Faithful Grace

  • David Fairchild
  • Mar 21, 2010
  • Series: Ephesians

When Madison was about two or three years old we started playing a game that lasted for a few years. We owned a two story home and when she was little I would get down a couple of steps from the top and hold my arms out and tell Madison to jump. The first couple of times it took quite of bit of convincing that I wouldn’t drop her, and the first few times she more leaned forward and fell into my hands than actually jumped.

 Needless to say, Grace didn’t like this game very much, but we loved it. As Madison grew I would take another step or two down the stairs and call her to jump. Each time the distance grew by a couple of steps she would, at first, become nervous and unsure, but eventually the desire to jump off the top of the stairs got the best of her and she would leap. It got to the point where I was a step or two from the bottom of the first flight of stairs and she was getting bigger, so the stakes were higher and the consequences of my failure to catch her were getting bigger. But, at this point she trusted that I was strong enough because she had done it so many times that she knew that I would catch her. Now, my daughter doesn’t like pain. She’s not a Tom-boy, in fact she’s quite girly. So to see her leap off the steps into my arms was a pretty brave thing for her. Of course if we tried this now, the results would be a bit different for both of us and I think her assurance that I would catch her would be gone!

 Unlike my daughter, I was a stuntman when I was a little boy. I was a regular visitor to the ER and had more casts on my body than I care to admit. When my parents separated, I moved back to Iowa with my mom. She worked a lot and there wasn’t much to do in Iowa except jump off stuff. So, one day I was watching an old war movie and saw men jumping out of airplanes. I immediately grabbed my plastic gun, a potato sack and climbed on the roof. I was about six, already bruised up from falling out of a tree a couple days prior, and I had my potato sack open as I leapt from the roof into the yard. I was expecting the sack to act as a parachute and slowly bring me down. That didn’t happen. Instead, I fell like a rock. I wrote a mental note to myself that potato sacks can’t be trusted. About two weeks later, after watching Mary Poppins, I intelligently grabbed our big family umbrella and decided to take a leap off our concrete steps in front of our house. The umbrella turned inside out and I did a lip skid down the steps. Another note to self: “Mary Poppins and umbrellas are evil!”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last time I attempted stupid stunts. You could say the rest of my life, until Christ, was one long period of stunts until I realized that potato sacks, umbrellas, bikes, motorcycles, cars, girls, friends, family and money didn’t have the ability to catch me when I fell.

 For some of you this morning, security or assurance is hard to come by. You know what it’s like to fail and to have others fail you. You know what it’s like to live with the nagging question, “How can I be sure I’m God’s child?” The problem with being so willing and daring to try out a variety of other arms to jump into is that you begin to realize how weak they are to bear up the insecurity of your life.

How may times have you been promised by someone that they’ll never leave you and always love you, only for them to split when times got tough? Every lover that promises this is only thinking wishfully. They don’t have the power or moral perfection to guarantee such a thing. Paul wants us to realize there is only one lover who can say with eternal honesty, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

 Oh, but what a promise this is! Listen to what Paul says about what we’ve been given that can never be taken away.

 

Ephesians 1:13-14: “In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.”

 Let me explain what Paul’s getting at here. He’s saying that the God who loved you before time and proved that love by shedding His own blood, is the same God who will make sure that everything He promised you can never be taken from you.

 This God is fully invested in making sure that everything He planned and promises will most definitely come to pass.

 Look at how Paul teaches us about salvation from the perspective of the Trinity.

 

Triune Salvation

 In verses 2-6, Paul speaks to us about God the Father who planned our salvation by His good pleasure and will. This Father was the one who decided and ordained what would come to pass so that we would be His.

 In verses 7-12, Paul speaks about Jesus, who came to accomplish the Father’s plan by offering Himself up as a sacrifice to God as our substitute so that God could be merciful and still remain Holy and just.

And now in verses 13-14, Paul shows us the role of the promised Spirit that would come and seal us to guarantee that everything Jesus accomplished for His Father is applied to us.

 That is the Triune God at work in saving us: the Father plans, the Son accomplishes and the Spirit applies. Or, as Shai Linne says, “The Father chooses them; the Son gets bruised for them; the Spirit renews them and produces fruit in them.”

 The Spirit of God is the focus of these two verses. It’s no wonder, the role of the Holy Spirit is not only to gift us repentance and faith, but to remind and grow us in our assurance that God is good on His promises.

 In fact, Paul says that we were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit and the Spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance until we fully receive it.

 What does Paul mean by it being the “promised Holy Spirit”?

 

The Promised Holy Spirit

The promise of the Spirit was not only given by Jesus to His disciples, this promise has its roots all the way back to the Old Testament as God’s people looked forward to the coming of the Spirit that would live in His people.

 Isaiah 44:3-4: “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants. 4 They shall spring up among the grass like willows by flowing streams.”

 Ezekiel 11:19: “And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh”

 Just as the Spirit hovered over the dark waters at creation waiting for the Father to call life by His word, and just as the Spirit was breathed into Adam and Eve when God made them live, just as the Spirit made the valley of dry bones come to life in Ezekiel, and just as the Spirit came in power to raise Christ from the dead and breathe life into the Church at Pentecost, so the Spirit is given to everyone who has trusted in Christ.

 It’s a gift of presence, not simply power. God dwells in His people. We are now the temple of the living God, not a building in Israel. I believe one of the reasons we struggle with assurance is because we aren’t aware of what we have.

 Much of our growth as followers of Jesus doesn’t come from acquiring more and more information, but through believing and treasuring more deeply what we already know and have. It’s when it becomes fresh to us that we’re stunned.

There is a great scene in the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings where Frodo is speared only to be spared by a Mithril shirt.  If you've read the book, you know that Mithril was a precious metal that was lighter yet stronger than steel, it didn't tarnish, and was extremely valuable.  Frodo was given this Mithril shirt by Bilbo, his uncle, and wore it like a bulletproof vest for protection. But he wasn’t amazed by its importance or value.  There is a chapter in one of the books when Frodo was walking with his friends and one of them begins talking about the Mithril coat and says something like, "You know Bilbo was a very rich man, but even with all his wealth he had something that was far more valuable than anything else he owned, it was a shirt made out of Mithril."  Another of the companions says, "A shirt of Mithril!  Do you know what that's worth?  That would be worth far more than all the land in his entire country."  Mithril was 100 times stronger and lighter than steel, and far more valuable than gold.  Frodo then grabs his side and feels Mithril shirt under his cloak.  In that moment he became staggered that he possessed something of far greater worth and power than his entire country. 

 If you've heard and believed the Gospel, you are someone who is walking around under your flesh with something of far greater value and power than the entire world. You have been given the promised Spirit.  Do you know what you have?  Do you have any idea how valuable God’s indwelling Spirit is?

 This promised Spirit seals us and guarantees our inheritance.

 

Sealed with the Spirit

 You were stamped and marked with this seal of the Spirit. A seal is the signet ring of the King that would be stamped into soft wax and placed over the document or letter demonstrating kingly authorship and authority. The seal is given to prove the item is the real thing and not a forgery. The Holy Spirit is at work letting you know that the Father loves you, not because of your value, but because of His seal. You’ve literally been “stamped” by the Holy Spirit, as one would stamp a document to show ownership or payment in full.

 In being sealed, God has declared to the entire spiritual cosmos, “This is my child, in whom I am well pleased.”

 

Guaranteed by the Spirit

 He’s not just a seal, He’s a deposit. In our day we misunderstand what deposit means. We think of a deposit as something we get back when we move out of our apartment or house we’re renting. But that isn’t the idea of the word in the Greek. The term deposit actually means the first installment or down payment. This down payment is the first installment of your future.

 The English translation “the guarantee of our inheritance” is clunky and misleading. The Greek says that we are His inheritance, His heritage, His portion. It’s more than us being promised an inheritance; it is saying that we are God’s inheritance. We are His very own. This is guaranteed by the Spirit giving the initial installment of what’s to come.

 This means that every privilege of the Son’s relationship with the Father is now ours and will fully be realized. What does Christ have before His Father? That is what we now have because we are “in Him.”

 All ownership has been transferred once and forever. It isn’t our doing that would cause His possession to be lost, but His own inability to keep what He already made a deposit on and has purchased by the shedding of His blood.

 The Bible is filled with statements about our “eternal” life, being written the Lamb’s book of life, having no condemnation, being justified, etc. These are all things we possess today. We have not been given temporary life, but eternal life for those who have trusted and continue to trust God. Listen to Jesus’ own words in the Gospel of John:

 John 6:37-40: “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

 How many will come to Jesus if they’ve been given by the Father? All. How many will be cast out if they’ve come to Jesus? None. How many will Jesus lose? None. Whose will is this? The Father’s. How long is this life that Jesus gives? Eternal.

 John 10:27-30: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”

 How long is the life Jesus gives? Eternal. How many will perish? None. How many will be snatched out of Jesus’ hands? None. How many will be snatched out of the Father’s hand? None.

 What does Peter say?

 1Peter 1:3-4: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Because of his great mercy he has given us a new birth to an ever-living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead 4 and to an inheritance kept in heaven for you that can't be destroyed, corrupted, or changed.”

 Our new birth is into how long of a hope? Ever-living. Based on what? Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Can this inheritance be taken away, destroyed our changed? No.

 Let’s listen to Paul in Romans 8:

 Romans 8:31-39: “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died--more than that, who was raised--who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 Questions about Assurance of Salvation:

  1. Can a Christian lose their salvation?

This is the wrong question. Since we don’t initiate salvation, and is not accomplished by us, then it is not kept through our efforts. The real question we should ask is, “Can Christ lose a Christian?” We don’t lose our salvation like we lose our car keys.

  1. How much faith do I need to have to be sure I’m saved?

It’s not your faith that saves you, but Christ. If you were sliding down a cliff and were about to fall to your death when you saw a branch sticking out of the cliff, how much faith would it take to keep you from falling? It’s not your faith that saves you but the branch. It takes as much faith as it did to reach out. Doesn’t that mean a faith without blemish? No, it just means that however much faith it takes for you to grab hold of Jesus is how much you need. The amount and percent doesn’t matter. Growing in full confidence is a process of growth in Christ; it isn’t the basis of your salvation.

Unbelief is not a lack of any belief. We don’t really lack faith, what we lack is placing our faith in God’s word. When someone says, “I’m struggling to believe,” or, “I don’t have faith,” what they are really doing is actively believing something else; they are putting their faith actively in this other story, truth, idea, feeling or thought. We don’t need God to create faith as if it doesn’t exist, we need to move our faith from what we’re actively believing that is contrary God’s trustworthy Word.

The quickest way to lose your assurance is to analyze your faith, as if your faith saved you. It isn’t your faith that saves you; it’s the object of your faith, Jesus, that saves you. Since your faith is imperfect, you begin to believe that Jesus’ salvation is imperfect. Faith is nothing more than a channel or conduit, and it is not pure and perfect. It is cracked, jagged, and often feels quite weak. But what a blessing it is to know that I don’t have to concern myself with the perfection of my faith, but with the perfection of Jesus.

  1. What would happen if I no longer feared losing my salvation?

I’m afraid if stop fearing the loss of my salvation I’ll lose all motivation to obey God. If you are no longer motivated to obey God because you stopped fearing your loss of salvation, then your motivation to obey God is fear and not love. God doesn’t want His children to fear losing Him in order to obey. God wants His children to love Him so that they’ll want to obey.

God doesn’t give us new birth and then tell us to wrap our feeble arms around Him and never let go or we’ll fall away. He is a good Father that not only brings us life but holds us in His arms to ensure we won’t be dropped. It isn’t the strength of our grip that secures us. It’s the strength of His loving arms. He not only saves us by grace, He keeps us by grace. We don’t get in by grace and then stay in by our own weak efforts.

  1. What if someone began as a Christian but walks away from Christ?

1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.”

  1. What about when I sin? I feel like I’m not saved?

1 John 2:1-2: “My little children, I'm writing these things to you so that you might not sin. Yet if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father-Jesus Christ, the one who is righteous. 2 It is he who is the atoning sacrifice for our sins...”

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sin. Our salvation rests purely on His righteousness and not our own. Yes, but I still can’t believe that I’m truly His child.

When we disbelieve God has saved us by grace we are essentially saying that He is not trustworthy. My opinion and feelings are more true than God. Disbelief is sin to be repented of, not a condition to be coaxed.

There is joy in realizing that disbelief doesn’t happen to me, but comes from me. Since it comes from me, I can repent of this sin and it can be forgiven. We can grieve the Holy Spirit by a lack of love towards God and others, a lack of humility, a lack of honor to God, a lack of trust towards God’s will and character, and through sin. The Spirit is grieved and there is a sense of His withdrawing. This is so that we wake up to the severity of our actions and become aware that this is a relationship not simply a religion. For the Spirit to be grieved indicates that out of the love relationship between us and God, God desires our response towards His love and that response be loving faithfulness to Him in return. Much like a wife is grieved when her husband is harsh, unkind, and unloving, so the Spirit is grieved. The wife may not take off her ring and throw it away, but she will withdraw and the experience of her closeness is diminished. So it is with the Spirit. The Spirit desires that we are lead by His prompting in our lives out of love. As we follow His lead, we experience joy, trust, closeness, security and assurance. When we grieve the Spirit, we experience His withdrawal and a lack of closeness with God. This is not to punish and condemn, it is out of love so that we wake up and realize what we’re doing. If a man is harsh to His wife and she gently withdraws, only a fool would then become angry at his wife and blame her. It is his actions that have caused her to withdraw. But sin often results in blame-shifting. When we get angry at God because of our sin and the sense of the Spirit’s withdrawal, we are like the foolish husband. Instead, we should see the effects of our actions and it should grieve us as it grieves our spouse and we should move to confess our foolishness and ask forgiveness for our actions so that the experience of closeness will thrive.

  1. What happens if I still feel like I’m condemned and I lack assurance?

So often our lack of assurance is a result of not dealing honestly with our sin before by hiding, ignoring or excusing away our actions. This hard heartedness only brings relational distance. But this distance does not need to remain. The gap is ready to be closed at once if we simply confess our sin and trust in Him. Unlike our human lovers, though we may exhaust their patience, our God is always ready to forgive His children and remind them again that we are loved and accepted. He doesn’t throw off His ring and leave us; He speaks to us His Gospel and as we hear and believe again and again, we experience the freshness of grace.

We persevere because we are “In Him.” Jesus perseveres until the end and we would never question Jesus’ status before the Father. Since we have been given everything that Jesus has been given, we persevere because He perseveres. This the beauty of being joined in Christ. All his benefits are our benefits, including our assurance that the Father will always love us because the penalty for sin has already been paid.

Also, we have a God who loves us and is greater than even my feeling of condemnation:

1 John 3:19-20: “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; 20 for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.”

Just as my daughter learned to trust me, learned to be sure that I can catch her, so assurance is born out of experience. John Newton says this:

“Assurance grows by repeated conflict, by our repeated experimental proof of the Lord’s power and goodness to save; when we have been brought very low and helped, sorely wounded and healed, cast down and raised again, have given up all hope, and been suddenly snatched from danger, and placed in safety; and when these things have been repeated to us and in us a thousand times over, we begin to learn to trust simply to the word and power of God, beyond and against appearances: and this trust, when habitual and strong, bears the name of assurance; for even assurance has degrees.”

We can encourage assurance of salvation by living a lifestyle of repentance and faith. When we are regularly aware of our failures and shortcomings and at the same time trust that Christ has succeeded where we’ve failed, we are more and more assured that we are loved by our Father. Not because of our efforts, in fact it is in spite of our efforts, and only on the basis of Jesus’ righteousness. The Father accepts Jesus and since we are in Him by faith, He loves and accepts us as His very own.

We get ourselves in trouble when we forget that we’re both sinners and saints at the very same time. Luther says we are “simul justus et pecator” or “simultaneously just and a sinner.” This is important to realize.

If we only see ourselves as a saint and forget we are still sinners, we’ll tend towards arrogance and self-righteousness. We begin to look down our noses at those who are not as put together as we are. So we have tons of confidence, but lack any humility. We often to have to hide our failures because our salvation is dependent upon how well we’re behaving, so we lower God’s standards to make them reachable or we inflate our accomplishments to make them more attractive.

The flip side to this error is only seeing yourself as a sinner. When we do this we are aware of our failures, so we seem humble, and instead of being arrogant, we become cowards. We think because we’re not worthy to be loved that no one loves us. We wallow in our failures and lack any confidence and courage.

We lack assurance when we base our justification on our sanctification. In other words, when we examine our spiritual health and growth and determine whether we are saved by it, rather than by Christ, we find ourselves unsure, insecure and feeling saved one day (when things are going well) then feeling unsaved the next (when we struggle). Instead, our sanctification is based on our justification. To the degree we continue to remind ourselves that we’re saved by grace and made right with God solely by the finished work of Christ, to that degree we’ll grow more like Christ and have the courage to deal with our sin truthfully. If our assurance is based on how we’re doing in the moment through spiritual experiences or an emotional feeling, then our assurance is always at the mercy of our feelings and our growth will be stunted.

So, we err in arrogance or insecurity. We either boast or we put ourselves down. There is a third way that only comes by God’s grace. It is the way of humble courage, of confident brokenness. It’s what Luther is saying, we are far more sinful than we can bear to admit, but at the same time we are far more loved and accepted than we could ever dream of. We are both humbled to the dust and affirmed to the stars all because of God’s grace.

This is counter intuitive isn’t it? To say that the way to full assurance is through admitting how much we’ve failed seems strange. But that is gospel irony. We lose our life to find it. We become poor so that we might become rich. We become weak so that we’re strong. We declare ourselves utterly bankrupt of any righteousness of our own so that we are made righteous.

The more you give up on your own performance and ability, the more you cling to your Savior, and the more you cling to Him, the more sure you are that God truly loves you.

 

Hearing and Believing the Gospel

Asking for more of the Spirit is asking for both. It’s asking for Him to remind us of who we are in Jesus and at the same time it’s asking for Him to remind us why we need Jesus. Remember, the verse says, “when you heard the word of truth, and believed the gospel of your salvation.”

We ask the Spirit to come and fill us so that we can not just hear, but believe the truth of this Gospel.

The beauty of being sure that God saves by grace is that you can now freely admit how much you’ve blown it and how sinful you really are. If God isn’t going to cast you out, and if you believe His love for you is worth far more than anyone else’s love, then you can start being honest.

So go ahead, jump. His arms are strong. His heart is soft. His will is good. And His grace is sweet.

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