By Grace, Not by Works #1

Faith is not the point of this passage. The point of this passage is grace. It is what God has done in unmerited favor toward those who deserve His condemnation. Grace is an expression of the activity and the attitude and the motions of God, not the motions of man. Do we get any credit for the faith we exercise upon coming to Christ?

Just how far does God's grace go? You'll hear the answers right here on The Truth Pulpit as Pastor Don Green continues our series, Your Sin and God's Salvation. Hi, I'm Bill Wright and Don is titled his message today, By Grace, Not By Works. And Don, why are too many people prone to wanting at least partial credit for coming to Christ? Well, Bill, I think that it illustrates the pride that is lurking in the heart of every man. You know, my friend, we want to somehow take credit if we get to heaven to boast. But Scripture says that boasting is excluded based on the principle of God's grace. Study with us today as we look at the nature of salvation as we study God's Word on The Truth Pulpit. Thanks, Don. And friend, let's join our teacher as he begins today's lesson in The Truth Pulpit.

Paul is making a statement to Christians here in verses 8 and 9 for us to understand about what it is and what the conclusions are that we are to draw about it. And here's the way that I want you to think about it. Forget everything else that's going on in your life for these moments. I realize a lot of sorrow and difficulty and uncertainty await almost everyone in this room. We can set that aside for this hour and just contemplate ourselves in the presence of God. We can set those things aside and just say, where am I and what does it mean that I stand in this position before God? Just contemplate yourself alone as it were with God, shutting everything else out and saying, how did I ever get to this wonderful position?

And contemplate that. And for those few of you who are not believers in here, here's what you're missing and here's what you need to hear for the redemption of your own soul. There's a great contrast in this passage. It is clear, it is vibrant, it is echoed again and again and again. There is so much compressed into these two verses that as we unfold them, the cumulative impact of every phrase that is said is going to leave us humbled, grateful, and ready to obey the God who called us. There's a great contrast between God's grace and your works that are in these two verses, and it's designed to produce in you a culminating effect that you would boast in Christ and not in yourself. And so we're going to structure this message on a contrast, a two-part contrast. And first of all, you can just title this point in your notes if you're taking notes, saved by grace.

Saved by grace. And we'll unpack that. So with everything that Paul has prayed, verses 15 through chapter 2 verse 7, and all of the riches that are there, he's now bringing it to a conclusion. He's bringing it to a focal point.

He's wanting to direct your attention with laser-like intensity. Here's what you're supposed to get out of everything that I've been saying. Look at verse 8. Four. Four. Four by grace you have been saved. The word four here is a connection, it is a bridge, between everything that he has said leading up to this point in the preceding verses with what he is now immediately about to say. And here is what is so crucial for you to understand. What immediately follows this word four is the focal point of everything. The whole point of everything that Paul has been saying, he is now going to summarize in one great concise climax. He's drawing your attention, this is what you are supposed to take away from everything that I've been saying and everything that I've been praying.

Get this point clear in your mind because it changes everything about the nature of the Christian life. Four. I pray for you and I pray for you. Four. Why have I prayed like I've prayed?

It's for this reason. Here's what he wants us to see. Paul says, mark it, park it right here.

So what comes next? Four by grace. That theme, beloved, is the whole point. I realize that some of you have been trained to take this verse and show people the importance of faith in calling them to a saving knowledge of Christ. Faith is not the point of this passage. The point of this passage is grace. It is what God has done in unmerited favor toward those who deserved his condemnation. This passage is about what God has done. Grace is an expression of the activity and the attitude and the motions of God, not the motions of man. And so with everything that we have seen leading up to this, Paul is saying it's by grace.

This is what you are supposed to see. Four by grace. By what God has done, not by what you have done. You and I, when we understand the flow of Ephesians, you're supposed to humble yourself completely before the great truth that it is God's unmerited favor toward you that explains why you are saved today.

It is not of anything that you did. It is all a result of the mighty power and the mighty grace of God. The summary point here, if you're a Christian here today, what the biblical takeaway for you is, and providential leading of God to bring us to this moment at this text, is for you to step back, as it were, silence your heart, and in the hallowed chambers of your heart, understand and bow before the wonderful, unspeakable truth that God showed kindness to you when you deserved His judgment. That is why you're a Christian today. Simplifying it all down and bringing it all to this one point, it is by grace that you have been saved. God showed mercy to you when you deserve the complete opposite. That is very humbling. It makes us realize that God truly does get all of the glory.

This is not about me, it's not about you, it is about Christ and His Father being good to unworthy sinners like us. Now, in the Greek text there's an article, the word the, before the word grace. It's not translated here in English, but it's an important aspect of understanding the text. When Paul says it's by the grace, what he's doing is he's referring to the grace that has previously been mentioned in the context.

He's not injecting a new idea here. He says, I'm simply referring to that which I have already been talking about. And you say, okay, well what is this, where was grace previously discussed? All you have to do is go back a couple of three verses. In verse 5, it says, God, when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved. By undeserved favor upon you, you have been saved. When you were dead in your transgressions, that is when God saved you.

It was grace when you were dead. It was a powerful exercise of grace in the past by which you have been brought into this present beautiful spiritual position. When God did a gracious act in the past and made you alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved. That grace is what he's talking about. But then you say, but that's not the only time grace was mentioned just before verse 8, is it?

I really believe that when you start to really grasp something of the essence of what Scripture says about these things, you almost start to tremble because it is so holy, it is so magnificent, it is so otherworldly. Verse 7, Paul said, by grace, by a powerful grace, you were made alive together with Christ. And in verse 7, so that in the ages to come, he might show the surpassing riches of his grace. His grace saved me in the past, and he's got a whole lot more to display to me in the future.

Unmerited, undeserved. And so when Paul says in verse 8, for by grace you have been saved, that word grace, he's drawing upon what he had just said. He said, by that grace, which I've just been speaking about, that grace that made you alive in Christ at some point in your prior physical earthly life when you were converted, grace brought you to faith in Christ. Grace made you new. Grace made you alive. Grace made you a new creature. Grace forgave all your sins. That grace is what I'm talking about.

And he says in verse 7, he has that future forward-looking emphasis to it. The grace that is going to extend throughout an endless eternity of the abundant goodness of God, falling upon you wave after wave, drenching you in unspeakable glory. That's grace.

That's kindness that we have no claim on. Grace saved us and made us alive in Christ. Grace is going to show us future glories yet to be told, yet to be seen by human eyes on this earth.

Our human eyes haven't seen it yet. And so this grace, past and future, it's by that grace that you have been saved. A grace that is so magnificent and holy that you tremble in the face of it. You tremble in the wonder and the mercy of it. That grace is what saved you. As you come to verse 8, so captivated, so enamored with, so impressed with, the undeserved kindness and mercy and love of God on your life. You're so overwhelmed that in exchange for your captivity to evil and your condemnation before Him and your spiritual death in exchange for all of that stuff that you were by nature, He's given you all of this in its place. And your knees buckle under the glory of it.

That's really wonderful. And Paul says, yes, it is wonderful and it's by that grace that you have been saved. So that by the time that you get to verse 8, the idea that you contributed anything to this present position has been completely expunged from your mind. The idea that you brought something to God and He rewarded you with salvation in response to what you brought Him in your own strength and your own power and your own ingenuity and your own devotion.

That thought is so far foreign to the passage that you realize that it couldn't possibly be that. And so you are done with yourself by the time that you get to verse 8. You have put yourself completely out of it and you are just so wrapped up in the greatness and the glory of God that everything else falls out of your mind. And all that you can focus on is the glory and the grace and the goodness and the greatness of God.

That's what verse 8, that's the climax that verse 8 is bringing you to. Grace made you alive. Grace will be displayed through eternity. It's by that grace that you are saved.

Wow. Now, here in verse 8, look at the text with me again. When you take this word by word, phrase by phrase, you see how it all reinforces that same central point. Paul says, for by grace you have been saved. What does it mean to be saved?

Two things that I would say about this part of the passage. One is that the construction here, you have been saved, it's a construction that says your salvation was completed by a past act of God, and the results of that are continuing in your life to the present time. You stand in a condition of redemption. You stand in a condition of grace, having been on the receiving end of God's favor.

That's the position that you stand in. And you are in that position, Paul says, you stand there secure, established in the righteousness of Christ and in the grace of God, you're in that position because grace brought you there. You have been saved, you stand in this great position because of what came from God's grace. Now, what have I been saved from? Well, look, if anyone that tries to diminish the horror of human sin, any teacher who would try to diminish to you the seriousness of the sin that you brought to conversion, is doing you a great disservice. For one thing, they're lying to you when they diminish your sin, but they are also putting you in a position where if you have a shallow view of sin, I promise you you will have a shallow view of grace.

You only appreciate undeserved favor when you understand how much undeserved it was. So you've been saved. What have you been saved from? Go back to those first three verses. You've been saved from spiritual death, chapter 2 verse 1. There you were, dead in your sins. Verse 2, there you were captive, enslaved by hostile evil powers, the world, your own flesh, the devil himself. You were in prison, in chains, locked in the key thrown away, without hope.

Paul will go on and say in verse 12, you were without hope, you were without God. You were hurtling on a runaway train toward destruction in hell. And verse 3, by very nature, you were a child of wrath. In the righteousness of God, he righteously could have destroyed you in an expression of his judgment upon your sin. You were twisted, you were depraved, you were dead to God, you were alive to sin, and you followed your father the devil, Jesus says in John 8. And you weren't even looking for God, really. Maybe a God of your own making, not this holy God who condemned you.

No one looks for that God. And so when Paul says that you've been saved by grace, what he's saying is that God has thoroughly and effectively and completely and forever rescued you from spiritual death, rescued you from your captivity to the world, to the flesh, to the devil, and delivered you from the threat of his righteous wrath. So when we say, I'm saved, there's content to that.

There is rich, meaningful content to that. 2 Corinthians 5, 17 says, If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. Behold, the old things have passed away, new things have come. And when we say that we've been saved, we're not talking about some superficial little thing, that Jesus has now become my best friend, Jesus is my buddy. No, no, we're saying that a holy, righteous God intervened in order to deliver us from ourselves and our sin, and not only brought us out of a position of judgment, he didn't just bring us out of judgment to a place of neutrality and set us off to the side, he brought us from judgment into blessing! He brought us from judgment into a conscious experience of his grace now and a hope of eternal blessing forever in the ages to come. When we say we've been saved, there is enormous content to what that means.

It was really bad and dangerous and threatening. Now it's really, really good, and it's secure, and there is peace and hope and reconciliation with the God who once condemned me. And Paul says, understand that it's by grace that you're in that position. It's because God exercised kindness toward you, not because you exercised righteousness toward him. It's by grace that you stand in this glorious position today. And we feel together the pride of our human hearts just continually shrinking, don't we?

And just saying, oh God, you're so great. You know, when I study Ephesians 2, when I preach on it, when I read it, I don't even want to claim any credit for my salvation. I have no desire and interest in that at all.

That is not appealing to me at all, and it shouldn't be for you either. Because for us to claim anything that we brought out of death and captivity and condemnation and say that we brought something out of that condition to bring us into that glory is to rob God of all of the glory that he so richly deserves. It makes us to claim credit is to seek pride where humility and gratitude should be there instead. It's by grace that you're in that position. God saved you at a past time in your life, in a moment in history. God regenerated you, worked in your heart and reconstituted you in a way so that you gladly came to Christ in response to the work that he had done. And now the effects of that, you sit here in your chair today, basking in, living in the wake of that, knowing that the wake and the current of salvation is leading you to eternal glory, where God will display even more of his kindness for ages to come. It will be wonderful, and God did it, not us, not you, not me. I like to preach on our hope, our future hope. I realize that whatever I say about it doesn't begin to approximate how wonderful it will be. But even as I say the most, use the best of my limited capacity to extol how good it's going to be, I have every confidence that I'm not telling you half of what it's going to be like.

It's going to be so much greater than what we think. And that's what God has done for us. Today, if you're a Christian, you are spiritually safe. You are standing in grace today because God showed permanent grace to you in the past. Now, how did it come to be yours? It was not through a work or ritual that you did.

It wasn't because you were better than someone else. Look at verse 8 with me there. How was it that this was appropriated in your life? For by grace you have been saved through faith.

You merely received a work that was already completed on your behalf. And what made your heart bend toward it was the fact that God had done a prior work in your heart. God had made you alive in Christ.

Regeneration precedes faith, theologically if not temporally. You responded to Christ when you had rejected the gospel many, many times prior because God determined at that moment to do a work in your heart, to bend your heart, and you willingly came. You received Christ and you rested in Him for a complete salvation. The word faith expresses a firm conviction that Christ is the Son of God who alone can save from sin. In faith, we surrender to Christ as our only hope of salvation. We receive Him and we rest in Him. We receive this eternal Son of God as our Savior and we cease trying to do anything to earn God's favor as if we bring merit that He will reward us for going forward. We rest in Christ understanding that His righteous life fulfilled the righteous demands of God's law on our behalf. We rest in His death and resurrection as the payment for our sins. When we sing Jesus paid it all, we mean it. If God's grace alone has saved us, where do our works come in? Well, Pastor Don Green will turn his attention to the work side of the equation next time on The Truth Pulpit and we hope you'll be with us.

Right now though, Don's back in studio with news of a great resource. Well, my friend, as we bring today's broadcast to a close, I want to offer you a very special gift, a special resource as a gift from our ministry. It's my series called Trusting God in Trying Times and this series over the years has proven to be the most popular set of messages that I've ever done. It helps you know how to trust God as you're going through the deep sorrows that sometimes come to us in life. It comes from the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament and it comes from some very deep sorrows of my own that were present early in my Christian life. It's very personal, it's very helpful, it's very biblical and I would love to see you have it in your hands. It's available in CD album or by download, transcripts are available if you prefer that. My friend Bill is going to give you information on how to find it. Just visit our website at thetruthpulpit.com to get the resource Don just mentioned. I'm Bill Wright and we'll see you back here next time on The Truth Pulpit.