What is Grace?

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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As we begin this afternoon, I want to pose this question to you. What is grace?

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What is grace? As Christians, this is often a word that is thrown around.

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We speak about the grace of God. We sing amazing grace.

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Some of us, or maybe some others, sit down for dinner and speak of saying grace to give thanks for the meal.

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We wax eloquent about the doctrines of grace. Even our church is

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Grace Fellowship Church. But what is grace?

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Yesterday afternoon, as I was ruminating on Ephesians 2 and verses 8 through 10, my son

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Noah and I went for a bike ride. And as we rode our bike through the country just east of our home, we passed by the

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Kingdom Hall, where the Jehovah's Witnesses met earlier today to expound upon their own version of Jehovah's grace.

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And as we passed by that Kingdom Hall, I began to realize that we are surrounded by a million and one counterfeit versions of grace.

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For instance, Muslims believe that God's grace is a special favor that is bestowed upon those who have earned it, who possess some form of inner belief and good works.

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Grace is something that is earned. If I were to quote from the Quran, not that I want to do this often, but just to demonstrate this, in Surah 19, verse 96, it says,

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Upon those who have believed and did good works shall the most gracious bestow his love.

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To earn the love of a gracious God, one must believe and do good works.

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For the Mormons, their grace is actually, if you were to chart it on a spectrum, has far more in common with the grace of Muslims than it does of Christians.

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Mormon grace is a stepping stool between man's best efforts and God's lofty demands.

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In the Book of Mormon, again, not that I want to quote it often, but in 2 Nephi 25, it says,

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For we labor diligently to write to persuade our children and also our brethren to believe in Christ and to be reconciled to God, for we know that it is by grace that we are saved after all that we can do.

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And so for Mormons, grace comes to those whom God finds working to earn salvation.

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Now, I've started, maybe you can see here, I've started with the Mormons, and now we're going to, or sorry, the

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Muslims, and then the Mormons, we'll come just a little bit closer to home and find the Roman Catholics, our

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Roman Catholic neighbors, who they say that while grace is an undeserved favor, it is a favor not that saves, but that empowers one to pursue salvation.

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The Catholic Catechism, not that I want to quote it often, but we'll mention it here, states that grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become the children of God.

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Now that sounds almost right, but is that what grace truly is?

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Is it a divine jumpstart to help us to earn eternal life and to become God's children?

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And if you think I'm misrepresenting the Catholic position, Catholic Answers, catholic .com, one of the most prominent

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Catholic apologetics organizations in the world, they write this, they say, actual grace is a supernatural kick in the pants.

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It gets the will and intellect moving so we can seek out and keep sanctifying grace.

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Imagine that, kick in the pants fellowship church, that we rejoice in the kicking of our pants to get us on our way to earn our salvation.

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Now this is how the world defines grace. It is a reward for faith and good works.

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Grace comes to those who try really, really, really hard, and it is a cosmic whip to get people living their best life.

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And yet each of these answers we know, I hope, are painfully wrong. This is the kind of grace that has the power not to save a man, but to kill a man.

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And not just to kill a man, but that is actively killing millions of men, even at this very hour.

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Yesterday as I rode my bike past that kingdom hall, I was reminded that we as a church, as the church of the living

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Christ, as the pillar and buttress of the truth, we are engaged in a real spiritual battle over this word, the meaning of this word, grace.

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And the stakes are unthinkably high. When I use battle language, some people might think, well

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Shane, isn't that a bit militant, a bit controversial? Let me reframe it a bit.

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We're in a battle against a false idea, a false gospel, a false grace that is at this very moment damning our neighbors.

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Our neighbors, whom we have been commanded to love as our very selves, are being led astray by a counterfeit grace.

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And for some strange reason, it seems that there is a growing list of evangelical Christians who are departing from the faith and converting to that form of grace.

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Just yesterday I was watching a video on Russell Brand, who is adopting some kind of Catholic views.

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And as I was watching that, another suggested video came up about Candace Owens, who has apparently converted to Roman Catholicism as well.

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Let me ask you, what does the evangelical church in North America have to contribute then to this spiritual battle centered on this biblical concept of grace?

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How would you define grace? It's one word. How would you define grace?

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Are you able to skillfully wield the sword of the spirit, which is God's word, to lead yourself and your family and your neighbors to safety?

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Or are you a spiritual novice, a sitting duck, unable to defend even one of the central concepts of the

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Christian faith, this concept that is grace? I fear that many professing

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Christians today are such spiritual novices. They think they know what grace is.

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They say, oh, I know what grace is. But if they found someone on their doorstep that would ask them, define for me this concept of grace, they would find it almost impossible to assemble even one coherent sentence to define it biblically.

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But regardless of where we are on the spectrum, if you're here with the sword of the spirit in your hands, ready to define, ready to defend the biblical concept of grace, or if you find yourself in a place saying, well,

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I think I know what grace is, but I don't know that I could articulate it, God's word comes to us as a guiding light on this subject.

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In this passage, we find Paul building upon what he has just said in verses 1 through 7.

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We looked at that last week. And especially verse 5. If you look at Ephesians 2 and verse 5, we see this parenthetical thought, at least in the

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ESV, it is between two dashes. He says, by grace you have been saved.

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And here now, Paul is going to offer, as it were, an exposition of this parenthetical thought in verses 8 through 10.

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And with the understanding that this concept of grace is vitally important, Paul is going to spend verses 8 through 10 expounding upon this theme of God's grace.

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What does it mean to be saved by God's grace? And as he does, I think he provides us with a definition of this term.

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And so we're going to look at verse 8, 9, and 10. And over these three verses, look at four points that arise naturally from our text that teach us the biblical meaning of grace.

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So, beginning in verse 8, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved.

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For by grace you have been saved. And the first truth that I want us to see in this passage is that by God's grace, the

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Christian is saved from condemnation. By God's grace, the

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Christian is saved from condemnation. When the grace of God comes to a Christian, it does not come as a spiritual kick in the pants.

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It does not come as a reward to those who by the sweat of their brow have been already working hard to earn eternal life.

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But God's grace comes freely and savingly to those who otherwise are dead in their trespasses and sins, abiding under the just condemnation of a holy

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God. It comes as a gift to those who are condemned.

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Now does verse 8 teach this in terms of a historical context?

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If you lived in first century Ephesus, whether you were a Christian or not, you would have known something about what it meant to be saved or to have a savior, to receive salvation.

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And this is because the concept of salvation and that of a savior was baked right into the architecture of the city.

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You see, a century before Paul wrote this letter to the Ephesians, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar came to the aid of the

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Ephesians during a civil war that broke out in that region. And during this particular time, he became, you could say, somewhat of a savior to the people.

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Not even once, but twice. And on the first occasion what happened, about 60 years before Christ, was a powerful

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Roman general named Scipio came upon Ephesus and they were helpless as he ordered that all of the treasures of the temple of Diana, you'll remember that great temple in Ephesus, all the treasures of the temple of Diana, including even the statues of the goddess, be plundered and taken.

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And Scipio's aim was to steal everything of value in Ephesus, even their gods.

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And in the process, the city of Ephesus itself would be brought to complete economic and spiritual ruin.

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And they were helpless to stop him. Nevertheless, when Scipio learned that Julius Caesar was approaching with his mighty army through Greece, he was deterred and the city was saved.

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Julius Caesar felt really good about himself being the savior of Ephesus in that moment. And I'll show you why

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I know that in a moment. But then on a occasion, a man named Ampius Balbus, gotta love these names, this is our newborn

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Ampius, sought to rob the city of its treasure, apparently to fund

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Pompey's war against Rome. But Julius Caesar again intervened, sending Ampius into exile.

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Now after all of this had transpired, we know that Julius Caesar felt excellent about himself and he wanted all the people of Ephesus to remember that he was their savior.

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We know this because when they were looming or when the looming shadow of death hung over them,

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Caesar came to be their knight in shining armor, their savior. And in doing so, he built an impressive statue in the middle of Ephesus.

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And on that statue, read this. These are the words of a man, mind you.

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He said, the cities of Asia, along with the citizen bodies and the nations, honor

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Gaius Julius Caesar. He's speaking on their behalf. These people, they honor me.

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A son of Gaius, and here he describes himself, the high priest, imperator or emperor, and twice consul, the manifest

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God from Ares and Aphrodite, and universal savior of human life.

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That is what Julius Caesar thought of himself, the manifest God and the universal savior of human life.

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He was a humble man, wasn't he? But nevertheless, the Ephesians knew, at least conceptually, what it meant to be helped, or sorry, to be helpless, to be as good as dead, and then to have a savior appear.

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And in this historical context, Paul writes that there is a God who has, who is truly

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God, who has come to eternally save those who are helpless and lost and without hope in this world.

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Now this is the the cultural context that Paul is writing to, but there is a grammatical context that I want us to look at as well.

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We're doing grammatical historical interpretation. Paul tells us that by grace they have been saved.

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Now first of all, Paul uses a Greek verb, this word, to be saved, and it is a significant one.

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It is a word that appears, you don't have to know what this means necessarily, but if you do, extra points, in the perfect tense and in the passive voice.

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And what that means is that when this comes to the Ephesians and to all Christians, it is meant to demonstrate that we are passive recipients of this saving work.

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There's nothing that the Ephesians or that we can do to contribute to the saving except the need to be saved.

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And more than that, because it is given in the perfect tense, this means that the saving work can only be understood as a once -and -for -all event, a completed action that yields ongoing blessings.

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And so the grammar of this passage is important, and it paints a beautiful oasis of Christ's saving work.

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I want you to imagine for a moment that we live in a destitute city in the middle of the

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Sahara Desert. We have no access to water, no access to the very liquid that we need to bring us life.

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And the oasis that Paul is painting here is this. Imagine that in that condition, that God were to appear and to build a perpetual well in this desolate village to bring water to all of its thirsty residents, to all of us.

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And he builds that wall at his own expense, and we can contribute nothing to it at all.

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All we can do is gaze upon this well that he alone has built, and we don't have to add to the well.

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We don't have to maintain the well. God built the well once, and he built it perfect the first time, and now it will provide life -giving water to every single one of us every day forever.

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This is the kind of saving that Paul is speaking about with this grammar.

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Passive and perfect. The kind of saving that Hebrews 7 25 speaks of, that he saved us.

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Christ has saved us to the uttermost. And when God delivered the saving work to us, when he built this perpetual well,

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Paul tells us he did it by grace. Now we're getting to the heart of the matter.

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What does it mean that the Lord has done this by grace? If you were to look in a

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Bible dictionary, grace is typically defined in three words. God's undeserved favor.

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You can remember that. That's a good short -form definition of grace.

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God's undeserved favor. And this is true. But I like what one theologian has said when he's speaking here about Ephesians chapter 2, and this grace that Paul is revealing to us.

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This grace in Ephesians chapter 2 is used to refer to something far more than God's undeserved favor.

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But it is used to refer to those who were once dead in trespasses and sins.

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Children of wrath. Like we looked at last week, slaves of Satan. And as this theologian writes, he says, as this whole passage shows, grace is actually

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God's favor granted to those who deserve wrath. It is not undeserved favor, as if the people whom

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God befriends were neutral, but it is an act of immense favor bestowed on those who lie under God's just condemnation as transgressors and as sinners.

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Grace doesn't just save the undeserving, brothers and sisters. Grace saves the condemned.

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So perhaps a better definition, if the Mormons or the JWs or a dear

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Christian brother were to come to you this afternoon and say, speak to me about the grace of God as it is revealed in the

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Bible. You could say, grace is

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God's immense and undeserved favor freely given to the helpless and woefully undeserving.

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Grace is God's immense and undeserving favor freely given to the helpless and woefully undeserving, the condemned.

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Now brethren, do you ever feel, we touched on this last week, do you ever feel like God could never love you because you are so unworthy of his love?

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Well, I have wondered this myself countless times, but let me assure us, just at the definition of the word grace, that God does not love us because we are worthy, as the

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Muslims suppose, nor does he save us because we have almost earned it, that close as the

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Mormons suppose. But he loves us, and he saves us because he is a gracious God who takes great pleasure in saving to the uttermost those who are altogether unworthy of such kindness.

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This is the very definition of grace. And brothers and sisters, because this is the definition of grace, we can see that it is a grace that gives and gives and gives and never asks anything of us in return.

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It is a grace that we, in spite of ourselves, can never exhaust. How do

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I know that? Turn with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 9.

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2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 9. I'm going to highlight just a few of these words, but hopefully we will see it for ourselves, and it helps all of you that I'm the last one to get there.

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But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.

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My power, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weakness, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

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Just those opening words in verse 9. My grace is sufficient for you.

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Do you know what that means? It means that we can never exhaust God's grace for us.

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The dear brother, God's grace is sufficient for you. The dear sister,

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God's grace is sufficient for you. That even you are not beyond God's all -sufficient, all -encompassing, matchless grace, saving grace.

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There's a story that Spurgeon once told. He was riding home after a long day's work.

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And if you know anything about Spurgeon, you know that he was a man who was given to melancholy and to depression.

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And he was utterly depleted after this day's work. He felt weary by his own weakness, greatly depressed.

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And riding home from work in this condition, 2

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Corinthians 12 9 came to his mind. My grace is sufficient for you.

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And in a moment, Spurgeon went from, I really look forward to meeting Spurgeon by the way, just reading all about his life all the time.

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Spurgeon went from depleted and depressed to bursting with uproarious laughter.

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And why was that? Because he was filled with joy at the thought of the infinite grace of God.

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Spurgeon later wrote, he said, it seemed to make unbelief so absurd. Think about this grace that he is thinking of.

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It was as though some little fish, being very thirsty, troubled about drinking the river dry.

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The father Thames, at the Thames River in London, he said, the father

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Thames said, drink away little fish. My stream is sufficient for thee. He said again,

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I imagine a man away up yonder in a lofty mountain saying to himself,

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I breathe so many cubic feet of air. I fear I shall exhaust the oxygen in the atmosphere.

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But the earth might say, breathe away, oh man, and fill thy lungs ever.

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My atmosphere is sufficient for thee. Such is the grace of God for us.

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And Spurgeon goes on, he says, oh brethren, be great believers. Little faith will bring your souls to heaven, but great faith will bring heaven to your souls.

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And how our souls would be filled with heaven today, if we could but understand the immeasurable, the matchless quality of God's grace, not for the righteous, but for sinners, for the condemned, for us.

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But Paul goes on, not only are we saved by grace, but verse 8, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.

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So God's grace comes to save the condemned, but we see too that by God's grace, the

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Christian is saved through a gifted faith. Isn't that an interesting phrase, through a gifted faith?

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Believer, God is exceedingly pleased to save condemned sinners by his grace.

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But we must understand that such saving work is accomplished through instrumental means.

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It is not enough to rely on the graciousness of God, as some do, and say,

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I don't need to repent of my sins, I don't need to believe in Jesus Christ.

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Well, why not? Because God is a gracious God, and he is in the business of saving, and don't you know, he's in the business of saving me too, because of that graciousness.

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But no, Paul is very clear in addressing this, in addressing those who might come to this conclusion in error.

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By grace, sinners are saved, but only through faith, and of course this is faith in Jesus Christ.

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This is the gospel that Paul preached at every turn of his ministry. This is the gospel that was part of Paul's very identity, that he lived by faith alone in Christ alone.

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And if you're sitting here and wondering, how can I be certain that God has saved me from condemnation by his grace?

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Maybe there's some of you who say, I don't know. I've been listening to the preaching all these months, all these years,

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I don't know if I am truly a partaker in that grace of God.

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Brother and sister, friend, you can be certain if you have placed your faith in his son,

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Jesus Christ. Our brother read from Romans chapter 3, not going to read it all again, but Romans 3 21, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.

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The righteousness of God, through what? Through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

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For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom

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God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

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The only way that we can be declared righteous, the only way that we can be right before a holy

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God, is coming to him on his terms. And those terms are faith, repentance toward God, and faith in Jesus Christ alone.

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If we are to be saved, we must first believe. And this faith has many constituent parts.

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First, we must see our own sinfulness. One of my prayers, some people might think this is a morbid prayer, why would you pray such a thing?

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But one of my prayers for my children, and for all of the lost people in my life, is that God the

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Holy Spirit would haunt them with a sense of their own sinfulness.

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That they would know to the very depths of their being, that they are rotten to the core.

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Now why would I pray such a prayer for my children, and for the people whom I love? Because it is true, first of all.

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Not praying for them to realize something that is not true. But also, because if they are to reach out, and to seek, and to receive the greatest care possible from the

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Great Physician of their souls, they must first know that they are sick. They must first know that they are ill.

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That they have a malady that they themselves cannot heal. But saving faith includes more than that.

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Saving faith will also recognize this sinfulness starkly contrasted with a holy

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God. Before the Lord made atonement for Isaiah's sins, in Isaiah chapter 6, you might remember that the angel touched his lips with the burning coal.

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Before he could have his sins atoned for, in Isaiah 6 and verse 7, he had to have an

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Isaiah 6 and verse 5 moment where he said, woe is me.

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I am a man, or sorry, I am lost. I am a man of unclean lips, and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

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For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. If you don't know if you're a believer, ask yourselves, have

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I been convicted of that sin? Children, adults, everyone in this room.

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Have I been convicted of that sin, and in light of that conviction of sin, have

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I seen that God is a good and holy God, and I realize that I cannot suffice as my own

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Savior. And then saving faith must be awakened to the object of that faith.

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There are some people who think that because they feel rotten for their sins, they are saved.

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That is not the definition of a Christian. But the definition of a Christian is one who has sensed this rottenness of sin, and then has set their gaze upon the object, the saving object of that sin.

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And that saving object is only ever Jesus Christ. We should always find it odd when someone shares their testimony, and it ends with these words, and so I believed in God.

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Saving faith does not merely believe in God. Saving faith lays hold of Jesus Christ as the only

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Savior of the world, the Son of God. That's why

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Paul did not tell the Philippian jailer as he prepared to take his own life, and then said, what must

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I do to be saved? He didn't say, you just need to believe in God. But what did he say?

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Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.

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Saving faith isn't faith in a distant, vague, divine being. It isn't even a generic faith in the

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God of the Bible as its sole object. But saving faith sees

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Christ on the cross, and sees him as the only acceptable sacrifice for sins, making vicarious satisfaction on the sinner's behalf.

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Saving faith sees Christ raised from the dead, conquering death and the seated at the right hand of the throne of God, ever living to make intercession for us.

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And any man, or woman, or child who truly is saved is one who looks to Jesus Christ by faith, assured that he must be their only

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Savior. You don't realize how hard I had to work in this sermon not to make it just about sola gratia and sola fide.

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You know I love the Reformation, but I will quote one Reformer. Calvin said, sounding like the

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Reformer that he was, the act of receiving salvation is made to consist in faith alone.

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There it is, faith alone, sola fide. Faith then brings a man.

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Well how does it bring a man? It brings a man empty to God, that he might be filled with the blessings of Christ.

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John Bunyan. Don't you love that the vivid word pictures that John Bunyan can write.

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He said in his book, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. We should have a copy in our book table when it comes,

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PJ. He said, I am for going on and venturing my eternal state with Christ.

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Picture this with me for a moment. Climb a ladder with a blindfold on and picture this with me. I will leap off the ladder, even blindfolded, into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell,

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Lord Jesus, if thou will catch me, do. If not,

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I will venture it all for thy name. That is saving faith.

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Not to have one foot on the ladder and one foot on your own works, but both feet on the ladder, walking by faith and not by sight and casting yourselves off the ladder and on to Christ and finding him there, catching you, bearing you up in his righteous arms, bringing that saving grace through faith to your souls also.

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To have faith is to venture all on Christ. Dear friends, have you ventured all on Christ?

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If you have, you can rest assured knowing that you are most assuredly saved.

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And if you have not, if you're saying this language is alien to me, then

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I implore you now, even as you sit in your seats, to come off that seat and venture all for Christ.

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To say you are the only Savior of the world. I have never treated you as such, but you are, and so you shall be treated as such, and so I shall be saved also.

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Now the astute student of God's Word might ask, if we are saved by grace and yet through faith, does that mean that we are saved then by our choosing him?

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That we somehow contribute to such a salvation? And if so, do we get any of the credit for it?

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And this is where grace is made visible again in this part of verse 8. Here Paul shows us that all that God requires, he provides.

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All that God commands, he empowers. Paul says, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.

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Now for those of you who have quoted this verse, and have quoted it, shall

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I say, in a Calvinistic fashion, maybe you've wondered, I hope

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I'm quoting this right, that faith itself is a gift. Is that what we're talking about? That faith is the gift, right?

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Or is it salvation that is the gift? Now this is where the debate rages on.

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But much of the debate, as we looked at in the last point, is centered on the grammar of the passage.

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Don't you love it when I come up with another grammar lesson? But there's an important point, a deathly and earnestly important point to be made here from the grammar.

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I'm not going to turn every stone, but I'm going to give you a concise summary because that's what you want. When Paul says, this is not of yourselves.

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This is not of yourselves. It is a gift of God. He's using a common technique that was used in the

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Greek language, whereby an author takes, big word here, a demonstrative pronoun, that word this, to capture multiple concepts.

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It is like a sweeping net capturing all of the concepts therein. And what

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Paul is conveying, if you've been quoting this to speak to how faith comes from God and not from man, you'll be very pleased that all of these things collectively and individually are a gift from God.

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Meaning that God's grace is a gift. You can say I'm saved by grace and it is a gift of God.

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You can say I am saved and it is a gift of God. And you can say

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I have faith. Why? Because it was a gift of God.

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S. M. Bowe, who has written what is largely recognized as the definitive technical commentary on Ephesians, says this, humans contribute nothing of their own salvation, since even believing is a divine gift.

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It runs counter to Ephesians 2 and verses 1 to 10, to propose that humans acquire the benefits of election by believing.

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How? He asks and then he answers. It is a gift to those who are by nature dead and must therefore first be enlivened in their mediator before exercising their faith and enjoying its benefits.

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And this is hardly a novel interpretation that faith is a gift from God. Origen. Origen and Jerome wrote a together on Ephesians.

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Now they're separated by time, but Origen, he lived, he was born just just over a century after Paul wrote these words.

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He spoke Koine Greek. He was a Greek scholar. Educated in Greek, that was his language.

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And his interpretation of this passage reads like this. This faith itself is not from yourselves, but it is from him who called you.

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Faith itself is not of our own will, but it is the gift of God. The very freedom of the will has

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God as its author. And all things are referred to his benefaction, since it is he himself who permits us even to will good.

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Like I said last week, so I shall say again, this is not a Calvinistic doctrine, but this is a

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Pauline doctrine and a biblical one. Even scripture itself, Philippians 129 says, for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ, granted to you, that for the sake of Christ, you should not only believe, but suffer for his sake.

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Even faith is granted by God. So God saves condemned sinners by his grace.

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He gifts faith to his elect by his grace. And now in verse 9, we see that by God's grace, the

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Christian is saved from futile works. In verse 9, not a result of works so that no one may boast.

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He doesn't just say not a result of good works, but not a result of works as in all works.

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This demonstrates the graciousness of the gospel. That there is not one thing under heaven that you can rely on to be saved.

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Save the grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And this has always been

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God's MO, his modus operandi. It's been pointed out that God redeemed

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Israel from slavery in Exodus chapter 12, long before he gave them a command, a work to do in Exodus chapter 20.

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This is what God does. He saves, he rescues, he heals, he restores, he redeems the helpless even before he gives them a work to do.

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Romans 11, 6, but if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works.

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Otherwise, grace would no longer be grace. In order for us to be saved, sola gratia, solely by grace, it must be all together apart from works.

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And so I ask you, brethren, why do you keep thinking as if it is dependent on your works?

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Why is it that you wake up in the morning and have some form of difficulty that day or the day prior and think, well certainly it was by grace, it was by faith, but now it is by works.

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It never has. Since the days of Israel, it was not in the days of Christ, and it will never be by works.

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But we have been freed from working for our salvation. We have been freed from working to maintain our salvation.

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And brethren, then we should live as free men and free women in Christ.

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I'll get to good works in my next point, but we need to do away with this fallacy, this idea that the

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Lord loves us more when we obey and loves us less when we don't obey. That Christ has saved us to the uttermost.

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He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. The Lord knows that you are being sanctified, and yet he has still perfected you for all time.

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I heard a story about a man who yearned to come to a revival meeting that was happening in his city.

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We don't have revival meetings anymore. Out by Nicole's parents' farm, my wife's parents' farm, they have an annual tent revival meeting, or at least they did for a number of years.

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They build a tent, they set up the tent, they invite the people, and I think the premise is so long as the tent is there and the people are there, the revival will be there.

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I'm not sure how that works. Now, this man showed up to a revival meeting, and because of some circumstances beyond his control, he found himself running late, very late.

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If he was married, his wife was in the passenger seat saying, we're late! Now, when he arrived at this revival meeting, much to his own dismay, he found that it was empty.

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Only a few workers were there cleaning up and tearing down the tent. And frantic at the thought that he had missed the evangelist who was speaking at that meeting, he asked one of the remaining workers, he said, what can

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I do to be saved? And one of the workers, perhaps in a cheeky fashion, and being a

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Christian, he said, there is absolutely nothing you can do to be saved.

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You're too late! And the man said, what do you mean? How can I be too late?

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And the worker said, all the work has already been accomplished. There's nothing left for you to do but believe.

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And why does the Lord do that? For one, our salvation would never be secure apart from that.

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Our Lord is too high, too holy, we too sinful. But also, verse 9 says, so that no one may boast.

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The Ephesians well understood the kind of boasting that Paul was speaking to. One historian sees this statement of Paul and they draw a direct line from Paul's statement on boasting to one of the more important buildings in Ephesus.

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It was a boastful society. On one such example, and well maybe

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I'll frame it this way, oftentimes what people would do is they would own their buildings, maybe it was in downtown

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Ephesus, and they would do a good work, they would do a good deed, they would make a donation to the

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Ephesus Rotary Club. And then they would take a record of that donation and they would paste it to the side of their building.

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So that everyone walking by would say, boy that man Lowell, he sure is a kind man donating to the

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Rotary Club. I'm really glad he put it on the wall so that I could praise him for it. And there was one such example of a man who, his name was, where is it,

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Vedius. Vedius Antoninus. Again another name, this is my son

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Vedius. He owned a building in town and did some great act of generosity for the city.

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But the people of the city did not, as they walked by his building, did not pay him due honor.

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And so what did he do? Somehow he managed to bring it to the attention of the Roman emperor

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Antoninus Pius. And he heard of this failure on the people's part and he wrote a letter to all the citizens of the city, chastising them for failing to properly honor

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Vedius. Now if you were Vedius, what would you do? Maybe you would paste that to the side of your wall.

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Maybe you'd make photocopies of it and have it sent out to all of the citizens of Ephesus.

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But no, that wasn't enough. Instead he had the rebuke chiseled into the side of his building, into the exterior wall of this prominent building in Ephesus, for every citizen to pass by and read.

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And in his quest for self aggrandizement, it was so significant that the message was so immortalized that people have dug that up 2 ,000 years later.

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And now we know the story of Vedius Antoninus. But with such boasting limited to only that generation?

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Absolutely not. We see this all over the city, don't we? Go to the University of Alberta and you will know the names of all the big donors, because they have buildings named after them.

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And the Lord would save us from such boasting. And we should, as we look at how man is not saved by works and how the

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Lord would keep us from proud and arrogant and lost boasting, we ought to look at our lost neighbors.

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Not as our enemies, but as those who have been deceived by the enemy.

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That every other system of grace that I mentioned at the introduction, that comes through, apparently anyways, works is one that comes only through futile works.

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And the one who masquerades as an angel of light would have it that he would grind those people's bones into the dust, working that they might earn that grace.

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And brethren, because salvation is not of works, but of grace.

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Not of works, but of grace. I'll repeat it twice. We ought to go to those people whose bones are being ground into dust and to proclaim the gospel of God's grace.

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I think sometimes, I know I can be this way as well, you encounter a Jehovah's Witness on the sidewalk and you think,

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I remember learning some concepts in Greek, and then we found ourselves in Arizona, and I said to myself, the knowledge of some of this

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Greek grammar, I could cream you with this. Demonstrate to you just how untrue your beliefs are.

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But brethren, rather than coming at those people with that mindset, let us see them standing by their board with their literature and say,

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I have a gospel of God's grace to share with you. We see

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Paul's heart towards the Jews. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

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For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own by works.

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They did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

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For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.

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Brethren, our salvation is not of works. Let us rejoice in that, and then let us take this gospel to those who still think it is.

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And then the last truth I want to bring out here. By God's grace, the Christian is saved to walk anew.

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Verse 10, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

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There's almost a bit of a chiastic structure here. In Ephesians 2 and verse 2, in which you once walked in your deadness, in your trespasses of sins, following the course of this world.

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And now we see in verse 10 that we've been freed to walk anew, not as dead men, but as men and women who love righteousness, who love to do good deeds.

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Grace not only saves us from an ungodly life, but it empowers us to live a new

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God -honoring life in Christ. There's a wordplay that Paul uses here, he says, we are

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God's work created for good works, that we would walk in them.

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It has been said that salvation is creation, and then recreation, and now new creation.

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And we have been created anew for an excellent purpose. And though we were not saved by works, we have now been saved to good works.

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Paul talks about this in Romans 6 and verse 4, we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death.

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Just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father, we too might walk, walk in newness of life.

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Not stand in newness of life, not sit in newness of life, but walk in newness of life, which

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God prepared beforehand. That even our good works following our redemption are a gift, are a grace of God.

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Beforehand, in case we didn't get the memo, Paul stresses that it is

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God who determined to include us in his redemptive plan from before the foundation of the world.

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One writer notes, we should not, however, skip over the fact that earlier Paul had focused on his audience as having been predestined, elected, and redeemed.

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But here the outcome and the effect of that redemption in their life is grateful service of God, which

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God has prepared for them in all of our rejoicing. And we love to rejoice in it, of God's divine, electing, predestinating work.

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Let us not miss the fact that he has not only predestined us for adoption as sons and daughters, he's not only predestined us for an eternal salvation, but he has predestined us for good works in Christ.

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And any understanding, any right understanding of predestination, of his choosing us, without acknowledging his predestinating us, his choosing us for good works, is a truncated doctrine of predestination.

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Israel missed this when they were chosen. They were chosen to be the light, light to the nations.

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They were chosen to demonstrate the manifold wisdom of God, and yet they focused on the blessings a little bit more than the calling to demonstrate those things.

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Salvation can never be obtained through good works, yet true salvation will always produce good works.

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Second Corinthians 9 .8, and God is able to make all grace abound to you.

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Second Corinthians 9 .8, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all time, you may abound in good work, in every good work.

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This is why grace has come to us. Charles Hodge says, holiness is the end of our redemption.

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And so brethren, let us take hold of this grace of God that saves us, that saves us from condemnation, that saves us from even attempting to believe apart from the power of God, that saves us from futile works, and that saves us to good works.

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We should have our heads on a swivel as Christians, looking for every opportunity to do good in the name of Christ, that God would be honored.

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Holiness is the end of our redemption. So I'll conclude with these thoughts.

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I ask you the question, what is grace? Hopefully by now you know.

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You can go past that kingdom hall next week and find someone on the road and say, do you know what the grace of God is?

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There was a publication called the Southwest Presbyterian and they had an article that was featured in their 1869 edition.

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It was the story of a man who lived an utterly depraved life. He was a man who seemed by many to have somehow eluded the common grace of God.

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He was a broken man, one who in his coming and going through the city, his own appearance cried out before him, unclean, unclean,

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I am a man who is unclean. And one day this man's hard lifestyle caught up to him and he found himself on the verge of death.

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And being on his deathbed, one of his old schoolmates decided to go visit him. And the friend arrived and said, it grieves me to the heart to find you thus.

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And the old man replied, we've not met for 20 years. If you had waited a few weeks longer, you must have searched for me in the graveyard.

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And the friend remarked, I prayed the Lord to make me wise to win a soul.

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Wouldn't we pray that same prayer? He said, do not be angry with me. I will tell you what distresses me.

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You are halfway to eternity and unready to die. And the old man replied, it is no use to talk to me on the subject of religion.

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I'm a doomed man, as sure of hell as if already shut up in its vault of fire.

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I am a drunkard and no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God. The old man continued, you do not know what kind of drunkard

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I am. I carry my jug to bed with me. It takes the place of my wife.

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And I pull from it so often that it can scarcely be said to be corked at all.

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If I could only break the bonds of this cruel habit, there might be hope for me.

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But I have tried a thousand times in vain. I am bound hand and foot with its accursed chains, and there is nothing left for me but to drink and be damned.

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And his friend replied, but sir, what you need is a savior.

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You need a savior who will save you from all your drunkenness. He shall be called

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Jesus, and he shall save his people from their sins.

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You must come to Jesus as a drunkard, or not at all.

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And the old man and his friend bowed in prayer. And a little excerpt from this article reads that the man's poor emaciated body shook with sobs as though it would fall to pieces with the violence with which it was wracked.

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A few days later, the friend returned and found the old man in a completely different state.

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The man said, when you went away, I prayed that the Lord would have mercy on my soul.

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And all at once, the shackles fell off of me, and I have been full of peace and joy ever since.

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As it turns out, the Lord saved that poor wretched man by his grace, not only from his condemnation, but from his bondage to sin, even his bondage to the sin that he had tried to give up a thousand times more.

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And then this is the precious part, dear brothers and sisters, listen to this. The old man said,

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I am a very ignorant man. It has been many years since I've been in the walls of a church, and I've forgotten everything that my pious mother taught me.

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But I want to tell you what I think the gospel is. And the man declared,

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I think that we are all born in this world with wicked hearts, that we are guilty and condemned from our birth, that Jesus Christ has come into the world to save us, if we will only trust entirely ourselves to him.

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But that he won't be a half savior to anybody. I must not do the best that I can and then come to complete what remains.

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But I must come at once, just so, and let him do the whole work from beginning to end.

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He will be a whole savior, or he will be none at all.

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And then the old man looked at his friend and he said, is that the gospel? And the friend grasping that man's hand said, choking back sobs, he said, if you had been a doctor of divinity for 50 years, you could not have put it better.

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And then kneeling down, they gave thanks to God for his grace. That is the grace of God.

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Let us give thanks now for that grace. Thank you for listening to another sermon from Grace Fellowship Church.

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If you would like to keep up with us, you can find us at Facebook at Grace Fellowship Church, or our

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Instagram at Grace Church, Y -E -G, all one word. Finally, you can visit us at our website, graceedmonton .ca.