When Grace is all thats left
- Tim Cain
- May 15, 2010
- Series: Ephesians
Kaleo Church El Cajon
May 15th 2010
Ephesians 2:4-10
Tim Cain
I will never forget when I was eighteen years old I got a job driving a straight truck for a rental company. I would set up tents for weddings and deliver tables, chairs, glasses, dishes and stuff like that. For one of the weddings we did our company didn’t have enough glasses so we had to rent two pallets of glasses from another rental company in order to fill the order at the wedding. When the wedding was over I was taking the two pallets back to the rental company. As I was driving I realized I was about to miss my exit, I hit the breaks pretty hard and all of the sudden I heard the worst sound in the world. I heard this massive crashing sound. As I heard the sound my heart and stomach knotted up, I got off at the exit, pulled off to the side of the road and ran back and opened the door. I looked in the truck and both the pallets had fallen over and their was broken glass everywhere. I was so scared and so devastated, I immediately started sifting through the glass hoping only a few of the glasses was broken. I wasn’t even thinking as I rummaged through all the glass looking for glasses that weren’t broke and pretty soon I noticed there was blood everywhere and I looked down and saw that my hands were all cut up. I remember setting the glasses down and going to the back of the truck and just sitting there. I didn’t know what to do. As I sat there I realized I had a serious problem and I had no idea how to fix it. Everywhere I looked was broken glass and I realized I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t do anything to make it better. I couldn’t take back that stupid moment when I tried to make the exit. I couldn’t change the fact that the guys who packaged it hadn’t tied it down right, I couldn’t fix it. That is what I remember about that day. I remember the devastating feeling of being totally helpless and unable to fix a situation. In the past I had rarely felt this way. Usually if I thought hard enough I could figure out a way to fix most situations, otherwise I could always call my dad and he could fix almost anything, but there on the back of that truck I knew I had broken something that couldn’t be fixed and it was a devastating and uncomfortable feeling.
Last week we talked about how this helpless desperate feeling is exactly what Paul has spent the first few verses of Ephesians 2 trying to instill in his readers. Paul begins chapter 2 by reminding the Ephesians who they were before they came to Christ. He is reminding them that they were dead. They were helpless. They had broken things in their life that they were absolutely unable to fix. And Paul is so adamant about this because he knows just how hard it is for people to ever accept his description of them apart from Christ. Paul knows that as long as people have physical life they will always find it very difficult to believe that they are or ever were spiritually dead. Paul knows that most people spend their lives frantically trying to fix the problem, they spend their lives like I was when I was sifting through all the glass trying to see if there is anyway to salvage the situation.
We know there is a problem but we think that somehow we can use our physical life to fix the problem with our soul. This is how most of the world goes about life apart from Christ. They know there is a problem, but they feel like as long as they have breath there must be some way that they can fix it. And so they live their physical lives frantically trying to fill their dead soul, which ultimately will never be satisfied with anything on this earth.
What Paul is doing in Ephesians 2 is he is reminding the Ephesians how impossible that idea is. He is trying to get the Ephesians to remember what it felt like to put down the broken glass and sit their knowing that they could not fix their situation. He wants them to remember what it felt like to admit that they were dead, sons of disobedience, enemies of God, children of wrath, unable to do anything to fix themselves. He says, remember what that felt like. Slow down, whatever you are doing right now, slow down and remember how helpless you were without Jesus.
You see the reason Paul does this is that he knows that grace is really hard to accept. Love is not hard to accept, kindness is not hard to accept, gifts are not hard to accept as long as you can convince yourself that somehow you deserve it. Even when people give us gifts its easy in our minds to accept them because we feel like we deserve them. We are great at accepting anything that we can justify deserving. But grace is hard to accept. Now, many of you would say I don’t agree, I think grace is pretty easy to accept, I know I don’t have a problem accepting it. But I believe this is because we don’t know what grace is. In fact I believe that grace is so hard to accept that we have changed the meaning of it so that we can accept things we call grace but in real life we don’t truly believe it is grace at all. You see for many we have so corrupted the meaning of grace that we actually feel like we deserve grace.
Moses rightly understood just what a temptation this was. That is why he warns the Israelites about it before they enter the promise land. You see the Israelites are just getting ready to enter the Promised Land and they knew they needed God. They know that the people who currently are there are much stronger than they are. So, they Israelites know they must depend upon God. They know if they are ever to have a chance it will only be because God fights for them. In Deuteronomy 9 Moses tells them that God will go before them and destroy the people. However, Moses knows that as soon as the people are destroyed, as soon as the Israelites look around and no longer see just how much they need God, they will immediately try and convince themselves of their own abilities. Moses write in Deutoronomy 9:4, “After the Lord your God has thrust your enemies out before you (Grace) do not say in your heart, “It is because of my righteousness that the Lord has brought me in to possess the land.” Do you hear what Moses is saying? He is saying as soon as God blesses you with his grace don’t try and say that it wasn’t grace but that you somehow deserved it. Moses knows our tendencies; he knows how quickly we are to turn grace into something we deserve.
We know we are doing this when we begin to demand grace. When we find ourselves complaining when we are not given grace. This is the attitude we display when a cop pulls us over, we ask him for grace and when he says no we think he is a punk who just likes to flaunt his authority. If we are late to work and we ask our boss for grace and they say no and fire us we get angry and can’t believe they did that. Why? Because we think we deserve grace. Think about this one, when we apologize to someone for something that we said that was sinful and they say no I don’t forgive you and I will never speak to you again, we think they are jerks, we think they are the ridiculous one. If someone asks us why we are no longer friends we will blame it on them. We will say, I apologized and they just won’t forgive me. We make it seem like our broken relationship is their fault. We are the one who sinned and yet we apologize expecting to be forgiven, even demanding that we be forgiven. Oh how highly we think of ourselves.
I find myself thinking this way all the time. I know that most of the time when I ask for forgiveness inside my heart I know that I expect to be forgiven. I think that I should be forgiven. I think, I would forgive myself, or I always forgive this person so I expect them to forgive me. If they don’t forgive me I know that I will usually blame our broken relationship on them. Guys, do you see how we expect grace?
Forgiveness is not a right, it is never a right, it is grace and when you expect someone to forgive you all you show is that you truly don’t know the depths of your sin. How you deserve eternal hell for what you just did and how no one owes you forgiveness. When you sin you break something that you can’t fix and until you put everything down and go sit in the back of the truck and realize how desperate you are, how absolutely dependent you are upon grace, as long as you believe that you deserve to be forgiven you will never know what grace is.
Oh my friends Paul knows how easy it is for Christians to forget about grace. For them to forget who they were before Jesus came and how it is that he saved them. To forget how absolutely dependent they are upon him and upon his grace. He knows how easy it is to beg for grace when we realize how helpless we are and as soon as we are rescued out of the difficult situation to forget about God and believe he saved us because we deserved it.
So, if grace is so hard to accept, how is it that we come to accept grace? What does it look like to accept God’s grace and to have it applied to our lives? Ephesians 2:8 tells us how it is that we accept grace. Grace is accepted through faith. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And in case you are arguing in your head about all that I have said about how hard grace is to accept, listen to what Paul says next. Almost before the words are out of his mouth Paul feels like he must explain again what he means by grace. He knows that if he lets up for a minute we will manipulate grace into something about us and not something about God. And that is why he immediately explains to us what he means by grace. He means something that is “not of your own doing” something that is “a gift of God.” and something that is “not of works.” Do you see the great lengths that Paul feels he must go to explain to the Ephesians what grace means? He knows that our every impulse is to run, to always run to self-reliance. Always cling to things we can earn, always revert to a dependence upon ourselves and our performance. He knows our frame. That is why I believe that what Paul has done in this last section is he has tried to prepare the soil of the Ephesians’ hearts to grow their faith. And when I say he is trying to grow their faith I mean he is trying to grow their utter dependence on the grace of God to save them.
Let me show you how I think Paul prepares the Ephesians hearts to strengthen their faith. He begins by extolling the massive power of God. He does this in Ephesians 1, culminating in God’s immeasurably great power toward the believers that he demonstrated when he raised Jesus Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in heaven. So, Paul begins by affirming the power of God because he wants the Ephesians to know that there is one who is very strong, strong enough even to raise the dead.
Having reminded the Ephesians of the power of God, Paul feels comfortable reminding the Ephesians just how desperate their situation was. He reminds them that they were once dead. Paul spares no punches reminding the Ephesians of their desperate plight. He wants them to despair of putting any hope in themselves. He knows that they are still physically alive and he wants them to despair of using their physical life to try and save themselves. He longs for them to give up. He urges them to remember that they were dead, followers of God’s enemy, children under his wrath. And he knows that he can say these things without absolutely crushing them because he has already planted the seed that there is hope for the dead. The Ephesians can admit that they were dead because there is one whose immeasurably great power is able to raise the dead.
Paul longs to do for the Ephesians what God has already done for him. You see in 2 Corinthians 1:8-10, Paul talks about how God brought him to the very end of his rope as well. He says, “For we do not want you to be ignorant brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope…” Do you see what Paul wants for the Ephesians? He wants to kill any hint of self reliance. He knows that self reliance is the great enemy of our faith and he longs to kill it. He knows that until we have despaired of ourselves we will never be able to put our trust in God. That is why he is so concerned that we remember that we were dead. Paul reminds the Ephesians and us that we were once dead because he wants us to put our trust in the one who raises the dead.
What I want you all to see is that grace can only be received by faith when we are ready to give up trying to fix things on our own. As long as we are still in the back of the truck trying to pick up the pieces and somehow make things better we will never be able to accept God’s grace. But once we give up, once we let go, once we realize just how much we need God, then we are ready to look away from ourselves and put our trust in the one who is able to come and fix everything that is broken.
And so after spending the first three verses of chapter two trying to get the Ephesians to give up, he immediately moves to encouraging them by reminding them that in the midst of their desperate need God has broken in. After reminding us all of just how lost and empty and dead we once were Paul breaks in and says “But God.” God has broken in and he is not merely a powerful God, The God who has broken in is a God of grace. You see that is the last thing that Paul must remind the Ephesians of. Not only is God able to raise the dead, but he loves to raise the dead, not because they deserve it, but because he loves to show off his grace.
So, Paul seeks to strengthen the Ephesians faith by reminding them of God’s power, their desperate need and unworthiness, and God’s amazing grace to use his power to save needy and unworthy sinners. Paul knows that for faith to abound these three things must be righty understood. You see Paul knows that for faith to abound all three of these things must be affirmed. In fact he knows that one of the great dangers we face is that we often emphasize one or two of these truths and forget about the third. Here in Ephesians Paul is fighting against these false responses to God’s grace. Tonight I want to show you two of them that I believe are very common.
The first way we often misunderstand grace is the way that we spoke about last week and for much of this week. It is the response of those who as soon as they receive God’s grace and they are no longer dead they forget who they were without Jesus and begin to live like they deserve the grace of God. They do not heed Moses’ warning that we spoke of and as soon as God rescues them they begin to believe that he rescued them “Because of their righteousness.” This happens when we receive God’s love not as grace but as something we deserve. This is what we talked about last week. In this response God’s love is used to build our self esteem instead of to boost our worship. So remember we talked about the three truths that Paul has taught the Ephesians and how our false responses come when we forget about one of them. This response comes when we believe that God is powerful and that he is love, but we forget that we were dead and did not deserve his love. And so we see how Paul has tried to fight against this false response. He has fought it by calling the Ephesians to remember who they were before Jesus. He has also fought it by being radically clear not only that salvation is by grace but also that grace means that it is “not of our own doing, it’s a gift of God, and not a result of works.”
There is however another misunderstanding of grace. This false response is despair and it comes when we focus solely on how terrible and absolutely undeserving we are. When we find ourselves purely focusing on how dead we were in our trespasses and how angry God rightfully was at us because of our sin. When we do this it is easy to despair. We find ourselves feeling absolutely helpless. We rightly understand that we don’t deserve forgiveness. We rightly understand that we are enemies of God and deserve his wrath. You listen to what Paul has said in Ephesians 2:1-3 and you have said AMEN. You have said that is me and because of that you find yourself in despair. Now this despair may play out in a number of ways. In our despair we may give up trying to be good and simply choose to wallow in sin. Or we might find ourselves fighting sin but failing over and over again and growing bitter at God for even making us if we were going to be so pathetic. Others find themselves clinging to their despair as a sort of virtue. We look around and all we see is how ridiculous it looks for people to walk around as if they were actually good. We feel like at least we take the Bible seriously on sin. And so in many ways we feel very humble. So humble sometimes that when people tell us about God’s forgiveness we simply tell them they don’t understand just how sinful we are. They don’t understand how dead we are. How beyond hope we are.
These are feelings that almost all of us have had at times in our lives. This feeling comes upon many of us when we find ourselves failing and falling over and over again into sin. It comes when we thought we had conquered something and then we fall back into it. It comes when our sin gets exposed and we feel totally ashamed. All of us know what it is like to despair. To be so overwhelmed by our sin that we feel absolutely helpless and we can’t seem to find a way out. Some of you guys having heard the last message may have even struggled with despair this week. My friends, Paul has a message for you who are despairing. It is not the cheap message that this world offers. He will not lie to you and tell you that you are not that bad. He will not try and blow up your self-esteem. Paul knows better than that. His answer is real and it is deep and it finds its way to our very Core.
Paul says to you who are despairing that everything you think about yourself and your sin is true. You are not exaggerating and you never have exaggerated the depths of your sin. However, if Paul found you in despair he would tell you that you were wrong about one thing. He would tell you that you are wrong about your God. While you are right about yourself, you are wrong about your God. You have not rightly understood what Paul meant when he said “BUT GOD.” You see when Paul wrote, “BUT GOD” he is adding an immeasurably great power to the equation. When he wrote “BUT GOD” he is adding one who is able to raise the dead, able to save even the worst of sinners. When he said “BUT GOD” he is speaking about the one who has demonstrated not only his immeasurably great power by raising his only son from the dead, but he has demonstrated the immeasurable riches of his grace by sending his son to die in your place. Everything you think you deserve you do deserve, but Paul would call you not to despair but to look to the cross.
There on the cross your savior took your punishment. However, bad you have been, however great your sin, look at the cross and know that what you deserved has been paid for by your savior. Let your absolute revulsion at your sin help you love your savior more. Let the weight of your sin that you feel so strongly, help you understand just how much he bore. Whatever you think you deserve look at the cross and find it paid for. Guys I know how your sin can sometimes make you feel. You feel so dirty, so alone, so pathetic, so undeserving of anything. You think in your mind I don’t even deserve to breath, how can God possibly let me live. My friends that is when you must look to the cross. At the cross God put all your dirt on his son, on the cross God did what you think he should do to you to his son. He took his life. His son Jesus hung on the cross. He gave up his breath, he bore God’s just wrath, my friends you never think that your sin is worse then it is, you deserve everything you have ever thought you deserved in your worst and most despairing moments, BUT GOD, being rich in mercy has bore your sins. Look at the cross and know that your sins have been paid for, your punishment taken.
Oh my friends so many of us go through life moping around because of our sin. We go through life with lowered heads ashamed of how much we fail and how worthless we feel. We have tried to please God and gain acceptance with him through obeying him and having failed we believe that the only way to earn back his favor is to punish ourselves. We beat ourselves up about our sin thinking it will somehow make God happy to see how seriously we take our sin.
Oh my friends your moping around is not taking your sins seriously. Your moping around does not take your sin seriously because it is not the punishment your sins deserve. Your savior does not appreciate your moping around. Your sins deserve punishment but the punishment they deserve is far greater than any self-flagellation you could ever induce. Oh my friends if you want to take sin seriously run to the cross. If you want to take sin seriously take it to the cross. There on the cross your savior shows you how bad you truly are and yet he also shows you just how much he truly loves you. At the cross we see what grace means. At the cross we see sin taken seriously, but we also see love poured out lavishly. Jesus died to forgive our sins. He died so we would not have to try and pay for them ourselves. He bore our punishment so we could be free. He bore our sin so that we might not have to carry them. So for all of you who find yourself in despair run to the cross. Let go of your sin. Let go of your failures, your savior has paid for it. Your savior loves you and He loves you not because you are deserving but because he is full of grace. He has paid for your sins and you honor him not by moping around and trying to add to his work on the cross, but by joyfully accepting it by faith. Your savior is honored when despite your pathetic sin you rejoice in your amazing God. For all of you who are so overwhelmed with verses 1-3 that you don’t feel you can continue reading Paul has a message for you and his message is found in verses 4-10. His message is that despite your sin, “God being rich in mercy, Because of the great love with which he has loved you even when you were dead in your trespasses, he made you alive together with Christ and raised you up with him and seated you with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward you in Christ Jesus.”
Do you hear what he is saying? He is saying that because of his great love for which he has loved you he has raised you up with his precious son Jesus in order that you might be a trophy of his grace. In verse 10 Paul calls believers, “Gods workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.” Oh my friends we are God’s workmanship. One of the Greek words used here is the word we get our English word ‘poetry’ from. What Paul wants us to know is that we are God’s work of art, His masterpieces. We are his workmanship, which he will use for all eternity to show off the riches of his grace. Guys this is so exciting. God has taken us from dead in our sins and trespasses, utterly helpless and without hope and through his sons death on the cross he has raised us up with Jesus and is forming us into a masterpiece of his grace.
For all eternity we are to show off God’s amazing grace. That is why he chose to save sinners. Oh death and sin and worthlessness are the canvas that he has chosen to pour out his love upon. And the reason that he has chosen this canvas is because the massive distance between how amazing God’s love is and how unworthy we are of it, that massive distance is called grace. And so it is precisely because we are so unworthy that God has poured out so much of his love upon us. And the more unworthy we were and the deeper God’s love is the greater the masterpiece of grace we are.
Oh we are God’s workmanship and it took Jesus death on the cross for God to be able to create masterpieces from our sinfulness. We are the trophies of God’s grace. My friends moping around, despairing of our ugliness, feeling worthless, these emotions do not befit trophies of God’s grace. They don’t befit his masterpieces, they don’t befit his workmanship. Oh my friends joy befits God’s workmanship. Gratitude befits his trophies of grace. Worship, joyful worship, befits God’s incredible workmanship.
Oh my friends our salvation took work, but it was not our work, but God’s. God’s work so that God may boast and not us. God’s work so that we might worship him and stand in awe of his power. And so Paul ends be telling us that as God’s workmanship he has made us to worship him by obeying him. By doing good works. Not so that we might pay him back, not so that we might earn his pleasure, but so that we might demonstrate his amazing grace. You see when dead sinners love God they do not draw attention to themselves but rather to God’s amazing work. When we remember that we were dead and then we go out and no longer walk according to the course of this world but instead we walk in the good works that he has created for us; we show the world his amazing transformational power. Anything good we ever do shouts forth his amazing work in us. And all of our failures serve as the perfect canvas for God’s unfailing love and forgiveness. And so we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works. And when we do, God gets all the glory and we worship him, and when we fail we cling to the cross and there find forgiveness and so we worship him. So that in all things, in success and in failure our God is worshipped as we live our lives as demonstrations of his amazing grace. We are his workmanship.
0 Comments | Login to Post Comments