‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
52nd teaching
10.28.2013
“God’s Grace,
part I: the Freeing Gift”
Review:
So we’ve successfully concluded our review of God’s
attributes as we’ve covered them through our course in Theology Proper. I’m
very proud of each of you who stepped up and shared with us your thoughts on
these subjects, even those of you who didn’t get a chance to share but who
expressed a desire to. That’s the whole point of it all, isn’t it? The capacity
and desire to share with others the truths of God.
Thus we’ve discovered that the LORD God, as revealed by His
own Word, is the one and only purely actual, self-sufficient, single, triune,
omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, impassible, spiritual, mysterious, sinless,
immortal, unchanging, infinite, illuminating, timeless, simple, necessary Being.
He is the God who is loving of sinners, jealous, perfect, faithful and
truthful, wrathful of sin, just, merciful, holy, patient and good. What a
tremendous and beautiful picture that paints of this One unique Being we label
with so small a word as “God”.
Last week, we had a special message, really a guy’s study
since pretty much only men were here (except for my wife). Anyone remember what
the title of the message was? Who were the two kings we saw in Scripture? What
were they doing in their lives which led to them arming their adversaries? What
should we do about it to keep from making the same mistakes they did?
End Review
Tonight, we come to it at last, the final moral attribute
of God we had yet to cover, this subject of the Grace of God. I’m both
intimidated and humbled by such an immense topic, such an impactful truth, recognizing
that getting this truth down correctly means the difference between dead
religion and a living relationship so far as our Christianity goes. Needless to
say, the Grace of God is one of the most
important subjects of Scripture that you or I could ever learn. And yet it is
one of the most misunderstood and most missed subjects in all of Scripture. I
cannot emphasize the importance of Grace enough. Grace is fundamental to real
Christianity. Grace is central to correct understanding of the Bible. Grace
means all the difference between eternal life and eternal death.
I firmly believe that the Grace of God is what pulls the
soul from death to life, what turns the believer from dead religion to a living
relationship, what turns a life spent in guilt, shame and failure to a life
characterized by joy, freedom and gratitude. You cannot live the Christian life
without the Grace of God. You cannot relate to God without His Grace. You
cannot experience joy in the Lord without His Grace. You cannot even be saved
aside from the Grace of God.
This is the ultimate, the pinnacle, the zenith of it all.
Grace is one of the highest and most glorious of truths in the entire Bible.
If this whole “church-thing” is just one big drag to you…
if the Bible seems boring and lifeless… if people around you are hateful to you
and you just can’t stand them… if the cross seems like just another trinket,
just another religious symbol in a world full of religious symbols… if the
words “joy of the Lord” and “rejoicing in God” seem trivial and hokey… if God
Himself seems like a distant cosmic grouchy huffy-Henry… then this subject of
Grace, let it wake you to life!
This is a critical
truth for you to know!
Therefore, I pray God would give us great care, that His
Spirit would guide us into truth and steer us from incorrect thinking and
incorrect believing.
The Grace of God is such a profound topic, we’re going to
spend several weeks studying it, learning it, knowing it, understanding how to
live by it. Tonight, though, the title of this message is: “God’s Grace: the Freeing
Gift”. Next week, we’ll consider Grace in the context of salvation and the part
it plays in being saved. The week after that we’ll look at Grace and its place
in the Christian walk. But for tonight, let’s get a clear understanding
biblically of what this Grace of God is.
Turn to Romans 5:1-21.
Here, Paul the apostle has written his magnum opus, the book
of Romans. And in the book of Romans, chapter 5, Paul is comparing two people:
the one man through whom sin and death entered the world, that’s Adam. He says that
through Adam’s offense death reigned. And since all of humanity has come from
that first man, from Adam, we all in Adam’s footsteps have sinned.
But He says Adam was
a type, that is a foreshadow, a hint at a second Man. The second Man is Jesus
Christ. In contrast to Adam, who’s one act of disobedience brought death, Jesus’
one act of obedience brought life, referring to the death of Christ on the
cross. In Adam, all the human race received sinful natures resulting in
condemnation. In Jesus, all the human race has the opportunity to believe and
receive new natures resulting in justification. The picture is very clear, very
stark of all reality, seen in this comparison between the First Man, Adam, and
the Second Man, Christ, between the biological head of the human race, and the
spiritual Head of the church. Elsewhere, Paul said “For as in Adam all die,
even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (I Cor 15:22).
And as we read Romans
5, no doubt you recognized how many times Paul used the word grace. The Grace of God is a central
theme of this chapter in Romans. Adam’s disobedience brought sin and death.
Christ’s obedience brings grace and life.
But just what is grace, anyways? Once again, we run the
danger of being so familiar with the word that we fail to grasp its meaning.
So our first point
of several points tonight is this:
1.
What is Grace?
Let’s notice a few things about
this word.
Firstly, and I don’t think you could
notice this unless you’re reading your New Testament in its original language,
but first notice that the original Greek word for grace is the word charis.
In Greek mythology, the word charis represented goddesses known as the graces. They were
believed to be embodiments of human creativity, beauty and nature. Charis then represented beauty and
creativity, it represented gifts and favorable things.
However, in Biblical language, this term charis is adopted from pagan religion
and redeemed. Though the word charis
once simply meant “something that brings joy, pleasure, delight or charm”, the
Bible gave it new meaning.
Biblically, charis,
grace, means the gift of God’s favor, the undeserved kindness of God. Grace,
therefore, means “God’s unmerited favor”, truly a beautiful gift wherein He
grants us His favor.
So Grace is God giving you something you do not deserve and
cannot obtain on your own. By definition, you cannot earn the grace of God. God
gives His grace freely. It is undeserved. To earn grace or to think you deserve
grace is to make grace no longer grace. You cannot deserve grace since it is undeserved.
Often of course you hear grace and mercy go hand in hand.
Mercy is not getting what you deserve, which would be the punishment for our
sins; while Grace is getting what you do not deserve, which would be the favor
of God.
So let’s get this concept down: God is both merciful and
gracious. He had mercy to spare us the punishment due our sins by the
crucifixion of Christ and Him taking the punishment for us. But it’s not that
God has saved us and then is angry with us. I think many people live with this
half-truth, that God has saved them but that He’s still very angry with them,
especially when they mess up. He might not be able to do anything about it,
since you’re saved now, but boy, is He mad up there!
No, that’s all wrong! The truth is God has saved you in His
mercy and that God smiles upon you in His grace. He hasn’t saved you to be
distant from you. He didn’t save you so He could just be mad at you. He saved
you and pulled you out of the darkness so He could give you His favor and love
you all your life.
We notice then, that grace is God’s unmerited, undeserved
favor and blessing. We also see that, because of Grace, God isn’t angry with
us. Rather, He has given us His undeserved favor. No amount of good deeds you
do will earn God’s favor, He already gives it to you freely.
Next thing to notice is what unlocks the favor of God.
Again, we can often get this skewed. What unlocks God’s
favor? Surely, if you think about it, I’m a good person, right? You might think
you’re a pretty good person, especially in comparison to other people. Maybe
you think you’re a good person because well you don’t smoke or drink, you don’t
go out partying, you don’t have any tattoos, you don’t swear. Or maybe it’s
because of the good things that you
do: you go to church, you read your Bible, you pray before meals and at
bedtime, or even on a whim.
But we have to realize that while good deeds and obedience
are definitely pleasing to God, that
these things do not earn God’s favor.
See the difference? I think that the faithful walk of a believer is pleasing to
God, but that that same believer even at his worst already has the unearned
favor of God’s grace.
So how then do we receive the grace of God if it cannot be
earned by what we do? We read it in Romans
5:1-2: “…we have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into
this grace in which we stand…”
You get the undeserved favor of God through Jesus Christ,
through His work on the cross, not through any work of your own. And lest we
come to think that having faith earns us God’s favor, we’re reminded by Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of
yourselves; it is the gift of God…”
The only way to take hold of Grace is to take hold of the
key, the only work that counts, the finished work of Jesus Christ upon the
cross. Through Jesus we have access to the grace of God. If you are in Christ,
you already have the favor of God. If you are in Christ, you are already loved.
If you are in Christ, you need not consider God as angry with you. He has already
opened the way Himself for Him to love you and have fellowship with you and to
be pleased with your life.
Paul called it the free
gift, there in Romans 5:15. You
cannot earn a free gift. Let’s say you’ve get a coupon in the mail. Hey, it’s a
free mocha latte at your local coffee shop! You don’t have to do anything but
show up and take hold of the offer. So, with coupon in hand, you enter the
coffee shop and immediately head for their restroom. No, you’re not going to
use it. You’re going to clean it.
And you’re going about scrubbing the nasty toilet and
sweeping up the hair off the tiled floor when the manager opens the door and
says “What on earth are you doing?” And you explain that you got this coupon
for a free coffee and that you’re wanting to get on the manager’s good side,
you want to earn His favor, so you can get that free coffee.
Now where’s the paradox lie? Where’s the crazy in that line
of thinking? It’s in believing you could earn the free coffee when the free
coffee is already a free coffee. It is a gift and you can’t earn gifts (I’m
looking at you, Santa Claus)!
But I think in many ways that we as Christians can so get
this wrong that we spend most of our lives doing good for the wrong reasons and
despairing over it, trying to make God happy and imagining Him as unhappy with
us whenever we fail. Many of us can spend years cleaning God’s toilets
throughout Christendom just to try to earn what God has already freely given.
Yes, do good. Yes, yes, yes. But do not for a moment think
that doing good will earn you the favor of God which He has already freely
given.
Finally, notice also Romans
5:20, “Moreover the law entered that
the offense might abound.” We’ll touch on this more in the coming weeks,
but the purpose of the law is to point out the flaws. The Law points out the
flaws. The Ten Commandments tell you what
to do, but they can’t help you if you fail to keep them.
The late great Chuck Smith writes this in his appropriate
book Why Grace Changes Everything: “Suppose
that I robbed a bank willfully and deliberately. The law condemns me because I
can’t say I didn’t do it or prove that I didn’t do it. The video camera caught
me. I can’t say I had a right to do it because robbery is not included in the
First Amendment. Therefore, there is no way I can be forgiven within the law.
“During the trial, I might try to say, ‘I promise I won’t
rob any more banks as long as I live. I will live a good, clean life from now
on. I will never take anything from anybody wrongfully again.’ That still doesn’t
justify me from what I have already done. I might try to say that I should be
forgiven because I did so much good with the money. I gave some to the church
and I fed my family. But my ‘righteous’ deeds cannot counterbalance or absolve
my guilt.
“The judge may order that I pay back to the bank all the money
that I took. As part of my sentence, he may order me to pick up tin cans along the
freeway to help keep America beautiful. I may spend the rest of my life doing
good things, but still I will not be absolved of what I have done. All the
works of the law cannot erase my guilt. My past wrongdoings still exist. I am a
robber and the verdict is clear.”
The Law points out the crime and the guilt, but no amount
of keeping the law will erase what has already been done. A crime remains a
crime. That’s where grace comes in. “But
where sin abounded…” Where the law points out lots and lots of sin… “grace abounded much more.” Grace, the
favor of God, the gift of God in salvation, is the “what to do” if the Law
points out your flaw.
No amount of preaching the Law or looking at rules will do
anything to pardon you of what you’ve already done. If you committed a crime,
you committed a crime, and the Law can only show you that, it cannot forgive
you of it. But Grace can. Grace is what paves the way for justification. Being
justified is “just as if I’d” never sinned. God gives you His favor. God
forgives and saves and pardons you. And God smiles down upon you.
His law demanded death for being broken, and that demand of
the law was taken by Christ in our place who did die and thus did
satisfy the demand of the law. So now your sentence has been carried out. You
died in Christ and now you are born again by His grace.
What a miracle this grace seems to be! How it seems to be
too good to be true!
2.
The Biblical Basis of Grace
For a yet clearer picture of Grace and to understand some
aspects of it, let’s have our Project Scriptura verses now.
As far as the biblical basis for God’s grace, there’s a
very practical picture of God being gracious towards a woman caught in adultery
there in John 8:1-11.
First off, it’s pretty ridiculous that they caught the
woman in the very act… but where the heck did the guy she was with run off too?
What did they let him go?
But while the self-righteous were there ready to tear this
poor woman to pieces in their “holy anger”, Jesus ends up freeing her from
condemnation. That’s practical grace. She was
an adulterer. She had broken the law.
But the Man to whom they brought her was the one who was headed for a destiny
of death, for the garish cross and the pain that He would endure for that same
woman being accused! And so He showed her the grace that He would soon make available
to all the world.
3.
The Objects of Grace
In the past, we’ve discussed both wrath and mercy as
attributes of God. We’ve seen that the objects of God’s wrath, the people
against which the wrath of God is directed, are the unrepentant. Ephesians 2:3 says that before we were
saved we “were by nature children of wrath”
and Psalm 7:11 says “God is angry with the wicked every day.”
On the flip side, the objects of God’s mercy are the
repentant. So before we repented of our sins and believed toward salvation, we
were the targets of God’s wrath against sin. Now that we’ve repented, God has
given us mercy. We have been spared of the punishment due our sins, as
Scripture says “God made Him who knew no
sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him”
(II Corinthians 5:21).
But the bridge between the objects of wrath and the objects
of mercy is a bridge formed by God’s grace. In order to receive God’s grace,
you must be in a receptive state. A man who is dying of thirst will run for a
glass of water, while a man who isn’t thirsty at all will set that water sit in
its cup.
While it is true that the grace of God is undeserved, there
is a specific group which we might call the objects of grace, who receive the
grace of God. So what receptive state must you be in to receive the grace of
God?
Proverbs 3:34, “Surely He scorns the scornful, but gives
grace to the humble.”
James 4:6, “But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: ‘God
resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
I Peter 5:5, “Likewise you younger people, submit
yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be
clothed with humility, for ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the
humble.”
To whom does God give grace? Who are the objects of grace?
The humble.
But how many times does God have to say it? Remember when
you were a little kid and your parents told you the same thing again and again?
We realize as we get older that they repeated themselves to emphasize the
importance of their statement. Three
times in Scripture, God says that the proud shall be resisted and that the
humble shall be shown grace.
As Sean Connery said: “The penitent man shall pass!”
Consider also the words of President Abraham Lincoln,
speaking of course of our country: “Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have
become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving
grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”
That illustrates perfectly the reasonableness of the
biblical claim that grace goes to the humble. How so? I thought grace was
undeserved and therefore available to anyone.
Yes, but unless you reach out and take hold of it, unless
you accept it and ask God to forgive you through His Son Jesus Christ, then you
don’t have it yet. And you won’t reach out for grace unless you believe you
need grace. And you won’t believe that you need grace if you’re proud,
self-sufficient and have all that you need, comfortable with yourself.
On Sunday, we heard the words of Billy Graham, the great
evangelist, who said that the cross is an offense. How? Because the cruel torture
of the cross, the graphic imagery of the cross, points to the depth of our own
depravity. The cross was so awful because we are so awful. The crucifixion was
such a shocking death because the hideousness of our sins was shocking.
And you will only come to the cross to receive grace at all
if only you realize that you are a sinner before God. Then you will come to the
cross to beg for His grace and to receive His pardon.
It is perfectly logical that the proud will not receive
grace, because they’re too proud to think they need it. They think they are
good enough to earn God’s favor or to work their way into paradise. Don’t be
fooled.
The Bible says several times that God resists the proud. I
don’t know what that means to have an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present Being
resist you, but I don’t think that’s something we want to happen.
4.
How Grace Changes Lives
Earlier I had mentioned that tonight’s message is called “God’s
Grace: the Freeing Gift”. We’ve seen already that the gift of God, eternal
life, is a free and undeserved gift of His grace. And we’ve touched on the fact
that understanding this aspect of grace should put us at liberty from living
lives of trying to make God happy while being burdened down by our sins and
failures.
That’s not what Christian life is to be like. Nowhere in
the New Testament is Christianity compared to the dull, empty, hopeless
rigamarole of “do this and do that” ceremony that we’re so accustomed to today.
Christianity in Scripture is identified with phrases like “abundant life”, “freedom”,
“liberty”, “joy”, “rejoicing” and “constrained by the love of God”.
I believe we can personally miss the real Christian life
and settle for the bland and boring because we can miss this subject of grace.
So to illustrate that, let’s consider three great men of
the Christian church. These men have each been extremely influential, having
shaped and taught the church of God during their lives, and we enjoy the fruit
of their labor and the way that God used them even to this day. But they were
each men who were changed by God’s grace before
they were great men of God.
The first man began his life on November 10th,
1483. His father had aspirations for him to become a lawyer. He went to school
at a university he later called a “beerhouse and whorehouse”. But one day on a
trip by horseback to visit home, a thunderstorm overcame him. Terrified of death,
he cried out and swore that he would become a monk if only he would be saved
from the storm.
And so, Martin Luther, became a monk. But for many years of
his monastic life, Martin Luther was paralyzed by his own sinfulness and his
own failure in trying to please a seemingly unpleasable God.
Luther said: “My situation was that, although an impeccable
monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence
that my merit would appease Him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God,
but rather hated and murmured against Him.”
He devoted himself to fasting, long hours in prayer,
pilgrimages and confessions. I remember watched a documentary on Martin Luther
and seeing how he speak hours confessing his sins to a priest, only to get up
to leave, then turn around and come right back to confession again.
He beat his body and tortured his soul, agonizing for the
favor of God, until the break through, when he read and understood Romans 1:17,
there in the Tower of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg. What he read were the
words “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from
faith to faith; as it is written, ‘the just shall live by faith’.”
And for the first time, Luther realized that righteousness
from the Law and the righteousness of the gospel were different. He was trying
to obtain right standing before God and the favor of God not by faith but by
working for it. Luther himself later reflected upon the realization and wrote: “Then
I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace
and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith… Instantly all Scripture looked
different to me. I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors
into paradise.”
Luther changed from a cold, dark and brooding monk caught
up in despair to a new man whom God used as a tool to ignite the Protestant
Reformation. The change could not have been clearer: from dark to light, from
despair to hope, from bitterness to joy, Luther went from dead religion to a
life used by God.
The second man
penned the words of what is arguably the most well-known testimony of any man
and the most famous Christian song ever written. This man wrote the words: “Amazing
grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but
now am found, was blind but now I see.”
But John Newton, author of Amazing Grace, wasn’t just
stringing mere lyrics together for kicks. To him, grace was something to sing
of.
Did you know that before John Newton wrote the famous hymn,
before he became a minister in the Anglican
church, that he was no saint. He once attempted to desert his countrymen in the
Royal Navy. So that made him a coward. He contemplated murdering the captain of
his ship and also committing suicide. He also became a slave trader. Some
accounts even claim he was a rapist and a pedophile.
Does that not make the words of his hymn all the more
impactful? When he wrote “grace that saved a wretch like me!” he wasn’t talking
about himself like you and I do when we say we’re sinners. This man did some
awful things. Newton would have been the kind of man we would have sneered at
and condemned to prison and justice. And yet God showed him grace and saved
him. Newton realized that he was the worst of sinners and repented, and later
sang of God’s grace.
John Newton, the sinner that found the Savior, said “I am
not he man I ought to be, I am not the man I wish to be, and I am not the man I
hope to be, but by the grace of God, I am not the man I used to be”.
And finally the
third man, the late great Chuck Smith. Allow me to read Pastor Chuck’s own
words from his book Why Grace Changes
Everything…
(Read first section)
Consider that if the grace of God changed a miserable monk,
an awful wretch and a self-righteous goody-two-shoes into men who were
powerfully used to alter the course of human history, what can the grace of God
do to change your life?
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