WWUTT 553 Sola Gratia?

It is by grace that you are saved through faith, and this is not your own doing.

It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.

Thank you for subscribing, and if this has ministered to you, please let others know about our program. Here once again is

Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky, and greetings everyone. It is now the day after the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation, but may it be a day that we are reminded Reformation is still needed.

Imagine going to church and never hearing the gospel. That's what was going on during the

Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church was not proclaiming the gospel, and they still do not, by the way.

As the Council of Trent Canon 9 clarifies, that anyone who believes justification by faith alone would be anathema.

They would be removed from the church and cursed. So that's still the case in Roman Catholicism.

But considering that the Roman Catholic Church was really all there was 500 years ago, to not have the gospel proclaimed at all left everyone in darkness and following heresy and false teaching.

This was what stirred the hearts of the Protestant Reformers to mount a protest against Roman Catholicism in an effort to reform the church back to its originally intended purpose and recover the gospel.

It's what makes the motto of the Protestant Reformation so significant. In Latin, post tenebras lux, which in English means after darkness, light, or as it's also been interpreted, out of darkness, light, the light of the gospel shining forth the recovery of the gospel so that those who hear it would turn from sin and be saved in the truth of the message of Jesus Christ.

By faith, we are justified, as we talked about yesterday. Well, that was during the era of the

Protestant Reformation. That was 500 years ago. Now imagine that today. Imagine going to church and never hearing the gospel.

There are now even Protestant churches that are not proclaiming the gospel in their sermons.

I have teachers that come to mind every time I mention that, but I won't go into that today.

There are times and places where that is necessary to have to bring up. But just know that there are

Christians, even in America today, even in this world that are attending churches where the gospel is not being preached or salvation by faith and works is being preached, which, by the way, is a different gospel.

And therefore, the gospel is not being proclaimed. So this is a scary situation, even within our current modern day culture, that there would be

Protestant churches that had split from the Roman Catholic Church and then started clinging back to the same

Catholic heresies again, teaching their members those things. And they are fooled into believing that what they are hearing is of God when it's really not.

So you have churches that exist today where the gospel is not being proclaimed, and it's in those churches where reformation is still needed.

Or, as Dr. John MacArthur has said, the reformation needs to be recovered. It's not that we need a new reformation, but the one that happened needs to be recovered in some of these places where the reformation has been forgotten.

Church history has been ignored. What it was that the Protestant reformers fought and died for, many of them died.

The Puritans died. I think I was watching a short video the other day talking about how 300

Puritans in those years right after the Protestant reformation, so kind of like a post -reformation era, there were 300

Puritans burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church. You had a guy like John Rogers.

So William Tyndale was killed by the Catholic Church, executed publicly for translating the

Bible into English. Well, just a few years after that, Rogers was executed for the same thing.

So these men that died, that we might be able to hear the gospel proclaimed in the church today.

And yet there are so many Protestant churches that are not even teaching the gospel anymore.

This is why we still need reformation, that we might call those churches to repentance.

And if they won't repent, that we get a hold of those people who think that they are hearing the gospel, and they're really not.

They think what's going on in their church is godly, but the gospel isn't being proclaimed. That we would grab hold of them and share with them the true gospel of Christ, that they would see the error of the church that they've been attending.

And if that church won't repent, they will leave that church and go and find a place where the gospel is loved and proclaimed.

It's Charles Spurgeon that once said, don't go where there's grand architecture and fine music and great speeches.

Go where the gospel is preached and go often. That's the kind of church that you should be looking for.

That's the kind of church that we should be a church that loves the gospel and proclaims the word of God.

So we continue this week talking about the five solos of the Protestant Reformation, those five foundational truths that were clung to by those reformers.

And we began on Monday with sola scriptura, by scripture alone, which is our sole authority in matters of all faith and practice.

And then yesterday, looking at sola fide, by faith alone, we are justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ.

And then today we're looking at sola gratia, by grace alone we are saved. Let's come back again to our root text in Romans 3, beginning in verse 21.

The apostle Paul writing, 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 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.

This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins.

It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

We have here, it's said by the apostle Paul that 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.

We are justified by his grace. What is grace? Here's a very simple definition of grace, two words that define this big theological word for us.

Our two -word definition of grace is unmerited favor. You have done nothing to earn it.

You have not done any work. You can't buy it. There is nothing that you can do to earn the grace of God.

It is given to you by God because he's great, not because you're great or you have done anything great.

It is unmerited favor. Grace is perhaps the most important doctrine in the

Christian faith. It is the element of our faith that separates us from any other kind of religion in the world because you cannot earn the favor of God.

He just gives it to you. It is unmerited favor. That's what grace is. There is nothing else like it in any other kind of religious belief because every other religion is about trying to work to achieve some kind of greatness, whether that's the favor of the

God or one of the gods that they worship in their respective religion, or it's doing something great in order to achieve something great like, you know,

Nirvana or something like that, a complete peace of mind and whatever the religion might happen to be, whatever the goal is to be attained by practicing that religion.

It's always about doing something in order to get it. But in the Christian faith, you can't do anything to get the favor of God.

He just gives it to you because he loves you, because he has shown favor to you before the foundation of the world.

I'll show you that here in Ephesians chapter one. And then we'll also go to Ephesians two, because that's one of the most grace heavy passages in the scriptures.

So let's go first to Ephesians chapter one. Haven't gone far enough yet. I'm still in Galatians Ephesians one beginning in verse three.

Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love.

He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved.

This is this is the grace of God, the unmerited favor that he showed to us even before time began.

It is by the grace of God that he gave his son to die for our sins so that our sins would be atoned for so that all who have faith in Jesus would be able to stand before God as justified.

This is all by the grace of God. And then, of course, the big grace heavy passage of scripture that I mentioned to you,

Ephesians chapter two verses one through ten. Paul says, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

So even though God had placed his love and affection on you, even before the foundation of the world, that doesn't change the fact that when you were born, you were a child of wrath, an object of God's wrath, just like the rest of mankind before you turn from your sinfulness and worship

Christ as savior. At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

Before that, when you were walking in sin and following the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, you were just like every other lost, lawless individual walking in this world following after the schemes of Satan.

We were all there. And that's what Paul is saying here. Every one of us was like that. Every single person who was born in the line of Adam, which is everybody is born physically alive, but we're spiritually dead.

And our dead spirits know only how to do dead spirit things. We do dead, dirty deeds with our dead, dirty hands.

And all we have to offer God are dead, dirty offerings. So nothing that we do before God is ever going to be good enough.

We have to be changed. We have to be washed. Our sins need to be paid for, as we talked about yesterday.

So all of us are in that condition. When we come to Christ, we are all in need of a savior.

Every single person on Earth is like that. So even when we come to Christ, we know that we did nothing great.

Nothing that we did has earned this favor in which we now stand before God. It is by the grace of God that we were given this.

We were just like everyone else in this world. So none of us can ever have any kind of air of arrogance against those who are lost to say, well, look, look how much better I am.

Look how smarter I am, because I not only believe in the natural like you do. I also believe in the supernatural, which you do not have.

And so that's what makes me so much smarter than you. None of us can ever boast in anything like that. That's what the

Corinthians were doing when Paul rebuked the Corinthians for boasting in their knowledge. You don't have any kind of knowledge that you can attribute to yourself that you just came upon one day.

And because you acquired this knowledge, somehow that makes you better than everyone else. The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

But to those who are being saved, it is the power of God. You came to understand this aspect of the knowledge of God because of the

Holy Spirit that is within you. It is the spirit of God that discerns for you spiritual things.

You don't do that on your own. God does that because of his spirit dwelling within you.

And so this this was the problem that was going on with the Corinthians. And we need to be reminded also that we've not acquired any great knowledge based on our own efforts or our own smarts.

It is because God has been gracious to us and has has shown in our hearts the truth of the message of his gospel.

It is only because he has illuminated it to us, not because we somehow enlightened ourselves.

So let us not ever be puffed up with pride to think that we're better than anybody else. For we were just like the rest of the children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

But God, verse four, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace, you have been saved. So here in these two verses, we've had the words mercy and grace used.

What's the difference? Well, grace is unmerited favor. Mercy is when what you deserve is to be punished.

But the person who has the right to punish you doesn't. OK, so let me.

This is the illustration that I gave with my church congregation when we were going through Sola Gratia.

We went through the five solos in the month of October. So here is the illustration I gave my congregation.

Mercy would be this. You point the finger at God and say, I hate you, which, again, we've all done, all of us following in the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.

We were all once there. So all of us, though we may not have verbally expressed it, pointed the finger at God and said,

I hate you. And God's response to us was, I won't destroy you. That would be mercy.

OK, grace would be we point the finger at God and say, I hate you. And God's response is,

I love you. And to show you, here's what I'm going to do. And he sends his son to die for our sins so that all who believe in him would be saved.

Romans 5 8, God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were yet sinners,

Christ died for us. That's the grace of God. So there's the difference between mercy and grace. Mercy is when we deserve to be punished, but we're not.

Grace is receiving the favor of God that we've done absolutely nothing to earn. And so here

God is rich in mercy. He did not destroy us, even though that's what we deserve. We were children of wrath like the rest of mankind, but God was merciful.

He didn't destroy us, even though all of us were in that place where we could have been wiped out and God would have been completely just to do so.

But because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace.

You have been saved. God showed favor to you, and you are in his favor now in Christ, as it says in verse six and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

In other words, we have been given grace, and there's so much more of that to come.

There is grace upon grace, as John talks about in John chapter one, for by grace and now

Ephesians 2, 8, 9 and 10 for by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing.

It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.

For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which

God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Let me give you an even a deeper theological illustration here of the grace that we are under when we are in Christ Jesus.

Okay, if you were to do a word study of grace, so let's say a systematic theological study of grace in the

Bible, Old Testament and New, here's what you would find. The word grace is mentioned in the Old Testament only four times.

And most and with the exception of a mention in Psalms, where it's given as a characteristic of God, the other three times grace is talked about as something that is being hoped for.

So it's something that would be attributed in the future by God, but has not yet been received.

That's how grace is used in the Old Testament. And the most prominent occasion of of grace is in Zechariah chapter 12, beginning in verse 10, where God says,

I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, a spirit of grace and please for mercy so that when they look on me on him whom they have pierced, which is, you know, this is prophecy concerning Christ, they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only child and we bitterly over him as one weeps over a firstborn.

Here's what God is saying through the prophet Zechariah here that I am going to pour out my spirit on them so that they would cry out for repentance and I will give it to them.

This is the grace that God is talking about here, and it is a future grace that is coming in his son,

Jesus Christ. It goes on here. I'm going to go ahead and finish reading the paragraph, verse 11.

On that day, the morning in Jerusalem will be as great as the morning for Hadad Ramon in the plain of Megiddo.

And this is basically talking about how Josiah was struck down and the people of God wept over just over the loss of King Josiah.

And and God is saying here that the weeping for Christ and the desire for repentance through Jesus Christ will be even greater than the morning that happened when

Josiah died. Verse 12. The land shall mourn each family by itself, the family of the house of David by itself and their wives by themselves, the family of the house of Nathan by itself and their wives by themselves, the family of the house of Levi by itself and their wives by themselves, the family of the

Shimeites by itself and the wives by themselves and all the families that are left each by itself and their wives by themselves.

And again, this is all very prophetic to say that this son that is coming who will be pierced and the people will weep for him is coming by way of David through his son,

Nathan. And when you go to Luke chapter three and it talks about the genealogy of Christ there, it says that he is descendant from David through his son,

Nathan. And then it says the family of Levi by his son, the Shimeites. Well, the

Levites were the priesthood. And we know from the book of Hebrews that Jesus is our great high priest.

So this is the prophecy through Zachariah talking about how grace would come from God through this son who would be pierced.

And we know that to be Jesus Christ, the righteous. This is the most prominent speaking of grace in the

Old Testament. And it concerns Christ. Again, all those mentions of grace in the Old Testament are pointing toward a future grace that we would receive in Jesus.

And then when you get to the New Testament, you might be surprised to find that the first mention of grace doesn't come until the book of John.

So the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, don't even mention grace. It's not until John chapter one.

And it's in just a single paragraph, just in a few verses. And then it's not mentioned in John again. We don't come into grace until Acts.

And then when the apostles are just pouring out theology that we would understand the grace of God that has been given in Jesus Christ, then we find it in Romans through revelation.

But let me come back to John here. John 1 verses 14 through 18. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And we have seen his glory, glory as of the son from the father, full of grace and truth.

For from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God, the only God who is at the father's side.

He has made him known. We have received grace and truth from Jesus Christ, unmerited favor from God and the truth of who he is and what he has done through his son,

Jesus Christ on our behalf. All of this has come from the son. Again, this is the gospel, and we have done nothing to deserve it, nothing to earn it.

It is by grace we are saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Let me read one more passage, one more here as we come to a close. So yesterday, as we were talking about Sola Fide, I mentioned this passage in Romans 5, and I find it necessary to read it again.

So we come to this grace of God that we have by faith. It is by faith that we have access to this grace.

That's what Romans 5, 1, and 2 is about. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, which we talked about yesterday, we have peace with God through our

Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

And we'll talk about this again tomorrow when we get to Solus Christus.

It is in Christ alone that we have been saved. It is in Christ alone we believe.

It is in Christ alone that we stand in the grace of God. Let us pray. Our Lord God, we thank you for the salvation that we have been given in Jesus Christ.

If there's nothing else that we can think of waking up this morning to thank

God for, let it begin with that, that by your grace, the life wasn't snatched right out of us as we slept the night before.

That's what we deserve. We deserve at any moment to be struck down because of our sinfulness. And yet you have shown us favor through your son,

Jesus Christ, that you would give your son to die for our sins so that we would be presented before you as righteous, so that we would have an inheritance in our future heavenly kingdom, that we are even now a part of all those who are in Christ Jesus, all these wonderful blessings that have been given to us by the son, because you are a gracious God, because you have loved us so much to send your son to die for our sins, that all who believe in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

And because we have this grace, let us speak of this grace to the world, to a world that is graceless, that is dark and grim, that is dying and perishing, that is walking as sons of disobedience and under the wrath of God.

May they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed and turn from their sin and live and give them hearts to hear, ears to hear, eyes to see the things that would be spoken to them according to the word of God.

Thank you that we were so shown this grace that we might hear the word of God proclaimed and understand it, and let it fill us up with joy as we go throughout our day.

We praise the great name of Jesus, amen. Gabriel Hughes is the pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas.