WEEK 2

“AMAZING GRACE”

Text: Romans 5:1-11

I.          Introduction:

            Imagine that someone enters your house violently in the night, and with no motive and no mercy, they beat and kill your child, your wife, your husband, or someone that you love dearly. You immediately call the police, and within hours they catch the culprit, who admits full guilt for the despicable act.

1) If he is taken to court before a judge, and given a very stiff sentence we would call that Justice.

2) But imagine, then, that after justice had been served, you decided you wanted to take the matter into your own hands, and as the guilty person is being led out to the police car you take out a pistol, and you shoot him to death. We would call that: Vengeance.

3) But what if, when the assassin is brought to court you convince the judge to drop all of the charges against him and you forgive him for what he has done. What’s more, once this person is set free you take him to your house, give him a place to stay, and adopt him as your own son. We call that: (insanity?) Grace.

Grace is giving us what we don’t deserve, what we haven’t earned; grace is what God has given to each one of us.

II.        The need for grace

            The Christian doctrine of Justification by Grace –that fallen humanity is saved by grace alone - is one of the most important doctrines on which the Protestant Church was built, and on which the Protestant Church today stands or falls. And the first principle of Justification by Grace is that we cannot justify ourselves. All of us have sinned, and are therefore guilty before God. It’s not that we are completely unable to ever do anything good, that we are unable to be moral beings; but that we are unable to do enough good things to prove that we are acceptable to God and therefore deserving of His mercy.

            God does not save us because he sees something noble in us, something that makes us particularly deserving. God saves us purely out of His own loving nature; it is not because of who we are, but because of who HE is.

The acceptance of our absolute need for God’s grace can often be most difficult for people who are socially very correct. If you tell someone that they are a sinner in need of God’s grace (which I don’t recommend doing out on the street as you pass people by), the response is often “what do you mean? I’m a good father, a good mother, I take good care of my family, I work hard, I’ve never cheated on my spouse or on my taxes, I’ve never killed anyone, I’m not a drunk or a druggie, and I’ve never been in trouble with the law. What do you mean that’s not good enough for God? Look a HANK! Now there’s a guy who needs God’s grace!” Except that Hank isn’t God’s standard. God’s standard is perfection, and none of us measure up. The Bible says that the good acts of rebellious people are like “filthy rags” in the eyes of God. This was the primary criticism that Jesus had of the Pharisees: they considered themselves deserving of God’s mercy because of their religious acts. The prostitutes and tax collectors were the ones who recognized their need for his grace, and who responded with gratitude and obedience.

So it is impossible for us to earn our salvation, that is, our acceptance by God. For this reason the grace of God is not just important, it is indispensable for our salvation, and it is the foundation of the Protestant doctrine of Justification by grace.

III.        God took the initiative

            That brings us to the second principle of the doctrine of Justification by Grace, that in Christ, God took the initiative to restore our relationship with Him. It was never God’s desire or intention for us to live separate from him, but he knew it was inevitable, so from the very beginning He had a plan to restore our relationship with Him.

In Christ, God took the initiative, and reached out to us with His grace, and forgave us. We may think that it is our faith that saves us, but we are not made right with God just through our own faith, as though faith itself were some kind of good deed; it is the grace of God that saves us, the once-and-for all death of Christ on the cross that saves us. Our faith is a response to the salvation we have already been given. We would not even have faith unless it was given to us by God.

            This aspect of the doctrine of Justification by Grace is one of the main things that distinguishes the Christian faith from all other religions of the world. In all other religions of the world it is humanity who must make amends, who must do things and be good, in order to appease God’s wrath or indifference; that is, each one of us must earn our own salvation.

Much New Age religion promotes the idea that salvation is something we find within us, that we need to recover our inner gods and goddesses, and claim our own innate creative power. That all sounds very nice, and empowering, but it is not biblical and has no place in the Christian church, although I have even heard ministers teaching something along that line. They start out with a misunderstanding of humans being made in the image of God, and quickly transform it into “we are gods.” In fact, that kind of thinking is anti-gospel, it is idolatry, placing ourselves on the same level as God.

But as the text we read from Romans says, it was while we were still weak, while we were enemies of God, that Christ died for the ungodly, not for our “inner goddesses.”

IV.       Attributes of God’s grace

Precious, something to be treasured: Bonhoeffer: German pastor and theologian who was executed in a Nazi concentration camp just a few days before the end of WWII, for his opposition of Hitler. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance; baptism without church discipline; communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ. It is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought, asked for. It is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His son, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.

Universal: The grace of God is extended to all of humanity, it is available for all, but is received through Christ. All have equal access to God’s grace. It is a free gift, but we have to receive the gift in order to actually possess it. God extends His hand to all, but we have to reach out and take it.

Imagine a toddler is walking along the beach with his grandfather. The toddler’s precarious balance is thrown off by the softness of the sand, and so as he’s walking along he takes a few steps, and then stumbles and falls, then he gets up and takes a few more steps, and then does a face plant and has a mouth full of sand. So the grandfather reaches his hand out to the child. If the child recognizes his inability to cope with the sand, and allows his grandfather to hold onto his hand, he might still wobble and stumble along the way, but he won’t hit the ground anymore.

But what if the child – as toddlers so often do – gets upset and cries “no, me do it!” The hand is extended, but the grandfather is not going to force the child to accept his hand.

God’s hand is extended to all of us. And when you finally take that hand, it’s like a big relief. For some of us it takes a couple of good face plants for us to realize how much we need that hand, and once we take it we realize how wobbly we’ve been all along.

Active: God’s grace is universal, so it is available for all, but it’s not like God is just sitting there with arms crossed saying, “well, here it is...is anyone going to come and get it?” No, God actively reaches out to us, actively calls us, actively puts His grace within our grasp. Even when we are walking apart from God, God is continually trying to get our attention.  In Christ, God did not just fall out of Heaven and find Himself in human form, as though he were some character in a Monty Python movie. He chose to come to us, chose to humble Himself and take on human form. He actively bridges that canyon that had been created between Him and us.                

You see, it’s not just that God has made the grace available, and doesn’t care what we do with it; God wants us to turn to Him. In verse 8 it says that “God proves His love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us.” God proves His love for us?? What does the almighty God of the universe have to prove to anyone?? But that is the nature of God. He’s not an indifferent God. He actively seeks us out, actively tries to prove His love to us, actively tries to call us back to Him.

We spend so much time of our lives trying to impress others, to gain acceptance and approval from other people: people who are no better than we are – at least not in the eyes of God - no matter how smart or pretty or rich (or whatever) they are. No matter how high their golf score, or how fluffy their biscuits turn out. And yet the almighty God of the universe is running after us like the father of the prodigal son, saying “I love you, I accept you, look – I even died for you! Whatever you have done, I forgive you. Take my hand and walk with me. I promise, you won’t have to do anymore face plants.”