Transcript

During this time in God’s Word we’re going to be looking at Ephesians 2:8-10, some very familiar verses.

If I were to ask you to define “grace,” I’m sure many pictures, thoughts, and definitions would come to your mind.

First, I think it’s interesting to consider how many ways the term “grace” in its many forms is used in our everyday language. Think with me.

We say “grace” before meals, and acknowledge our daily bread as a gift from God. When the service pleases us at a restaurant or getting a haircut, we leave a “gratuity,” a gift of money, an amount over and above payment due for service.

I’m told a composer of music sometimes adds “grace notes” to the score. These notes are not essential to the harmony or melody, but are gratuitous, as they add a flourish and beauty whose presence embellishes the music.

In England, British subjects to respectfully address royalty say “Your grace.” Parliament declares an “act of grace” to pardon an undeserving criminal. We talk about being in good or bad “graces” or in or out of favor with someone.

We speak of one “gracing” us with their presence, meaning what an honor it is for them to be there among us. Or we might speak how a painting “graces” a room, or adorns and enhances it.

Some publishers have a policy of “gracing.” I.e., if you sign up for twelve issues of a magazine, you may receive a few extra copies after the subscription has expired. These “grace issues,” sent free of charge, are for tempting you to resubscribe.

Credit cards, insurance or mortgage companies extend to their customers an undeserved “grace period” many times. We hear of services offered “gratis,” or without charge or payment.

We speak of the “graciousness” of a host, referring to their benevolence, kindness and courtesy. We read sometimes of a person’s “fall from grace,” or out of favor and being discredited.

A person is insulted by saying “You ingrate!” or even worse, being called a “disgrace.” A person who offends the U.S. government by some act of treachery is officially proclaimed “persona non grata,” or “a person without grace.”

All these uses of the word grace as we use it in the English language give us a picture of what grace is. It’s a gift freely given, which goes over and above, giving honor to, lifting up and adorning, it is kind, undeserved, unmerited favor.

As we consider what grace is in relation to God’s Word, we find these things to be true of the grace of God toward us.

Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

There is a story of Billy Graham when he was visiting a city for one of his crusades. He had finished writing a letter and began to look for a place to mail it. Walking around the city for a while, he came across a young boy.

He asked the boy if he knew how to get to the post office. The boy gave Billy Graham the directions and before leaving, Billy said to the boy, “Come on over to the arena tonight and I’ll tell you how to get to heaven.”

The boy looked at him and replied, “How can you know how to get to heaven? You don’t even know the way to the post office!”

We know how to get to heaven. It’s Ephesians 2:8,9. In order to go to heaven, we need to be saved from our sins, we need life, we need to be righteous to see heaven. All this is available to all people by grace and by what Christ has done for us at the Cross.

Pastor J. C. O’Hair once said, “Grace is for sinners. All are sinners; all need grace.” The need for grace is the problem of sin. And the problem of sin cannot be solved by the efforts of man. Nothing man can do could ever cancel out the problem of sin. Christ came to save us because we can’t save ourselves from our sins.

All humans efforts fall short of God and cannot take the problem of sin away. Salvation is not a reward and it is not for sale.

Church membership, giving to charity, cleaning up your life, being a good person, taking communion, keeping the Ten Commandments, hoping that in the end your good works will outweigh your bad works all do not save us or give us a home in heaven.

When Jonah was in the belly of the great fish, there was no getting out of that circumstance by his own effort. Chapter 2, verse 1 says that he prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. And at the end of the prayer he said, “Salvation is of the Lord!”

The only way he was going to be delivered and get out of that situation was by “the Lord.” That’s true for our salvation too. We all have the eternal sentence of wrath and hell because of our sins and there’s nothing we can do about it to save ourselves. Our only deliverance, and our only hope is the truth that “salvation is of the Lord.”

We can be delivered from our sins and from hell by the Lord. Salvation is of the Lord. We are saved and get to heaven by God’s grace through faith in Christ alone, trusting that Christ died for our sins personally, was buried, and rose again.

Christ’s sacrifice for our sins satisfied God’s justice in every way, and He paid the penalty of all our sins in full. And thus the reason salvation is offered by grace as a free gift is because Christ fully paid for it on the Cross, and we need to just trust it.

Rob Bell states, “I was having breakfast with my dad and my young son at a café in Grand Rapids. As we were finishing our meal, I noticed that the waitress brought our check, then took it away, and then brought it back again.

“She placed it on the table, smiled, and said: ‘Somebody in the restaurant paid for your meal. You’re all set.’ And then she walked away.

“I had the strangest feeling sitting there. The feeling was helplessness. There was nothing I could do. It had been taken care of. To insist on paying would have been pointless. All I could do was trust that what she said was actually true.

“That is our invitation—to trust that we don’t owe anything, to trust that something has already been done. To trust that grace pays the bill.”

By God’s grace He provides and offers salvation as a free gift and through faith we receive it.

Faith is the channel, as someone once said “Faith is the hand of a beggar reaching out to accept the gift of a king.” Grace freely bestows and offers salvation, faith gladly accepts it. Grace and faith complement one another: Grace gives and faith receives.

Salvation is by God’s grace, God has provided it, it is God’s work. Salvation is “not of ourselves.” It is not what man does for God; it is what God has done for man. It’s been said that “Salvation is God’s greatest gift and man’s greatest need.”

Johnny Miller in a sermon entitled “The Great Rescue” said this, “When I was a teenager, I became fascinated, appalled, and grieved by the literature of the Holocaust…One scene that haunts me is a picture from Auschwitz.

Above the entryway to the concentration camp were the words, Arbeit macht frei. The same thing stood above the camp at Dachau. It means, “Work makes free”—work will liberate you and give you freedom. It was a lie—a false hope.

The Nazis made the people believe hard work would equal liberation, but the promised ‘liberation’ was horrifying suffering and even death.

Arbeit macht frei. One reason that phrase haunts me is because it is the spiritual lie of this age. It is a satanic lie. It’s a religious lie. It is a false hope—an impossible dream for many people in the world.

They believe their good works will be great enough to outweigh their bad works, allowing them to stand before God in eternity and say, “You owe me the right to enter into your heaven.” It is the hope of every false religion—arbeit macht frei.

Our good works don’t make us free. It’s the love and grace of God that liberates. It’s the blood of Christ that sets us free. Christ died in my place, and He frees me from my sins.

Salvation is “not of works,” it’s not by anything you do. Salvation is all because of what Christ has done for us.

Christ has done everything that was necessary for our salvation. Salvation is 100% Christ, and 0% us. We just receive it as a gift.

Because salvation is by grace and not by any human merit or work, all boasting by man as far as earning his salvation is concerned, is excluded.

Salvation is of the Lord and salvation is only by grace, the only boast we have is “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (I Cor. 1:31), and as Gal. 6:14 says, “But God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Romans 3:20-24 says this, “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin, But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested…

“Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe…Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

“Justified” means to be declared right and righteous by God eternally, because you have received the righteousness of Christ by faith. Verse 20 shows that you are not made right with God, you are not righteous before Him, by keeping the Law.

You can keep the Ten Commandments till the cows come home, and it will never cause God to declare that you’re right with Him eternally.

Instead we learn that we are declared right by God freely by His grace.

Verse 22 shows we receive the righteousness of God by faith, it’s unto all that “believe,” not unto all that “do.” It’s unto all those who “do nothing” but just “believe.”

We are declared right with God, “freely.” Freely means as a gift. Without human merit, not as a reward, but as a gift we are saved and made right with God. It’s completely free.

We were justified without any price to pay or anything to do on our part. So if you think you’ve got to earn your way to heaven or to God’s acceptance, or you’ve got to believe “plus this” or plus that, it’s just not true. It’s believe, plus nothing.

We are saved freely “by grace” and grace is undeserved favor and unmerited kindness to those who deserve and merit the opposite. It’s God’s kindness to the guilty, to sinners, to those who have fallen short of His glory. That’s all of us, we’re all guilty, we’re all sinners.

God’s grace and salvation is available to all, to be received by faith alone.

Salvation doesn’t cost us anything at all but it came at tremendous cost to God. It is “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” Romans 3:24 says.

Titus 2:14 says Christ “gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity.” Our Savior “gave Himself,” He gave everything, He sacrificially gave His life and shed His blood to pay for all our sins, to set us free from them all, so that we are no longer in bondage to our sins so we might be right with God, freely by grace as a gift.

Christ has paid the way for us to be in God’s presence for all eternity.

In redemption the sinner stands before God as a slave and when he responds to God’s gift of salvation provision and simply believes that Christ died for me, for my sins and rose, he is receiving his freedom, freedom from all his sins, through Christ’s payment.

Colossians 1:14 says, “In [Christ] we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.”

People often struggle with only one way to God. But that is the truth of Scripture. There is only one way. It is in Christ we have redemption. There is only one Redeemer.

Christ is the One who paid the price at His Cross. He bought us out of our slavery to sin and set us free. In Him we have the purchase which sets us free from our sins.

We need someone to pay our sin debt for us. We cannot pay it ourselves out of our own goodness to be set free, because we’re all unrighteous and spiritually bankrupt. We cannot make ourselves free, or pay the price for our freedom.

Redemption isn’t dependent on us. In Him “we have redemption.” Not in ourselves.

In Leviticus 25:25-27, God laid out the conditions of the law of redemption in Israel for those who couldn’t pay their debts. And among these conditions it was stated that (1) The redeemer must be a NEXT-TO-KIN; (2) The redeemer must be ABLE to pay the price fully; and (3) The redeemer must be WILLING to pay the price.

In Israel, if some RELATIVE was ABLE to pay off the slave debt of a loved one and was WILLING to, they’d be permitted to pay the price for that slave and set him or her free.

This is precisely what Christ did for us. We can’t pay our sin debts, to get ourselves out of the bondage of them.

But Christ, God’s Son, came to this earth, and became a man. Thus He was a KIN to all mankind. And then being the sinless Son of God, He was ABLE to pay the price for the sins of the world, of all mankind.

And in love, He WILLINGLY died upon the Cross of Calvary, shedding His blood for the payment of our sin debt and when we believe, we have been set free from sin.

1 Peter 1:18-19 says, “You were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold…but with the precious blood of Christ.”

By His shed blood at the Cross the bondage of our sins was broken. By His sacrificial, substitutionary death, the price was paid in full.

And because all our sins have been paid for, we have the redemptive result of “the forgiveness of sins.”

We are cleansed, all our sins are forgiven, past, present, and future.

Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”

Pastor Guy McGraw tells the following: Years ago a drunken man in Chicago headed towards Lake Michigan to drown himself.

He stumbled past the Pacific Garden Mission where someone got him in the door. He collapsed and fell asleep in front of the preacher who was speaking. The superintendent cared for him, gave him a bed, and led him to the Lord the next morning.

Harry Monroe was transformed by the grace of God that day and later would preach the gospel from the same platform where he once slept in a drunken stupor.

He would eventually become superintendent of the mission and when he died it took a whole day for the people to pay their respects. A Newspaper Editorial described him as ‘one of the most useful men in Chicago’. Useful? What made the difference?

The world would not have missed a drunken derilict but God took His life and made him a masterpiece. Harry Monroe was transformed by grace. That’s what God can do with our lives, as we allow the grace of God to touch our hearts and change us.

God wants to use each of our lives and make us useful and meaningful for Him by His grace.

The Greek word used for “workmanship” is poiema from which we get our English word “poem,” a piece of literary workmanship. We are God’s poem, we are His spiritual handiwork; we are His masterpiece.

We are all poetry in motion, all a work in progress. As we give our lives to Him, God will shape us, mold us and fashion us more and more into the image of His Son.

And as His workmanship, God would have us work for Him, and serve Him.

We are not saved by good works, we are saved unto good works, for good works, to do good works after salvation.

We don’t do good works to get to heaven, we do good works on our way to heaven.

Someone has said, “You cannot live a life for God until you receive life from God.” Now that we have life from God, now we can live a life for God.

Speaking of Christ’s earthly ministry, Acts 10:38 says, “Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: went about doing good.” And as we live through the indwelling life and power of Christ, we too will go about doing good.

And verse 10 says, that God has prepared good works for us to do and “that we should walk in them.” We should walk and live in them. We should because of God’s love and grace, presenting ourselves a living sacrifice for Him.

Now by the grace of God, we can live our lives, not according to the selfish desires of the flesh, but rather according to the desires of our Lord, and not for self only, but selflessly doing good works for others.

Pediatrician David Cerqueira shares this story: One Sunday my wife had prepared a lesson on being useful. She taught the children that everyone can be useful—that usefulness is serving God, and that doing so is worthy of honor.

The kids quietly soaked up my wife’s words, and as the lesson ended, there was a short moment of silence. A little girl named Sarah spoke up. “Teacher, what can I do? I don’t know how to do many useful things.”

Not anticipating that kind of response, my wife quickly looked around and spotted an empty flower vase on the windowsill. “Sarah, you can bring in a flower and put it in the vase. That would be a useful thing.” Sarah frowned. “But that’s not important.”

“It is,” replied my wife, “if you are helping someone.” Sure enough, the next Sunday Sarah brought in a dandelion and placed it in the vase.

In fact, she continued to do so each week. Without reminders or help, she made sure the vase was filled with a bright yellow flower, Sunday after Sunday.

My wife eventually told our pastor about Sarah’s faithfulness. That Sunday he gave a sermon on the honor of serving others, using Sarah’s vase as an example. The congregation was touched by the message, and the week started on a good note.

During that same week I got a call from Sarah’s mother. She worried that Sarah seemed to have less energy than usual and that she didn’t have an appetite. I made room in my schedule to see Sarah the following day.

After Sarah had a battery of tests and days of examinations, I sat numbly in my office, Sarah’s paperwork on my lap. The results were tragic. She had leukemia.

Time pressed on. Sarah became confined to bed and to the visits that many people gave her. She lost her smile. She lost most of her weight. And then another telephone call came. Sarah’s mother asked me to come see her.

I dropped everything and went to the house. After a short examination, I knew that Sarah would soon be leaving this world.

I urged her parents to spend as much time as possible with her. On Sunday morning church started as usual. The singing, the sermon—but I felt enveloped in sadness.

At the end of the sermon, the pastor suddenly stopped speaking. His eyes wide, he stared at the back of the church with utter amazement.

Everyone turned to see what he was looking at. It was Sarah! Her parents had brought her for one last visit. She was bundled in a blanket, with a dandelion in hand.

And she slowly walked to the front of the church where her vase was perched by the pulpit. She put her flower in the vase and a piece of paper beside it.

Then she returned to her parents. Seeing little Sarah place her flower in the vase for the last time moved us all more than I could say. Four days later, Sarah died.

I wasn’t expecting it, but our pastor asked to see me after the funeral. We stood at the cemetery near our cars as people walked past us. In a low voice he said, “Dave, I’ve got something you ought to see.”

He pulled out of his pocket the piece of paper that Sarah had left by the vase. Holding it out to me, he said, “Keep this.”

I opened the folded paper to read, in pink crayon, what Sarah had written: Dear God, This vase has been the biggest honor of my life. Sarah

Life is an opportunity to serve God by serving people. For what God has done for us by His grace, that is our motivation to serve Him, and it is our motivation to do even more and go over and above in living a life pleasing to Him because of what Christ did for us.

And, as Sarah so aptly put it, to serve God is the biggest honor of our lives.