What is Grace?

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.

The World’s Counterfeit Definitions of Grace

As we begin this afternoon, I want to pose this question to you. What is grace? What is grace? As Christians, this is often a word that is thrown around. We speak about the grace of God. We sing amazing grace.

Some of us, or maybe some others, sit down for dinner and speak of saying grace to give thanks for the meal. We wax eloquent about the doctrines of grace. Even our church is Grace Fellowship Church. But what is grace?

Yesterday afternoon, as I was ruminating on Ephesians 2 and verses 8 through 10, my son 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 Kingdom Hall, where the Jehovah's Witnesses met earlier today to expound upon their own version of Jehovah's grace.

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. 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.

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

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

Mormon grace is a stepping stool between man's best efforts and God's lofty demands. In the Book of Mormon, again, not that I want to quote it often, but in 2 Nephi 25, it says,. For we labor diligently to write to persuade our children and also our brethren to believe in Christ and to be reconciled to God, listen to this, for we know that it is by grace that we are saved after all that we can do.

And so for Mormons, grace comes to those whom God finds working to earn salvation. Now I've started, maybe you can see here, I've started with the Mormons, and now we're going to, or sorry, the Muslims, and then the Mormons will come just a little bit closer to home and find the Roman Catholics, our 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.

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.

Now that sounds almost right, but is that what grace truly is? Is it a divine jumpstart to help us to earn eternal life and to become God's children? And if you think I'm misrepresenting the Catholic position, Catholic Answers, catholic .com, one of the most prominent Catholic apologetics organizations in the world, they write this, they say, actual grace is a supernatural kick in the pants.

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

Now this is how the world defines grace. It is a reward for faith and good works. Grace comes to those who try really, really, really hard. And it is a cosmic whip to get people living their best life.

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

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

And the stakes are unthinkably high. When I use battle language, some people might think, well Shane isn't that a bit militant, a bit controversial. Let me reframe it a bit. We are in a battle against a false idea, a false gospel, a false grace that is at this very moment damning our neighbors.

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

Just yesterday I was watching a video on Russell Brand, who is adopting some kind of Catholic views. And as I was watching that, another suggested video came up about Candace Owens, who has apparently converted to Roman Catholicism as well.

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

How would you define grace? 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? Or are you a spiritual novice, a sitting duck, unable to defend even one of the central concepts of the Christian faith, this concept that is grace?

I fear that many professing Christians today are such spiritual novices. They think they know what grace is. 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.

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, 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.

Grace Saves the Condemned

In this passage, we find Paul building upon what he has just said in verses 1 -7. 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 ESV, it is between two dashes.

He says, by grace you have been saved. And here now Paul is going to offer, as it were, an exposition of this parenthetical thought in verses 8 -10. And with the understanding that this concept of grace is vitally important, Paul is going to spend verses 8 -10 expounding upon this theme of God's grace.

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

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

By God's grace, the 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. 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.

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

Now does verse 8 teach this? In terms of a historical context, 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.

And this is because the concept of salvation and that of a savior was baked right into the architecture of the city. You see, a century before Paul wrote this letter to the Ephesians, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar came to the aid of the 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. Not even once, but twice. And on the first occasion what happened, about 60 years before Christ, was a powerful 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.

And Scipio's aim was to steal everything of value in Ephesus, even their gods. And in the process, the city of Ephesus itself would be brought to complete economic and spiritual ruin. 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. Julius Caesar felt really good about himself being the savior of Ephesus in that moment.

And I'll show you why I know that in a moment. But then on a second occasion, a man named Ampius Balbus, gotta love these names, this is our newborn Ampius, sought to rob the city of its treasure, apparently to fund Pompey's war against Rome.

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

We know this because when the looming shadow of death hung over them, 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.

And on that statue, read this. These are the words of a man, mind you. He said, The cities of Asia, along with the citizen bodies and the nations, honor Gaius Julius Caesar. He's speaking on their behalf.

These people, they honor me. A son of Gaius, and here he describes himself, the high priest, imperator or emperor, and twice consul, the manifest God from Ares and Aphrodite, and universal savior of human life.

That is what Julius Caesar thought of himself, the manifest God and the universal savior of human life. He was a humble man, wasn't he? But nevertheless, the Ephesians knew, at least conceptually, what it meant to be helpless, to be as good as dead, and then to have a savior appear.

And in this historical context, Paul writes that there is a God who is truly God, who has come to eternally save those who are helpless and lost and without hope in this world. Now, this is the cultural context that Paul is writing to, but there is a grammatical context that I want us to look at as well.

We're doing grammatical historical interpretation. Paul tells us that by grace, they have been saved. Now, first of all, Paul uses a Greek verb, this word, to be saved, and it is a significant one. 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.

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

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

I want you to imagine for a moment that we live in a destitute city in the middle of the Sahara Desert. We have no access to water, no access to the very liquid that we need to bring us life. 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. And he builds that wall at his own expense.

And we can contribute nothing to it at all. All we can do is gaze upon this well that he alone has built. And we don't have to add to the well. 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. This is the kind of saving that Paul is speaking about with this grammar. Passive and perfect. The kind of saving that Hebrews 7 .25 speaks of, that he saved us.

Christ has saved us to the uttermost. And when God delivered the saving work to us, when he built this perpetual well, Paul tells us he did it by grace. Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. What does it mean that the Lord has done this by grace?

If you were to look in a Bible dictionary, grace is typically defined in three words. God's undeserved favor. You can remember that. That's a good short form definition of grace. 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. This grace in Ephesians chapter 2 is used to refer to something far more than God's undeserved favor.

But it is used to refer to those who were once dead in trespasses and sins. 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 God's favor granted to those who deserve wrath.

It is not undeserved favor as if the people whom 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. Grace doesn't just save the undeserving, brothers and sisters.

Grace saves the condemned. So perhaps a better definition, if the Mormons or the JWs or a dear 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 Bible.

You could say, grace is God's immense and undeserved favor freely given to the helpless and woefully undeserving. Grace is God's immense and undeserving favor freely given to the helpless and woefully undeserving, the condemned.

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? 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 Muslims suppose, nor does he save us because we have almost earned it, that close as the 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. 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. It is a grace that we, in spite of ourselves, can never exhaust.

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

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

Just those opening words in verse 9. My grace is sufficient for you. Do you know what that means? It means that we can never exhaust God's grace for us. That dear brother, God's grace is sufficient for you.

That dear sister, God's grace is sufficient for you. That even you are not beyond God's all-sufficient, all-encompassing, matchless grace, saving grace. There's a story that Spurgeon once told. He was riding home after a long day's work.

And if you know anything about Spurgeon, you know that he was a man who was given to melancholy and to depression. And he was utterly depleted after this day's work. He felt weary by his own weakness, greatly depressed.

And riding home from work in this condition, 2 Corinthians 12, 9 came to his mind. My grace is sufficient for you. 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.

Spurgeon went from depleted and depressed to bursting with uproarious laughter. And why was that? Because he was filled with joy at the thought of the infinite grace of God. Spurgeon later wrote, he said, it seemed to make unbelief so absurd.

Think about this grace that he is thinking of. It was as though some little fish, being very thirsty, troubled about drinking the river dry. The father Tams, the Tams River in London, he said, the father Tams said, drink away little fish, my stream is sufficient for thee.

He said again, I imagine a man a way up yonder in a lofty mountain saying to himself, I breathe so many cubic feet of air, I fear I shall exhaust the oxygen in the atmosphere. But the earth might say, breathe away, oh man, and fill thy lungs ever, my atmosphere is sufficient for thee.

Such is the grace of God for us. 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. 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.

Grace Comes Through a Gifted Faith

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

But we see too that by God's grace, the Christian is saved through a gifted faith. Isn't that an interesting phrase, through a gifted faith? Believer, God is exceedingly pleased to save condemned sinners by his grace.

But we must understand that such saving work is accomplished through instrumental means. It is not enough to rely on the graciousness of God, as some do, and say, I don't need to repent of my sins. I don't need to believe in Jesus Christ.

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

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

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

I don't know if I am truly a partaker in that grace of God. Brother and sister, friend, you can be certain if you have placed your faith in his son, Jesus Christ. Our brother read from Romans chapter 3.

I'm 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. The righteousness of God through what?

Through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. 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 God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

The only way that we can be declared righteous, the only way that we can be right before a holy God is coming to him on his terms. And those terms are faith, repentance toward God, and faith in Jesus Christ alone.

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

But one of my prayers for my children and for all of the lost people in my life is that God, the Holy Spirit, would haunt them with a sense of their own sinfulness. That they would know to the very depths of their being that they are rotten to the core.

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, 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 great physician of their souls, they must first know that they are sick.

They must first know that they are ill, that they have a malady that they themselves cannot heal. But saving faith includes more than that. Saving faith will also recognize this sinfulness starkly contrasted with a holy 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. Before he could have his sins atoned for in Isaiah 6 and verse 7, he had to have an Isaiah 6 and verse 5 moment where he said, Woe is me!

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, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. If you don't know if you're a believer, ask yourselves, have I been convicted of that sin?

Children, adults, everyone in this room, have I been convicted of that sin? And in light of that conviction of sin, have I seen that God is a good and holy God? And I realize that I cannot suffice as my own Savior.

And then saving faith must be awakened to the object of that faith. There are some people who think that because they feel rotten for their sins, they are saved. 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. 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. Saving faith does not merely believe in God. Saving faith lays hold of Jesus Christ as the only Savior of the world, the Son of God.

That's why Paul did not tell the Philippian jailer as he prepared to take his own life and then said, what must I do to be saved? He didn't say, you just need to believe in God. But what did he say? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.

Saving faith isn't faith in a distant, vague, divine being. It isn't even a generic faith in the God of the Bible as its sole object. But saving faith sees Christ on the cross and sees him as the only acceptable sacrifice for sins, making vicarious satisfaction on the sinner's behalf.

Saving faith sees Christ raised from the dead, conquering death and the devil, seated at the right hand of the throne of God, ever living to make intercession for us. 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 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. You know I love the Reformation, but I will quote one Reformer. Calvin said, sounding like the Reformer that he was, the act of receiving salvation is made to consist in faith alone.

There it is, faith alone, sola fide. Faith then brings a man. Well how does it bring a man? It brings a man empty to God, that he might be filled with the blessings of Christ. John Bunyan. Don't you love that the vivid word pictures that John Bunyan can write.

He said in his book, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. We should have a copy in our book table when it comes, PJ. He said, I am for going on and venturing my eternal state with Christ. 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, Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do. If not, I will venture it all for thy name.

That is saving faith. 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.

To have faith is to venture all on Christ. Dear friends, have you ventured all on Christ? If you have, you can rest assured knowing that you are most assuredly saved. And if you have not, if you're saying this language is alien to me, then I implore you now, even as you sit in your seats, to come off that seat and venture all for Christ.

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. 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?

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

All that God commands, he empowers. Paul says, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. Now for those of you who have quoted this verse and have quoted it, shall I say, in a Calvinistic fashion, maybe you've wondered, I hope I'm quoting this right, that faith itself is a gift.

Is that what we're talking about? That faith is the gift, right? Or is it salvation that is the gift? Now this is where the debate rages on. But much of the debate, as we looked at in the last point, is centered on the grammar of the passage.

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. 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, this is not of yourselves. It is a gift of God. He's using a common technique that was used in the Greek language, whereby an author takes, big word here, a demonstrative pronoun, that word this, to capture multiple concepts.

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

Meaning that God's grace is a gift. You can say, I am saved by grace, and it is a gift of God. You can say, I am saved, and it is a gift of God. And you can say, I have faith. Why? Because it was a gift of God.

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.

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

And this is hardly a novel interpretation, that faith is a gift from God. Origen. Origen and Jerome wrote a commentary together on Ephesians. Now they're separated by time, but Origen, he lived, he was born just over a century after Paul wrote these words.

He spoke Koine Greek. He was a Greek scholar, educated in Greek. That was his language. And his interpretation of this passage reads like this, this faith itself is not from yourselves, but it is from him who called you.

Faith itself is not of our own will, but it is the gift of God. The very freedom of the will has God as its author, and all things are referred to his benefaction, since it is he himself who permits us even to will good.

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

Even faith is granted by God. So God saves condemned sinners by his grace. He gifts faith to his elect by his grace. And now in verse nine, we see that by God's grace, the Christian is saved from futile works.

Grace Saves from Futile Works

In verse nine, not a result of works so that no one may boast. He doesn't just say, not a result of good works, but not a result of works as in all works. This demonstrates the graciousness of the gospel, that there is not one thing under heaven that you can rely on to be saved, save the grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

And this has always been God's MO, his modus operandi. It's been pointed out that God redeemed Israel from slavery in Exodus chapter 12, long before he gave them a command, a work to do in Exodus chapter 20.

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

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

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

But we have been freed from working for our salvation. We have been freed from working to maintain our salvation. And brethren, then we should live as free men and free women in Christ. I'll get to good works in my next point, but we need to do away with this fallacy, this idea that the Lord loves us more when we obey and loves us less when we don't obey.

That Christ has saved us to the uttermost. 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. I heard a story about a man who yearned to come to a revival meeting that was happening in his city.

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

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. 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. 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 I do to be saved?

And one of the workers, perhaps in a cheeky fashion, and being a Christian, he said, there is absolutely nothing you can do to be saved. You're too late! And the man said, what do you mean? How can I be too late?

And the worker said, all the work has already been accomplished. There's nothing left for you to do but believe. And why does the Lord do that? For one, our salvation would never be secure apart from that.