What's So Amazing About Grace

Welcome to Worship in the Word with Pastor Robert Morris. Today, Pastor Robert is beginning a new series titled Amazing Grace, where he will help us understand what grace is and, more importantly, that it's a completely free gift. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm your host, Patrick, and today I'm here with Janae.

Hey, everyone. You know, Janae, I think that most people don't fully understand God's grace or what it really means. We've probably all heard of the song Amazing Grace, but that seems more like a hymn that we sing in church than a gift that is available to us today. Yeah, I remember singing that in the church I grew up in in Arkansas when I was just a little girl, but I've never really thought about it and just how amazing God's grace is until I heard Pastor Robert explain it in this message. It's why this series is one of my favorites.

I completely agree. Well, let's join Pastor Robert now and hear what he has to say about why grace is unmerited, undeserved, and unearned. So the title of this message is What's So Amazing About Grace. And I know that was the title of a book a while back, which was a great book. I read the book.

I love the book. But about two months ago, when the Lord put this series on my heart, it was actually on my study break time. I said, Lord, why do you want me to teach on grace?

I want to know that. I know the doctrine of grace. I know the theology of grace. I know how important it is for us to believe in grace. But why do you want me to teach on grace? Here's what I felt like he said. I felt like he said, look around.

Just look around. How many people don't know the grace of God and don't understand the grace of God and even how many believers? How many believers live with a sense of shame and condemnation and fear of failure? And how many believers are performance oriented and perfection driven? And how many have a father wound?

How many live discouraged and depressed because they can never measure up? So I want us to understand how amazing grace really is. I mean, it is so amazing. And there's such misunderstanding about it. I have a good friend, a good friend who is a wonderful man of God. And he's a teacher in the body of Christ, great guy, but he doesn't understand grace.

And so we got together to talk about it. And one of the things he said was that grace is like the oars on a boat. And he said, we're in the boat and there's a current that's pulling us toward hell and God has provided these oars. That's his grace. And he said, and if we keep rowing, we'll get to heaven. That's the way he thought about grace.

But if we ever quit rowing, we go to hell. Okay, let me tell you something, that's not amazing grace, that's amazing you. And you're not that amazing.

He's amazing. And so he and I sat and talked and he said, okay, Robert, he said, I'm going to tell you what I feel about it. And he said, you tell me if I'm wrong.

And I said, okay, I'll probably do that. And so he shared about grace something. He said, I polled 100 pastors and I asked them, what is grace? And he said, 90 something percent of them came back with some answer close to the typical answer unmerited favor or the traditional answer unmerited favor. He said, only a few said in divine enablement. And he said, I think we've totally missed it.

I think grace is the divine enablement of God. And he said, and he went and he took about 20 to 30 minutes to explain to make sure he had covered all his bases. And then he said, okay, am I wrong? I said, 100 percent. I mean, you're 100 percent wrong.

He laughed and I laughed and we're still good friends. I have tremendous respect for him, even though he's wrong. I'm right.

He's wrong. But he said, well, why is that wrong? I said, because you asked your question. You said you asked what grace is. You didn't ask what grace does.

And one of the aspects of grace is it does divinely enable us to live a new life in Christ. But it is the unmerited, undeserved, unearned kindness and favor of God. That's what it is. So let me and if you want to write that down, I ask them that statement. Grace is the unmerited, undeserved, unearned kindness and favor of God. That's what it is. So I just want to unpack these three words just just a little bit for you.

Just kind of lay a foundation for our series today, right? Here's number one, unmerited. Ephesians 2, 8 and 9 says, for by grace you have been saved.

By grace, through faith. But now listen to this, that knot of yourselves wasn't your rowing. It's not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. Okay, hear this clearly. There will be no boasting in heaven.

There's a lot of boasting on earth right now, but there will be none in heaven. You will not say, I kept rowing. That's why I'm here. I'm here because I kept rowing.

And I have some friends, they didn't keep rowing. Notice they're not here. But I'm here because I rode. The first time you see the male prince in his hands, you'll say, that's why I'm here. That's why I'm here.

I'm here because of Jesus. It's unmerited. We don't merit it. What's amazing is, when we first get saved, we know we don't merit it. But twenty years later, after all the good things we've done for God, somehow we think now, well, yeah, I mean, I didn't back then, but I'm a little closer now. No, even your righteousness is as filthy rags.

The best thing about you is still not even close to the worst thing about God. When I think of this unmerited, I was talking to my son this week and talking to him about the series on grace. He said, Dad, I remember grace in my life, well, several times growing up, but I just thought of a time. He said, when I was, he was probably early junior high, he said, we got our yearbooks, and before, on our lunch time, he said, for some reason, a group of guys, my friends, we decided it would be funny to draw mustaches and beards on the pictures of the teachers in our yearbooks. And so, when he got home, I said, hey, you got your yearbook, let me see your yearbook, and he didn't want to show it to me. And so, anyway, I got it and I looked at it, and I have to say, some of the ladies actually look, never, never mind, okay, so, but, I remember saying to him, son, do you realize what you've done? And it was beginning to dawn on him, I said, you ruined this.

This is something, you know, you may want to look back on this years from now, but you ruined it, and Josh has such a tender heart, he started crying. And then I remember picking his chin up and I said to him, son, look at me, tomorrow, I'll buy you a new one, I'm going to buy you a new one. He said, why would you do that? I said, because that's what fathers do, son. I raised my children because of my own father with the sense of them trying to model what the father's like, grace.

They have hundreds of examples of grace because I always, always wanted to err on the side of grace. I said, this is what fathers do. I said, let me tell you what fathers do, they take care of it when you do something stupid.

And son, this was stupid. You know, the scripture says love covers a multitude of sins. Here's a statement I thought of, grace covers a multitude of stupid sins.

Now you don't have to raise your hands, but, you ever do anything stupid? You better be glad for grace. So it is unmerited. Here's the second thing, it's undeserved. We don't deserve it. We didn't deserve it then, we don't deserve it now.

Even though we're teachers or leaders or groups or whatever we do, we don't want to deserve it. Romans 3, 24, being justified freely, undeservedly by His grace through the redemption that's in Christ Jesus. Now this word grace, I want to unpack it a little bit from the Greek. Our English pronunciation of it is Charis, and it's fine to say that, but that's really not how it's pronounced.

The C in Greek is silent. And so this word is actually pronounced Ha-rice, Ha-rice, the I would be like a long E, Ha-rice. So if I said the Greek word is Ha-rice, most of you wouldn't recognize it because we know of Charis. As a matter of fact, there are many people that name their daughter, daughters Charis, which is great. Don't go home and start calling her Ha-rice, okay? Just Charis is great.

I actually have a friend of mine who said, we're thinking about naming our daughter Charis. I said, I think you ought to think about that first. He said, why?

I said, because your last name is Maddox, Charis Maddox. So anyway, I want to just unpack this word just a little bit for you. It does mean the unmerited favor of God. That is the definition. But I want you to know that this word was a cultural word before it was a scriptural word. The Holy Spirit chose to use this word, but let me tell you the cultural meaning of this word before it was even a scriptural word. It implied, it always, it referred to a benevolent gift from a superior to an inferior. That's always what it meant. In the culture, when someone superior in wealth or in goods saw someone who is in need or inferior, not as a person, but inferior in goods, then if the superior gave a gift to that inferior person in this area of goods, then that was called grace.

That was Charis, okay? But it involves, now listen to me carefully, because this might shock some of you. It actually involves three parties, three persons.

You would think it just involved two. The person giving and the person receiving, but it didn't. And in Greek, now these would be the closest English words to the Greek words, so I didn't come up with these. These would be what they were in the Greek language, right? The person providing the goods was called the patron, the patron. And then the person receiving the goods was called the client. Now again, I don't think these are words that we should use when we talk about the gospel like clients and patrons and things like that.

I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying in cultural Greek, those were the meanings, all right? So the patron, let's put it this way, maybe owned a shoe store and he wants to provide shoes for some children in an orphanage, they would be the clients then. But who's the third person? In every transaction, there was a third person.

This again is the closest word in Greek. He was called the broker. The broker would go out into the community and see the needs of the inferior and bring the inferior together with the superior.

But here's something else he would do. The brokers actually paid for the merchandise. If it was 20 pairs of shoes, he paid for the shoes. The patron provided it, the clients received it, but the broker paid for it.

Does this sound familiar? The broker's Jesus. He brought us together with the Father, but he also paid fully for us. Every time I think of paid in full, when I was a young man, I attended a Bible college and, I mean a Bible conference, I did attend a Bible college, but I attended a Bible conference. And at this conference, a pastor named Dr. E.V. Hill spoke.

And I'll never forget this testimony he shared. He said when he was young, he told his mother, I want to be a pastor when I grow up. And his mother said, well, you need to go to college.

And he didn't think anything about it when he was young because he didn't understand, but as he grew older, he realized, I'm not going to be able to go to college. They were very poor. He was a minority. She was a single mother. And there weren't AIDS and programs at that time for minorities. We didn't understand.

Our nation did not understand that need at that time or were blind to that need. And so he just thought, I'll never be able to go to college. And as he got older, he began to kind of prepare his mother for it. He'd say to her, Mom, I'm still going to be a pastor, but I may not go to college. She'd say, Son, you're going to college.

He said, Mom, we can't afford college. This is what she'd say. She'd look at him right now and she'd say, Son, God will provide.

And every time he'd bring it up, she'd say, Son, God will provide. So she sent him down on the day to register. He goes down to register. He's standing. He gets all his books.

He gets all his schedule. He's standing in the registrar's line. He's about five people back. And he's thinking, I'm so embarrassed. I'm so ashamed. I should not be here.

I don't have any money at all to pay for this bill. And then he was four people back and three people back, two and one. And then when that person stepped aside, he said, I started to turn and run, but I remember my mother saying, Son, God will provide. So he said, I took a step up to that window and when I did, a man stepped right up beside me. He took my hand like this and he put money in it and he looked at me right in the eyes and he said to me, Son, God will provide. And he said, the lady said, Mr. Hill, your bill is, and he said, I took that money and I put it down there and she counted it out and it was the right amount. It was the exact amount.

And this is what he said. He said, she took my bill and she took this stamp and she said, paid in full. And he said, I remember for the first time thinking, that's what Jesus did. That's what Jesus did.

He paid it in full. You are listening to Worship in the Word, and we'll get back to the rest of Pastor Robert's message on God's amazing grace in just a minute. But I wanted to take a break and let you know that if you would like to get this entire series, you can do that at our website at pastorrobert.com. Well, Jenae, I have to admit, I've been asking the wrong question.

Me too. That was such a good point in his message. We shouldn't be asking what grace is. We should be asking what grace does. I've never been taught about what grace does. I've always just thought of it as something that I just received by being a Christian. I'm right there with you. I think if I look at it differently with the idea of what grace does, that it's unmerited, that we can't do anything to earn it and that we don't deserve it, then we begin to really understand that it divinely enables us to live a new life in Christ. I absolutely agree. Well, let's get back to the message and hear what Pastor Robert has to say about how grace really is the unearned kindness and favor of God.

And you're not going to want to miss this next story. It's one of the best stories I've heard about the Father's grace to us. So it is unmerited, undeserved, and here's the third word, unearned. It's unearned. Romans 11, 6 says, And if by grace, then it's no longer of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace. And if it's of works, it's no longer grace, otherwise work is no longer work. Now, let me substitute for grace and work, the words free and earned because we receive the free gift, the free gift of God of salvation, freely you've been justified, freely you received, freely you've...

Okay, here's what he's saying. If it's free, it's not earned, otherwise free is not free. If it's earned, then it's not free, otherwise earned is not earned.

It's one or the other. It's grace is either free or it's earned. And if it's grace, it can't be earned.

That's what he's saying. If it's a gift, you can't earn it. It was paid for, it wasn't paid for by you, it was paid for by Jesus. Let me show you a definition that just blows me away about grace. This is the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible. Grace is the dimension of divine activity that enables God to confront human indifference and rebellion with an inexhaustible capacity to forgive and to bless.

An inexhaustible capacity to forgive and to bless. It's free. It's free. See, listen, you've never received a birthday gift from someone and you say, oh, thank you. Then they say, that'd be $86. When I said that, I actually thought of some gifts that my children have given me that I knew I'd paid for. You ever open, your kids are all excited, hey, Dad, we got you a Christmas gift. You open it up and the first question you're thinking is, what is it?

The second thing you're thinking is, how much does this cost me? But I literally, I remember a time all of our children had one of my credit cards when they were in high school and college in case they had an expense or to be able to fill the cart with gas or whatever. I remember one time my daughter Elaine gave me a Father's Day gift and I said, oh, thank you. She said, I'll put it on your card. Okay, so other than gifts from your children, okay, they're free.

Kids are free, okay. I remember going to Bible college and I believe we should study church history, but I don't believe we should argue about it. And I remember in Bible college, they were sitting around, they were arguing about grace, Tertullian grace, which you've probably never even heard of, Augustinian grace, Pelagian grace.

Of course, some of you may have heard of Calvinism, Arminianism. We still have leaders in the body of Christ arguing today. And here I was in Bible college, just gotten saved, you heard my testimony out of a horrible life, they were arguing about grace and I was thinking, if you only knew, if you only knew that I shouldn't even be here today, I shouldn't even be alive, much less in college studying for the ministry. And they actually turned to me in a moment and they said, so, what do you think about grace? And I was just so overwhelmed, I just said, I was lost and now I'm found.

And they just went right back to arguing. I think Satan has tried to make arguments about grace, so we forget that grace is that Christ died for our sins. That's grace. So, I want to show you a picture of grace.

I hope you never forget this. It's about a father and son named Rick and Dick Hoyt. Rick was born with the umbilical cord around his neck and because the oxygen was cut off to his brain for a while, he has never been able to walk or talk. But they found out as he was growing up that he was extremely intelligent because they could watch with his eyes and they could communicate. They taught him, Dick and Judy, his father and mother, taught him the alphabet, even though he could not talk with just using his eyes. And in 1973, now you think about the technology back then. They gathered a group of engineers who invented a computer for him where he could move a cursor with his eyes and highlight letters and then bump something on the computer like a mouse and speak words for the first time.

That technology, of course, has been advanced, but that's in use now all over the world. They invented it for this young man. When he was 15, one of his classmates was in an accident where he was paralyzed. His classmate was paralyzed and they were going to run a 5K race to raise money for him and he, through the computer, tapping letters, he said to his dad, I want to run in that race. And so his dad, who was not a runner, trained so that he could push his son in a wheelchair in that race. And after the race, he said to his dad, that's the first time in my life that I did not feel handicapped. And so his dad continued to train. Now they've run in 72 marathons and 255 triathlons.

A triathlon, if you don't know, is 2.4 miles of swimming, 26.2 miles of running, and 112 miles of biking. When Dick swims, Rick is being pulled by Dick in a little raft. When Dick cycles, Rick is in a seat on the front of the bicycle. And when Dick runs, Rick is in the chair and Dick is pushing. Everything I've done is because the Father has been pushing me and pulling me and carrying me. That's grace. And all he's asking you to do is just get in the chair.

You know, actually, he's asking you to let him put you in the chair because you can't even get in the chair on your own. That was such an amazing story of grace. I can't even imagine what Rick had to go through to be able to compete in all of those races with his son. Yeah, that's really moving. What a beautiful picture of grace. It was such a good reminder that our Heavenly Father has been pushing us and pulling us and carrying us every step of the way. That really is grace.

It really is. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this word from Pastor Robert today. If you'd like to get a copy of this message or want to share it with a friend, you can get the complete eight-part series titled Amazing Grace right now at pastorrobert.com or by calling 833-933-WORD. Again, that's pastorrobert.com or 833-933-WORD. And you can also follow Pastor Robert on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Join us next time as we continue this series on Amazing Grace, where Pastor Robert explains what righteousness is and how we need God's grace to have it. Thank you for joining us, and we hope you have a blessed week.