes with an opponent and receives a trophy for his performance, that is a prize. When a person receives appropriate recognition for his long service or high achievements, that is an award. But when a person is not capable of earning a wage, can win no prize, and deserves no award--yet receives such a gift anyway--that is a good picture of God’s unmerited favor. This is what we mean when we talk about the grace of God.”
B. We have such a hard time with this whole idea of grace. (and why not?)
• To make your money, YOU EARN IT!
• To get your degree, YOU EARN IT!
• To get that girl to go out with you, YOU EARN IT! (Except for me, Tricia was a gift of God’s grace on my life, haha)
• To Get an A on a test, YOU EARN IT!
• To get others to like and respect you, most of the time, YOU EARN IT!
• Such a mentality is proper and normal in our society, but this mentality can contaminate our concept of salvation without us even realizing it!
• It is so hard for us humans to accept the way that God works sometimes.
C. Grace In The Lives of Others
• We wonder how God could bless this person or that person. We have all done it.
• We have all sat in a service where Brother John Doe gives or does this or that and we sit and wonder “How could God use him? Just look at how he acts.”
• When we operate this way, we confess that our walk with Christ is all about works. If we have to do certain things to get on God’s “good side,” then aren’t we all in trouble?? (I have been on God’s bad side many times when he used me)
• THAT IS WHERE HIS GRACE COMES IN!! This walk has very little to do with our performance and everything to do with his grace on us. It’s the heart that wants to please God. I have heard it said “A good leader or a good Christian is one who really wants to be one.” It is about the heart more than the performance.
What does this have to do with me?
Why do we do what we do??
• How is your understanding of grace? Do you do what you do, without even realizing that you are doing them to somehow earn more favor with God? OR do you do things as a response to his Love (along with him).
• We do things to impress people and it becomes a HABBIT that carries over into our relationship with God, which makes it ever more difficult to accept this “grace” idea.
• His grace is just there and FREE! He loved me, he loves you, and he loves your family, friends and coworkers. He has a free gift for them that will change their entire future and
• WE carry with us the responsibility to let them know that there is a God that is ready to have a relationship with them regardless of where they are or what they have done.
In Verse 8 we see that other than grace, FAITH is a huge key in this equation.
II. Responsibility to Faith (v. 8-9)
A. Obvious/Necessary Faith (read text again)
• It is interesting to me that verse 8 tells us that not only are we saved through the grace, but it is “through faith” The FAITH idea is key here. We are saved…THROUGH our decision to have faith.
• Faith is our only requirement in coming to Christ. Salvation is a free gift that requires only our faith.
• Acts 16:31 says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will saved.”
• John 1:12 says “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God.”
• All we had to do was believe. These obvious realizations about faith are NOT new to any of us, ALTHOUGH I think there is much more that Paul is getting at here and in most of his writings!
• Much of the faith referred to and modeled in our modern churches is not even worth having.
• Chuck Colsen said this—“American spirituality is 3,000 miles long and 2 inches deep.
• All too often we hear of faith as this weak suggestion that evokes no deep commitment, no deep thought, and no significant change.
• As I studied this passage, I began to really see how grace and faith connect
B. Faith Connected to Grace
• Check out how beautifully Paul applies faith to grace in the book of Romans, no illustration that I could ever come up with is more perfect than this passage:
Romans 5:2 “Therefore we have been justified through faith, we have peace in our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into the grace in which we now stand”
• Faith is our access and connection into the grace of God!! We see it in our text and we see it in this verse in Romans. Faith connects us and taps us into the grace of God
• APPLY TO LIVES. Is your faith in God visible? Can people see it? How do they see it? What does it look like? Maybe it is stopping on the highway to help a family that has been in an accident. Maybe…. Maybe… (give examples)
• What does your faith look like?
• William Booth tied faith and works together perfectly when He said this in an article in Christianity Today “Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again -- until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.”
****Which leads directly into the third segment of this passage that God has for us this morning****
III. Righteousness of Works (v. 10) (Read text)
A. “Works” centered mentality has the potential to be dangerous!
• We all know that No one can earn salvation by Observing the Law. (Rom. 3:20, 28)
• The “works” mentality - when it comes to earning salvation- is consistently condemned in scripture. (Doing good works as a means to earn salvation is like rearranging chairs on a sinking ship-- A waste of time that will not get you where you want to go!)
• It is very possible that Paul’s words here about grace and faith apart from works could lead to a do-nothing religion! (Because the text says that it is NOT OF WORKS)
• In Fact, we often run as far from the “works” mentality as we possibly can, don’t we.
• If anything, I want to do much more works as unto God, recognizing that it will not get you to heaven, but it sure does enhance the quality of life and our relationships with others. (This is mostly what we will be judged for)
B. BUT…I believe that “The Message of Works is really a message of service.”
True, there are no “works” that can “earn” salvation, but there is something dreadfully wrong when salvation and a relationship with Jesus Christ does not produce good works.
ELABORATE ON ABOVE!
• Paul refers to us in v. 10 as “God’s workmanship created for good works” for a reason;
• There is no reason for us to sit around in our faith and grace, when God has created and set us out to do good works. God is a fan of good works, friends.... so is Paul...and so am I!
• I am not implying in any way that by doing good works that grace runs out. Grace is not just the beginning, rather we live in grace. Actually, it was the grace of god that put Paul to work!
CHECK THIS OUT-- I Cor. 15:10 ties our “works” directly back to the GRACE of God when Paul says this “But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”
Friends…It is only by the grace of God that Paul did the things that he did.
It is only by the grace of God that we do things we do.
It is only by the grace of God that we are who we are.
It is only by the grace of God that we will touch the lives that we touch by doing the “things that we do.
Conclusion
