Welcome back to Hymn We Proclaim. Today we continue this journey through the five solas from the Reformation Conference in Jacksonville earlier this year. In this podcast, we hear from special guest Jonathan Leinbaugh, professor at Beeson Divinity School and one of today's leading Reformation scholars. With clarity and pastoral insight, Leinbaugh unpacks the second of the solas, Sola Gratia, by Grace Alone. In a world of relentless pressure to perform, this message is a breath of fresh gospel air.
you'll hear how salvation is entirely the work of God's free and sovereign grace, not something we can earn, maintain, or boast about. If you're looking for assurance and rest, This is a message to anchor your soul. Let's take a listen. It's a real joy to be here. It's great to be with.
Paramount Church and John and Catherine who have become Friends over the years and our mutual support of the Wittenberg Center for Reformation Studies, which I've been involved in since its first year teaching doctoral students in Germany. And we've sort of traveled together doing academic conferences and I think it's fair to say, as much as what we do in the academy, and as much as we're trying to encourage graduate students, the horizon of all the things. Is the proclamation of the gospel. And it's the meeting of people with the real mercy and grace of God in instances of genuine need. And pastoral care.
And so it's conferences like this where we actually get pretty close to the goal, not just the work along the way, but the actual goal of what we're doing. I think of a text Martin Luther wrote very early in the Reformation. It was 1518. And he wrote this academic treatise with a strange name. The first half of it was An inquiry into truth.
That's not that strange. That sounds like what you would expect an academic treatise to be. But the second half was An Inquiry into Truth for. the sake of troubled consciences. Let's think hard about what's true.
so we can minister God's love and mercy to hurting human beings. And that's how I think about What we're doing here, what we're doing at this conference, and really what the five solas are about: Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. At the end of the day, they're just a way to summarize and confess. the theme of the Bible. In the beginning God.
The first commandment: I am the Lord your God. who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and you shall have no other God before me. Or that refrain that runs through the Old Testament: salvation belongs. to the Lord. When we talk about all these aloons, We're just trying to confess that God In God's grace As God speaks it in God's Word, is the beginning, the middle, and the end of this story.
I hope we can all hear that.
So let me say a prayer as we start, and then we're going to look at this theme of grace alone. Almighty God. Help us to hear this familiar. Word. afresh today with all the surprise and power.
that it has. as it gives us the gift of your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen. One minute.
Alright, well one of the interesting things about grace alone is that by itself, I really don't think it means that much. If we're just talking about grace in the abstract, gift in the abstract, I don't think it would actually be that interesting. It's only because we're talking about grace, as a way of talking about what God does when He gives us Himself. when God gives us Jesus. that this actually has power.
Hope. and comfort.
So I'm going to talk about grace alone. But the truth is, I'm going to be talking a little bit about Christ alone. I'm not going to steal your material here, Mike, I hope. But we're talking about God's gift of God. Yeah.
And there's a couple of things I want to do as we do that, the kind of outline here. I want to think a little bit about why this is so urgently needed. I want to be honest for a few minutes. about How much it can hurt, and how hard it can be to be a human being. and why if there's gonna be any comfort or any hope.
Grace is the only answer. But I also want to think about a couple of moments, just two. In the history of the church, one that's right in the New Testament, the first century, and then one that's in the Reformation, the 16th century. Where the question was, what does grace mean? What is grace?
Because one way we can get this wrong is just downplay grace. But another way we can get this wrong sometimes is if we wrongly define grace. And it's only when grace is rightly defined and celebrated that we can hear the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus.
So that's the kind of outline. But one thing I think we need to say right at the outset is: if we're talking about Jesus as the gift. And I'm not. Trying to say anything revolutionary there. I'm going to emphasize that in a minute, but I'm just thinking of verses like Galatians 2:20, where it says, The Son of God loved me and gave himself or gifted himself for me.
Or Galatians 1:4, Christ gave himself. To deliver us from this present evil age. Or Romans 8: God did not spare, but gave. His only son. This gift means that if we're going to understand what grace is, we're going to have to understand something about who Jesus is.
Martin Luther had this phrase where he said, It's one thing to find Jesus. It's another thing to define Jesus. and it's very important that the Jesus we celebrate and proclaim is in fact. The Jesus who came at Christmas, who died on Calvary, who rose on Easter, and who reigns and intercedes for us now. And Luther's way of saying this was to say, well, the chief article And the foundation of the gospel.
So this is Martin Luther in Germany at the very beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. He says, the chief article and foundation of the gospel is before you take Christ as an example. Which Luther never denied that he was. If you want to know what it looks like to love your neighbor, to be faithful to God's call in your life, Jesus does show you that. But before Jesus is an example to you, first and fundamentally, Jesus is a gift.
A present that God has given you and that is your own.
So it's one thing to say this is all about Jesus. But it makes a big difference whether you think Jesus is simply your example or if Jesus is God's gift to you. Here's another way Luther put it. The highest art is not only to find Christ, but to define Christ. And then here's his definition: Christ is the Son of God, who, because of His sheer mercy and love, gave and offered himself for us.
He is the Saviour and the joy and the sweetness of a trembling and troubled heart. That's what I'm hoping we're going to hear. by the end. This joy and sweetness and comfort for trembling and troubled hearts. But I think to do that, we need to be honest about those trembling and troubled.
Hearts. And as we do that, I think we'll see why the definition of grace matters so much. I think one of the surprises sometimes, if you study this material, is it's really hard to find a point in church history where people aren't talking about and celebrating grace. There's almost no conflict or controversy or debate about whether grace is important. Or if there's a lot of grace.
There's really no debates about the degree or the amount of grace. Basically everyone would say, grace is a good thing and there's a lot of it. When you start saying, but what do you mean by grace? That's where you actually can expose some interesting conversations. And I think, even though when we're talking Sometimes in Terms that are scriptural or theological, we think we know what we mean.
If we just reflect on our ordinary language about grace, we can bring a lot of funny assumptions to this too. I mean the most obvious example of this Which is a song that one of my children described as the creepiest Christmas song of all time. And one of my friends recently described it as the most subversive song ever written. I'm talking, of course, about Santa Claus's coming to town. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
It's the he sees you when you're sleeping part, which came on the radio about a couple months ago, and my daughter said, What did that say? And I thought, that's a fair question. That is a little creepy. But my friend said, this is clearly the most aversive song ever written. It's taken.
An event in the year in which what we celebrate is God as gift coming to us. From heaven to earth while we in sin and error were pining, And we've turned it into he's making a list. He's checking it twice. He's going to find out who's naughty and nice. And somehow we think we're still in the realm of gift and grace.
But what really got me recently And I don't want to go into all the details. They're not necessarily embarrassing, but they could be for somebody else, somebody I know. I discovered a product line that you might find in, say, a Bath and Body Works or something. I'll let you sort of imagine your own backstories. That'll be more fun.
At first I thought this was great because I thought these things were funny and honest.
So there's this cream that's especially for sort of the lower face and neck region and the title of it is When Hope is Not Enough. I just thought that's great, right? That's sometimes you reach that point and why not? I'll go for this.
So I was all in on this brand. I just thought this is clearly made for sermon illustrations and maybe it will help. But then I find their next product that I see. And at first I was excited because in bold letters it was called. Grace.
All caps. Bold. I thought, wow, when hope is not enough, Grace. These people get it. But then After the bold, in smaller print, they offered a definition of grace.
On this lotion bottle. And here was the definition. Grace. Life is a classroom. Each day we receive a failing or passing grade.
in one particular subject. Grace. Don't fail. Yeah. I thought, I'm gonna buy the one, hope is not enough, and look somewhere else for the solution.
So It's fair to say that the definition of grace, however ordinary, mundane, and obvious it seems, is something we should probably return to.
So that's what we're going to do in just a minute. But before we do that, let me say a couple words about why this is so urgently needed. And here I just want to talk about those trembling and troubled hearts. Luther talked about. And why what?
the Wittenberg Center and why what we're doing here is so urgently needed. And to break into this, I want to tell you about an author. Writing in the middle of the 20th century, named William Inge. William Inge was mainly a playwright who was having plenty of success on Broadway and things, but He found himself at that point of the the lotion. not only was hope not enough, But there really was no hope.
He was at a low point. And what he started to do when he was saying, is there any hope? as he started visiting churches. Genuinely hoping he would encounter something that would talk honestly about. what he was experiencing, and have comfort and hope strong enough.
to meet the pain. But what he found And this isn't a statement about all churches or your churches, but what he found, and I think we need to hear this. A minimizing A kind of unwillingness to face the depth of his pain. And words that were far too shallow to actually be comfort or hope. in the face of his actual history and hurt.
And so he stopped going to church, and his end is somewhat tragic. But what he did do in the middle of that experience was write a novel. called My Son is a Splendid Driver. trying to give voice to the experience he was going through. And in this book there's a character, we just know her as mother.
And mother has suffered a lot. She suffered about a decade ago because some very mundane but realistic accident. led to one of her sons dying. And she's just lived with 10 years with an open wound that just doesn't get better. The kind of grief.
that time doesn't seem to heal. And she's hurting. And now here we are 10 years later, and she's hurting again because through an uncharacteristic but very real act of her husband, she's sort of facing some social shame in her community.
So she's got this grief, she's got this shame. She wakes up every morning, she sits on the front porch, but as soon as the neighbors start to stir, she kind of retreats inside 'cause she just can't face it. Her other son is visiting one time. And as their neighbor across the street gets up to go to church in the morning, and she's about to retreat inside, she says to her son.
Okay. You know? I wish I had a god to pray to. But I don't seem able to find him. And then the narrator comments, Mother had stopped.
going to church. And then she tells us why. With all of her loss, with all of her shame, she says to her son, when she wishes she had a God to pray to, she says, Church is not a place you go with your troubles. Church is just a place you go when things are going well. and you have a new hat.
to wear.
Some people have not found church to be a place of comfort. but a place of condemnation. Not a place of hope. But a place of hurt. Not a place they can go with their troubles.
but just a place where they can pretend. that things are going well. And I think this happens almost never intentionally, but I think this happens when we downplay. and when we miss define The Gospel of God's Grace for Us in Jesus Christ. As a friend of mine recently put it, when we downplay or misdefine the grace of God.
then the Christian life pretty quickly. Translates from being joyful and grateful, receiving of God's love for us. to the project. of our life for God. And when we downplay the grace of God and the Christian life becomes a project, it quickly becomes a burden.
and when it becomes a burden, it casts out the weary and the heavy laden. the very ones that Jesus said, Come unto me. And when the very ones that Jesus said, come unto me, are the same people who feel like they can't walk through the doors of a church? Then something's gone wrong with the gospel we are preaching. And this is why we need to hear.
Grace. Again. And I think human history is basically a story. Of people trying to answer this kind of question, is there any comfort? Is there any hope?
With resources other than the grace of God. Thank you. I could do a whole Let's go through civilization, and I think I could make this case. I think a particularly helpful case, because they were really honest about it, were the archaic Greeks. Maybe you didn't see that coming, but bear with me for one minute.
I think they were really interesting. They had a whole culture. that they basically defined as a competition. They called this agon in the Greek. We are in competition with each other.
And what we're trying to win is what they called kleos. It means glory, fame, reputation. It's this really cool word in Greek that both means fame or glory, and it also means song, the song you sing so that people know about your fame and glory.
Now I don't think there are any parallels to this in the modern social media world, but you can imagine that a long time ago, people both wanted to be thought well of and have people talk about it in public ways. Right.
Now that I think about it, there might be some parallels. That's okay. Maybe that's why one person on the internet recently called the Internet a justification machine. That appears to be broken. We could explore that.
But the Greeks would compete for this. They said, on its own terms, A life seems to be short. and somewhat difficult.
So how, in the face of meaninglessness and mortality, Can life be worth living? And the answer was, be memorable. have a song worthy life. The most famous example of this is the Greek warrior Achilles. The book The Iliad has an alternate title, The Song or The Kleos or The Glory of Achilles.
And he says at one point: if I go and fight in the Trojan War, I will die. But my song, my glory, my claos will never die. Or Helen of Troy. says to one of the princes They will sing our song. They will tell of our glory for a thousand generations.
This is the best answer they could come up with. We won't be here. but will be remembered. I think what this is an instance of, though. is what Ernst Becker, who wrote a book in the middle of the 20th century called The Denial of Death.
called the human tendency to want to be special. We want to stand out. We want to matter. We want to, as he put it, be the one. in creation.
He said, it's our tragic destiny. to do this. And I think that gets us close. Though I'm not actually sure everyone. wants to be the most Famous are the most.
Well I think there's truth to that and some of us can resonate with that. especially those of us who are not as humble as we get introduced as being. But I do think what that taps into. I think the word that actually captures what we're all after is not so much. chlaos, glory and reputation.
I just think it's something like We want somebody to love us. We want somehow To be Enough. The person I think captured this the best. is the seventeenth century English pastor and poet George Herbert. He wrote a poem called A True Hymn.
And in that, he has this very short phrase, which I think does describe us all. It's his definition of the human being. In our kind of condition of asking if there's any comfort. And he just said: the human being is sighing to be approved. Sighing to be approved.
Does any one could anyone Love me. The problem is When we ask that question, On its own terms and with our own resources, we do it with some default assumptions that run counter to. The Gospel of God's Grace. What we tend to assume is that the verdict on and the value of our life. is defined and determined by our life.
There's this kind of cruel default equation. that the sum of the things I have done and have left undone, somehow equal What I'm worth. And it's only if I do enough. or have enough that I will finally be. Enough.
But I don't have to tell you what that feels like. That turns life into a fragile Fearful. Exhausting. Endless Audition For love. But it seems to be a part we never get.
It's a kind of game in which we compete. and keep score and yet somehow all loose. We are sighing to be approved. But we are making our own biographies. carry the burden of our being enough.
Our own biographies carry the burden of our being loved. And they cannot hold that weight. And so much of the hurt and the harm in this world. as human beings being crushed under the burden. of their own biographies failing.
to feel like being enough. and being loved. I just want to give you one concrete example and then we're moving on to defining grace. At the University of Pennsylvania. number of years ago now.
Sad to say, this is a repeating story at some universities. There was A tragic season of what they called a cluster of self-harm and suicide. Students at an increased rate. We're taking their own lives. And the University of Pennsylvania, very understandably, put together a task force, put together some resources.
They wanted to understand what's going on, what is it about this environment, this culture, this community. That's both creating these conditions and not supporting people who are in them. And the report came back. And what they found was quote Students are experiencing An intolerable In unachievable BURDEN OF HAVING TO BE PERFECT in every academic, athletic, artistic, and extracurricular activity. to simply be enough.
There, they felt that they had to be perfect, in every area of life. The two things that were impossible. We're failure. and forgiveness. You could not fail.
And if you did, there was no hope. for forgiveness. And as one commentator on the report said, he said, these students are literally. Not a metaphor, literally. SUFFERING AND DYING Under the weight of the fantasy self they are failing to become.
They're sighing to be approved. They have some vision of what that would take. a no-failure kind of biography. And as they fail to live that life. In the context of no forgiveness, when your biography has to carry the weight of your being enough, That failure.
is Final. and crushing. And so I ask again, is there any comfort? Is there any hope? There's a book by Taylor Caldwell called No One Hears But Him.
And It's just people speaking to someone who listens. I actually can't recommend that book and the one called The Listener highly enough. But there's this person speaking. And Her son has been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. And she's talking to a minister right before she goes and talks to the person who listens.
And he just keeps responding with platitudes. It just keeps coming back with clichés. It's gonna be okay. We'll get through this. I've got a lot of sympathy for him.
He doesn't know what to say. She's hurting. Her son's not going to make it. And he doesn't know what to say. But everything he keeps saying is just too shallow because it won't face how much this hurts.
And she finally stops him, turns to him, and says, This is all you have words without comfort. Is that all we have? Do we only have words without comfort? Or do we have what we heard last night, what Thomas Cranmer called the comfortable? Words.
I think this is sort of the line in the sand. in theology and in ministry. Do we have words without comfort? Or do we have comfortable words? And what I want to say in our time left is that I think we have.
A comfortable word. But I don't think there's a whole bunch of options of things that would count as comfort and hope. that are honest enough and deep enough and strong enough. in the face of real human pain. I think there's one.
The one who said, Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. I don't think there's anywhere else to go, as the disciples said. Because he has the words of eternal life. I think there's only one name under heaven and earth by which human beings can be saved, because only He has a love strong as death. as the Song of Solomon says.
And we hear his name clearly when we hear it as Grace. and gift. Grace. Hello.
So let me tell you now, here's the kind of historical moment. Let me tell you about two instances in which the grace of God, what we mean by that term grace, was clarified. I think definitively in the first instance, this is going to come right out of the letters of Paul in the New Testament. And then in the 16th century, where this radical definition of grace is rediscovered and clarified again. But one of the things you may or may not know is that the language of grace in the New Testament, and it's all over the New Testament, is very ordinary language.
It's not special language, it's not theological language, it's not insider language, it's just every day. Greek language. It's the same word that people writing in Greek or in a slightly different version in Latin would have used to talk about a gift. A benefit, a present. that you gave to someone.
Here's a favor, here's a benefit, here's a gift. You would say Keris in Greek. And that's what we find in the New Testament. The Kairis of God, the grace of God, the gift of God.
So it's very ordinary language. But the use of the word, the kinds of sentences that it finds itself in. are anything but ordinary. They're shocking. They're scandalous, and they're surprising.
There's a reason that Paul says in 1 Corinthians: the word of the cross is scandalous and foolishness. because it preaches this kind of surprising grace. But how does that work? How does the same word stand out with so much surprise.
Well, here's what I want you to know. These are going to be just brief historical moments. But this language of gift that's so ordinary, and it's ordinary in Greek and Roman writers who are just talking about people giving gifts to each other. It's also very popular among what we might think of as Jewish interpreters of the Bible and theologians who are talking about God-giving gifts. Very ordinary language.
But here's the key thing to know about it. For a gift to be considered a good gift, It should be given to a good recipient. It should match. There should be a correspondence or a kind of fit. Between the gift and the recipient.
Yeah. That was so much assumed that one writer, a Seneca, his name was Seneca, he wrote about the same time as Paul, he said, if you give an extravagant gift, to a person who is not worthy to receive it. His example was a great sum of money. He said That Unfitting. Non-matching gift is not a gift.
He said, I have a word for it. It's called wasting. Right? But it's not gift. A good gift by definition.
should fit or match the person who receives it. There's 10 million ways you could do that. You could match because you were really good at saying thank you publicly. And so I'm going to give to you because then everyone will know I gave to you. Or maybe you'll give a return gift, or maybe it'll create a social or relational network that will further everyone, or maybe they're in your family.
There's all kinds of reasons a person might be the right person to give to. But the key is that you had to give. to the right people. I'm going to give you a couple quotes in a minute.
Now, I do think there's something we can learn that's helpful as we move toward a definition of grace here. The one thing that this doesn't mean in the first century is that gifts are the same thing as wages. That's very clear. You could think of it as there being two different economies. There's an economy of contracts.
And earning and payment. That's one. And then there's a con a whole economy of voluntary, relational. More personal. and their gifts.
And we're dealing with that one.
So that's one thing we can learn from the first century about gifts. They're not payments. They are benefits, their gifts. But who do you give them to? That's the key question.
If we want to understand. how the Gospel stands out in its context. Here's how Seneca put it. We should pick out those who are worthy of receiving our gifts. He's writing almost at exactly the same time as the Apostle Paul.
we should pick out those who are worthy to receive our gifts. Yeah. Or here's a Jewish interpreter of the scriptures who lived in Alexandria. His name was Philo. And here he's talking about God's grace.
God, he said, is one who loves giving gifts. That's a name he gives to God. But then he says, when God gives. Not As a payment, but as a gift. He gives to those who are considered rich.
worthy. And Philo will actually read through the Old Testament. and identify why the people who receive God's gifts are worthy to receive it. It's an interesting exercise. Why did Isaac Get a gift.
Huh.
Well, it doesn't say, but his name is Isaac, which means joy or laughter, and that's a virtue. And so Isaac receives God's grace because as a joyful one, he's a fitting recipient. He didn't earn it. But it makes sense that the good God would give to him. It fits.
Summarizing this, about a hundred years before Paul and Seneca and Philo. Cicero, the Roman lawyer, orator, politician, simply said, Gifts should be given on the basis of worth. That's what a good gift was. You give a gift. to a person who in some sense is fit to receive it.
Now, when you know that context, and you know that's the ordinary use of the word. And then you read something like Romans five. You start to hear the surprise. In the second half of Romans 5, Paul is contrasting What he calls the trespass of the one person, Adam. That brought sin and death into the world.
And what he calls the free grace of God through the one person, Jesus Christ. that brings righteousness and life into the world. And he calls what God has done in Jesus a gift over and over and over and over again in Romans 5, 12 through 20, 21. And he ends with this amazing phrase, where sin abounded, The gift that is Jesus Christ abounded even more. You can already start to hear the surprise.
Where sin abounded doesn't sound like you've identified a fitting or worthy location for the gift. And yet where sin abounded, the gift abounded even more. But if you go back just a couple verses, this becomes Totally explicit. Romans 5, 6. through about ten.
And remember this context of a gift being given to a person who in some sense is fitting or worthy to receive it. And Paul says this. Listen to the when of the gift. The what of the gift, what does God give, when does God give it, but especially notice the for whom. Who receives this gift?
At the right time. While we were still weak, for the ungodly. It's unlikely. that a person would die for a moment. For another, though perhaps for a good person, one could imagine dying.
In Romans 5:7, Paul basically says, you can imagine a fitting gift.
somebody giving their life for a good person. But then he says, that's not what I'm talking about. Romans 5:8. God demonstrated God's love like this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
When? At the point of weakness, sin, in ungodliness. What? Christ died. For whom?
Us. For the week. For the sinner. for the ungodly. This gift does not Fit.
This is an unfitting gift. This is not a gift for the worthy. This is a gift for the unworthy. And a gift for the unworthy, not after. They become worthy.
But at precisely the time, at the right moment, at the when of their unworthiness. At the sight of sin, Bondage and death. God gives the gift of Christ that creates righteousness, freedom. in life. I like to think of this gift as two funeral sermons.
that God preaches. The first is an honest word of diagnosis. It's a kind of graveside sermon that seals the tomb. It sounds a little bit like Ephesians 2. You were dead in your trespasses and sins.
It's not shallow. It's not cliche. It looks honestly at trembling and troubled hearts. and tells us the truth. about the depth of our hurt and our need.
But gods, you are dead in your trespasses and sins. is not God's final word. There's another funeral sermon. given at the grave side of the dead. that rolls away the stone.
It sounds also like Ephesians 2. But God, with the great love with which He loved us while we were dead. has made us alive. There's this amazing moment in a novel by Walker Percy called Love in the Ruins. And that title itself already captures something of unfitting grace.
Love. In the ruins. And in there, there is a world that's in ruins, but there's also a marriage that's in the ruins. And The husband and the wife are having a dialogue, and the wife says, People grow apart. Don't you understand?
We are dead. And the husband responds. I love you right now. I love you at this moment. I love you dead.
That's the unfitting. Gift. But God's unfitting gift, God's love while we were dead, is even stronger than that. It says I love you dead. But it also says, as Ephesians says, Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
This doesn't just speak God's love at the grave. God's grace empties the grave. As Martin Luther once put it, the love of God does not find. but creates. that which is pleasing to it.
It doesn't fit. It's given. At the sight of sin, bondage, and death, but impossibly out of the opposite, at the point of deepest need, in the ruins. It creates. Freedom.
Righteousness and life. Give you one more quote from Luther that summarizes this. He says this about grace. And notice the. unworthy that are repeatedly the objects of God's grace.
Grace, Luther says, comforts the afflicted, recalls the despairing, raises up the fallen, justifies the sinner, gives life to the dying. Unfitting. Grace. Which stands out. in the first century.
But what happened in the sixteenth century?
Well There's something that the late medieval church was emphasizing. That is absolutely right, and we need to hear. And we need to receive.
So if the big contrast in the first century was if something's a gift, it's not a payment. And we don't want to lose that, we want to hold on to that, even as we make the distinction between a fitting gift and an unfitting gift. When you get to the 16th century, one of the things that was being emphasized in the theological tradition that's so helpful. Is that not only is a gift not a payment, Grace was also emphasized as the opposite. of necessity.
Now stick with me for 30 seconds. And I hope that slightly obscure phrase will become a source of good news. What does that mean? That God acts in grace, that means God's not acting out of any necessity.
Well, this is what it really means. Think about God as the one who creates all that is not God. Why? If God's life has any lack. If God is not full and sufficient, if God's somehow incomplete and missing something, And God has to create some stuff that's not God.
So that God can be complete.
Well, then God is creating.
so that God can be filled up. incompleted. But if God is God, if in the beginning God, if God is the Alpha and the Omega, If God is the one who is and will be, as he says when he reveals his name to Moses, then there's no lack in the life of God. God is full and just fine. Thank you very much.
And it is wonderfully good news that God does not need you. Because do you know what that means? If God does not need you, But you are? That's just because God wants. Yeah.
God does not have to create. God does not want to be God without you. And so this all is, not out of necessity, but out of freedom and love. It is Grace. And that never stops being true.
And in the sixteenth century there was no dispute. about that. But what is, if that's how grace initially works, How does grace work? to bring us to completion. To life with God.
One way you could ask this question is: what does God finally See and say when God looks at us On what basis does God look at you and say, You are Fill in the blank.
Well, what was becoming the main answer to that? By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, is that God's grace. was the answer to that question. But what God's grace was understood to be was a kind of something. They use the word substance.
That actually would get put inside you, if you want the theological term. It was a substance that was infused. inside a person. That just means something from God, a gift. was inside you.
and it had the power over time to heal you.
So grace would transform your life. And in its own terms, amen to that.
However, Grace would transform your life. And it was your transformed life by grace that God would look at. That God would see. And on the basis of which God would say, Either. Righteous.
Or Unrighteous. Enough? Or not enough. My beloved child, Depart from me. I never knew you.
So grace is doing the transforming. But because it's transforming your life Where do you look? If you want to know. what God is going to look at. and see.
You look at your life. You still wind up looking at yourself.
Now it's your Grace Transform biography. But it's still your biography. that's going to carry the weight. of the verdict on and the value of your life. And any time we wind up looking at ourselves, Life is a fearful question mark.
At best. Is there any comfort? Is there any hope? One historian said that in this understanding of grace. Our relationship with God, what God will see and say to us, is what He called the uncertain goal of life.
You live your whole life. Towards what God's going to say, and you don't actually know what it's going to be. Judgment's still in the future. And it's a question mark. But what changes?
What do people like Martin Luther? The person he worked very closely with in Wittenberg, named Philip Melangton, what did they notice about Grace?
Well, one thing they noticed is that you had two ways of talking about it. You can talk about the gifts that God gives us. And they never wanted to stop talking about that. The gifts of God's grace, the gifts that heal, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift that transforms lives. These are real things.
But they said we've got the order wrong. If we're thinking that there are these gifts that transform us. And then finally, and in the future, and on the last day, we'll be so transformed that God will relate to us graciously.
So you get that distinction. We get gifts which move us along. And then if we're transformed enough, God will relate to us graciously. God will say Well done, good and faithful servant. God will say, You are righteous.
God will say, You are my beloved.
So a life of gifts that transforms us. has as its hoped-for finish line God's grace that accepts us. And Luther and Melangton said, that's exactly backwards. From what's announced. in Scripture.
It's God's grace. His favor. His acceptance, his forgiveness. Which is said first. And in the context of being fully and finally accepted by God.
God's gifts do go to work. helping and healing. but never in a way that shake the foundation Of gods. First and final love for us. What God will see and say to you On the last day, is what God sees and says to you every day in Jesus Christ.
You don't have to wonder if God will say, You are my beloved child. God today, in Jesus' name, is saying, You are my beloved child. That is God's final verdict of and value on your life. It's not an uncertain goal. It is the stable foundation.
It's not a question mark in the future. It is an it is finished in the past that gets spoken to you now. Thank God for God's gifts that help and heal. But God gives those gifts because God already first and finally, to day, yesterday, and to morrow and to morrow and to morrow. is the God of grace that fully and finally forgives, accepts, wants, loves, and calls you His.
That's the difference. Listen to how. Philip Melancton said it. Grace does not signify any condition in us how much were being transformed. Grace is the beneficence or the mercy of God towards us.
Or Martin Luther just says this. Everything is not yet healed by gifts. It's happening. God's gifts are doing something, but everything's not healed by gifts. But Everything is already.
Forgiven by grace.
So what does this add up to? By way of a definition.
Well, we've got a couple things we can say. We learned from the first century that grace is not payment. But it's a gift. And we learn from the 16th century that grace is not God had to do this, God needs you. But God, in freedom and love, once, Yeah.
But we also learn from the debates and the surprises. that the gift of Christ is not one of these fitting gifts for the worthy. It's a surprising unfitting gift for the unworthy. And that the grace of God is not simply What we can hope for at the end. if some gifts of God transform us enough.
But it is the already spoken, already given. Gift of God in the death, life, resurrection of Jesus Christ. God's grace, we might say, is the gift of Jesus. given at the point of real need. that creates forgiven beloved children.
where there was sin in death, in bondage. You can say this so many ways. I just want to say it like this by way of summary and then move toward finishing. Grace, we can say is First. Grace, we can say, does not fit.
It's God who acts to give, and it's God who gives to people in need. But because this gift is the gift of Jesus Christ, this gift is also full. And final. It is full and full. Final.
I don't know if you've noticed how many ways the New Testament says. Fines to say that. The most obvious is Jesus on the cross In the Gospel according to John, where he says, it is finished. Have you ever noticed how many ways the New Testament finds to say that? In Revelation.
When the one who will wipe every tear from every eye sits on the throne. He says it is done. In Hebrews. There's a contrast. between the sacrifices that took place in the temple.
And it says every day The priest stood. and made sacrifice for sin. And then they had to do it the next day. And then they had to do it the next day. And so they always had to stand because the work was never finished, and they always had to make sacrifices.
But they said, but when Jesus... Made a once-for-all final sacrifice for sin, he sat down. It is done. It is finished. I know.
That the gifts of God have not finished their work. of healing. in my life or in your life. And that can make this fullness and this finalness of grace Feel. Too good to be true.
I know that there are secrets that sometimes it just feels too scary to tell. I know there is shame that sometimes we just cannot shake, and I know there is sin that we cannot forget. but the full and final grace of God. Which sounds like that promise from Jeremiah that's repeated in Hebrews: that God will forgive our iniquities and remember our sins no more. It means however incomplete your biography is, God's belovedness for you is full and final.
It means that the sins that you cannot forget. God cannot remember. You are. Fully. Finally, forever.
Recipients. of the gift of Jesus Christ. Yeah it just means Yeah. Two things. As I conclude.
Bob Dylan. Obvious segue. Rhoda song called Lay Down Your Weary Tune. It's a song about two songs. He talks about the weary tune.
The song we strum. Just a kind of description of life as it often feels. There's a second song in there which says, Rest your neath. Rest yourself beneath the strength of strings. No voice can hope to hum.
There's some other song that doesn't seem to come from human beings, but we can rest beneath it. And I think that weary tune Is life Without Life in which we downplay, life in which we misdefine grace. Because in every case what winds up happening Whether we don't talk about grace and we just are searching for kleos, glory, belovedness. Or if we misdefine grace so that we think we have to be worthy to receive the gift like the first century. Or we think that the only place to look to know if the gift has done enough work is at our own biography to see if we've been transformed.
In every one of these cases, We wind up with the weary tune. of asking the question. Am I enough? Am I loved? Is there any comfort?
Is there any hope? and being told, look at your own life. That's the weary tune. When the burden of our belovedness has to be answered on the basis of our own biography. But God's grace sings like Dylan, Lay down your weary tune.
Because the gift of Jesus given to the unworthy. which first and finally says you are God's forgiven, beloved child. Let you rest beneath the strength of strings And maybe we can't sing. But we can definitely hear and share. And what that does is it lets us actually maybe for just the first time in our life.
Be honest Because if your biography is carrying the basis of your belovedness, Well, the one thing you can't do is be honest about your troubles. You can't let somebody else see what's really going on. You've got to project and present some version of yourself that just maybe. People could love. But it's a vicious circle.
It doesn't work. Because if people ever respond with respect or love, to the you that you project and present? You know it's not you. And so you're stuck. In the weary tune.
As George Eliot, the nineteenth-century novelist, once said, our daily life. is but a hiding of ourselves from each other. If this is more your style, the comedian Chris Rock Once said, We don't meet anybody anymore. We only meet each other's representatives. We're hiding.
And I understand. There's a lot of things. to fear. in a culture, in a context, of judgment. But when you hide And you're afraid.
In that cocoon what you get The shame. You don't get love. But is there any? That's the question. And if God loves us, if God gives Jesus to us, While we were sinners, God demonstrated God's love.
by giving Jesus to us.
Well, then maybe we can both be honest. about these trembling and troubled hearts. Maybe we can say we are sighing to be approved. And here that God has searched us and known us. That before God all hearts are open, all desires known, and from Him no secrets are hid.
But in the presence of this God. being seen and known and understood. Is not bad news. But it's the best news. Because there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
As far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed your sins from you. and nothing in all creation. Not life, not death, not the past, not the present, not the future, not things that are high, not things that are low, nothing and no one. can separate you. from the love of God and Jesus Christ.
And that's what this gospel is. It is the news, it is the promise that gives this gift. We're not just here to talk about a gift. We're here to announce the promise that gives it. concretely to you To me.
In this promise, At our point. of genuine need. And as this gift is given, I hope as it's being given right now. You might feel the weight of your own worth, the weight of your being enough, your weight of your being loved taken off of your shoulders. as it's carried by the one who said, Come unto me.
All you who are weary and heavy-laden, I will give you rest. Because in his name God is giving that gift to you right now. You In Jesus' name. because of the already given gift. are, God is saying, you, are my beloved.
child. Amen. Yeah. Thank you for listening to this week's message on By Grace Alone. We hope Jonathan Leinbaugh's teaching has reminded you that the gospel isn't about what you earn or deserve, but about God's free, sovereign, undeserved favor toward you.
May this truth settle deep in your heart and transform how you live in light of God's grace. If you're ever near Jacksonville, we'd love to have you join us at Paramount Church. For more information, Sermon Archives, or to plan a visit, check out paramountchurch.com or check out our YouTube channel. Also, many of you asked about the broader Reformation resources mentioned in this series. A great place to start is the Wittenberg Center for Reformation Studies.
The center works to recover and share the rich heritage of the Reformation, offering fellowships, historical study tours, and educational programs that bring the theology and history of the 16th century Reformation alive for today's church. For more information go to WittenbergCenter.de. We'll put that link in our description.
Next time, we'll continue our Five Souls journey with Sola Fide through Faith Alone. A message from Dr. R. Scott Clark that will challenge you to trust Christ alone for your standing before God. You won't want to miss it.
Until then, rest in grace, walk in faith, and keep proclaiming Him.
