Today on Renewing Your Mind... ... ... All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.
Like the rest, we were, by nature, objects of wrath. But because of His great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved." And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus in order that, in the coming ages, He might show the incomparable riches of His grace expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves. It is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.
For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. About twenty years ago, when I was still living in Scotland permanently, a friend presented me with a manuscript of a little book that was being considered for publication. The book or booklet was, in fact, eventually published and I suspect many of you may already have read it. It was called, I think, What Shall We Think of the Carnal Christian? What Shall We Think of the Carnal Christian? That is to say, what shall we think about a statement that suggests that it is possible to be saved by the grace of God and yet not to come really under the lordship of Jesus Christ, that it is possible to be saved by grace and sustain that salvation even although there may be contrary evidence to it in the fact that we do no good works. And it will tell you something about me and my naivety in those days that I read carefully through the manuscript and handed it back to my friend and said to him, surely there is no one left in the world who believes that kind of thing.
And he looked at me with a benign smile at my naivety and said prophetic words, wait, he said, until you have visited the United States of America. And of course your response indicates that you know exactly what we are talking about here. Our subject is the necessity of good works and we live, many of us, in a context where we are surrounded by professing Christians who at the very idea that a Christian minister might address the subject of the necessity of good works would throw up their hands in horror and ask whether you were at a conference where the gospel of the grace of God was denied. And of course the reasoning of such thinking is something as follows, that we are saved by grace and not by works, therefore works cannot be necessary for being a Christian. And of course the premise of that reasoning is true and right. It is entirely by grace and not by works that we are justified and saved.
But the conclusion is seriously unbiblical and seriously mistaken and indeed disastrous as far as biblical Christianity is really concerned. And there is a host of passages in Scripture to which one could point to establish that principle in the simplest way possible. Listen for example to the Apostle Paul as he writes to his friend Titus, it is the grace of God that brings salvation, but that grace teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled upright and godly lives in this world. For our Savior Jesus Christ gave Himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and purify for Himself a people that are His very own eager to do what is good. And Titus receives this further exhortation in chapter 3, when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us not because of righteous things we had done but because of His mercy.
He saved us through the washing of rebirth so that being justified by His grace we might become heirs. And I want you to stress these things so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. And so you can understand my naivety twenty years ago, that having a little knowledge of the surface text of Scripture, I came to the conclusion, surely there is no Christian in the universe who has ever read the pages of the New Testament who does not understand that the logic of the Gospel is not salvation by grace, therefore good works become irrelevant, but salvation by grace so that good works become the necessary consequence of grace in the life of the Christian believer. And that is why I want especially to draw your attention to these words of Paul, particularly in the last three verses of the passage we read in Ephesians chapter 2 in verses 8 and 9 and 10, where in a Christally clear fashion the Apostle Paul summarizes the apostolic teaching. It is by grace you have been saved through faith. This is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast because we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.
This is the reformation formula for the Gospel. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God's glory alone. But one of the manifestations of grace, one of the evidences of faith, one of the implications of belonging to Jesus Christ, one of the ways in which God's glory alone is displayed in our lives, the Apostle goes on to say in verse 10, lies in this, that we do not work for our salvation, but we ourselves in salvation have become God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance that we should do. And here he presents to us in a nutshell one of his glorious pictures of what it means for us this morning to be Christian believers.
What is it? It is, my friend, that you are nothing less than God's workmanship. He has been the potter of grace who has picked up the shattered image of man in you and has begun modeling you again after the likeness of Jesus Christ because He means to put you at the last on display before angels, archangels, and men and say to the entire universe, behold my workmanship. And this is what is happening in your life. This explains so much of your Christian life that God as a potter is taking you and molding you and shaping you and His strong and firm and other times gentle and subtle hands are constantly at work in your life because He is doing something glorious with you. The church I used to attend when I was a young student in Scotland had and still has a very remarkable minister who created his own posters for the front door of the church at which buses regularly would stop on their way down the main street, and I've never forgotten one of the best of them was this, workshop inside showroom upstairs. And this is what the Apostle is saying.
He is saying, by God's grace, as we live our Christian lives, the workshop is here and now, but God is working with an eye on the show He is going to create for all creation, for all eternity. When He puts on display in ways we can scarcely begin to imagine the perfection of His workmanship in every single one of His children. When I was a little boy, I mean a really little boy, I had an elder brother who was a couple of years before me and from time to time I suffered the fate of younger brothers when I was brought into the same teacher's room as the one in which he himself had been taught. And my brother was almost the opposite of everything I am.
He was everything one might aspire to be but was not. And part of Mrs. Wood's classroom routine was at the beginning of the day we were all brought to the front of the classroom for the daily inspection of hair. Was it clean? Ears, were they clean? Can you imagine a teacher actually wanting to look into the ears of seven-year-old children who have just come in from playing football in the playground? And then there was the investigation of the nails, were they clean? Had the back of the hands been clean? And then to me, worst of all, what about the shoes?
We'd almost kicked them, broken in the playground. And it wasn't just the front of the shoes that Mrs. Woods would investigate. She then would march round the back to see which children had polished the heels of the shoes. She was of my mother's school that believed you should never marry a man who doesn't polish the heels of his shoes. And Mrs. Woods, I don't know if these beauty competitions were in evidence in the 1950s, but Mrs. Wood's way of doing things was to dismiss the winner first and the loser of losers last.
And on not a few occasions, I am now able to confess with equanimity by distance the last person standing there was myself, and her invariable comment was in a shrill voice that would give me nightmares. Ferguson, she would say, Ferguson, you're nothing like your elder brother. While I'm glad to say I remember what Mrs. Woods said and have drunk some spiritual profit out of it because I often feel that way, that this is the truth of my Christian life. I am not yet anything really like my elder brother, but the glory of the Christian gospel, my friends, is this, that it is God's set purpose in His heart that one day He will conform us to the image of His Son, that He will be the firstborn and preeminent one among many who are quite evidently His brothers and sisters because they bear the family likeness. And when He presents us, our Lord Jesus, to His heavenly Father and says, my Father, here is my younger brother, my younger sister, then the heavenly Father will say in response, Jesus, I know they are so like their elder brother.
And that is what He is saying here. He is saying we are God's workmanship and He means at the last to put us on display. And it is within that context that the Apostle urges us therefore to see the glorious significance of what God wants to produce in our lives, creating us for the good works which He has foreordained that we should walk in them. Why is it that the Christian does good works? Very simply because that is what the Christian is created for in Jesus Christ.
That is what the Christian is created for. We are God's workmanship created in Jesus Christ for good works. And the foundation of this lies in what He has earlier said in verses 4 to 7. What is this creation of God? Well, He says because of His great love for us in Christ, God has raised us up with Christ. God has brought us to sit with Christ, He says, at the right hand of the Father in heavenly realms in order that He might show the incomparable riches of His grace expressed in His kindness to us in Jesus Christ.
What is He saying? He is saying that God has done this for us. He has brought us into a new orbit of reality altogether. If anyone is in Christ, says Paul in 2 Corinthians 5.17, then literally He says, if any in Christ, new creation. And He's saying already here upon the earth, the Christian believer participates in the blessings and the privileges of the final kingdom of God and already begins to share and experience what it means to be part of that new creation of God. So that as He says also in 2 Corinthians 5, we recognize that we no longer live for our self or work for our self, but we live and work for Him who died for us and was raised again. Now, what is the point He is making here?
Well, His logic is this. If you will only come to recognize who you are and what you are in Christ, then you will inevitably see the logic of doing good works for the glory of Jesus Christ. And this is something we need to learn and relearn throughout the whole course of our Christian lives.
No more frequent mistake is made in the New Testament churches and presumably in the churches in which we live. No more important mistake is made in living the Christian life than this, that we forget who we really are in Christ. We forget that we are a new creation. We forget what this means, says Paul. We forget that this means that we have died to the dominion of sin as He teaches in Romans 6, that we have been raised into newness of life, that we are no longer the kind of people who are in bondage to sin, but the kind of people who are identified by the name of Jesus Christ as Christians, that is those in whom Jesus Christ has deigned to dwell in the presence and the power of His Holy Spirit.
And he is saying in a similar way to these Ephesians, if you only realized what you are, that you are God's workmanship created in union with Jesus Christ, then it would become as clear as the noonday sun that the only thing you could do for Jesus Christ was to walk in the good works which God has foreordained for you. I wonder if you recognize that principle. Let me put it like this, what if Alistair Begg and I had found you at a weak moment and both being loyal citizens of Her Majesty the Queen, at some moment of high emotion had urged you to join together with us in the parking lot where the buses were waiting to drive to Washington, and together there are several thousand of us, we could march on the White House, enter the Oval Office, remove the sitting president and return this great nation to its lawful monarch, Her Majesty the Queen. Well I know the stomach of conservative Americans to recognize that we might get quite a number of supporters for that idea, but, but what would be your instinctive response?
Your instinctive response would be to stare at us and say to us, how can we possibly do that? We are Americans. We are no longer under her dominion. We were delivered from that dominion over 200 years ago, and her authority has nothing to do with us.
We are Americans and our way of life is the great American way of life. You see, when you recognize your nationality, there are implications for your actions, and the same is true when we have been made a kingdom and nation of priests, royal priests unto God in our Savior Jesus Christ. We recognize that if we are Christ's ones, then all we can do in response is to live in His footsteps. That's Dr. Sinclair Ferguson and a message from the series, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith.
You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday. I'm Lee Webb, and thank you for being with us. This is a twelve-part series that explores key truths of what it means to live as a Christian. We'd like to send you the entire series on a single USB drive. Just send a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries when you request it. We've included a bonus series on that drive. It's R.C. Sproul's classic collection, ten of his most requested messages.
You can give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us here at Ligonier, our number 800-435-4343. Perhaps you have asked that question, how many good works do I have to do before God is pleased with me? Fortunately, the answer to that question is none. God's pleasure with us, His favor, is not based on what we've done or even will do.
It's based on what Christ has already done for us, and any good works that we do flow out of gratitude for Him. If you are searching for answers to questions like that, we do hope you're a member of a local church and under the care and teaching of a faithful pastor who is able to provide you with answers. But let me also encourage you to use Ligonier's live question and answer service. We call it Ask Ligonier. Trained team members here at Ligonier are ready to answer your biblical and theological questions 24 hours a day, six days a week.
Just go to ask.ligonier.org. And speaking of frequently asked questions, if you're a Christian, can you lose your salvation? Alistair Begg will look to Scripture to provide the answer tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. Alistair Begg.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-12-24 06:36:22 / 2023-12-24 06:44:11 / 8