Saved By Grace, Through Faith, For Good Works

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.