Grace, of course, is the means by which we are saved. It’s not just that God decided to overlook our sins the way we overlook a child’s minor disciplinary issue. Grace is His unmerited favor in the face of deserved wrath.

Show Notes:

We all seem to have been touched by cancer – a friend or family member, someone who’s battling cancer.
When cancer strikes, it strikes with fear and before long we’re examining a myriad of treatment options. Traditional and alternative approaches, on and on it goes.
Imagine for a moment that there were one definitive cure for cancer and that every patient who goes to this treatment is guaranteed to come out cancer free.
Would we try it? Would we accept it?
When it comes to the spiritual cancer that we all have–death–there is a cure.

There is a cure for our sin condition and it comes through a gift, by way of grace, in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 2:8-10
Verses 8 and 9 are well known, but often verse 10 is forgotten.
Grace, of course, is the means by which we are saved. It’s not just that God decided to overlook our sins the way we overlook a child’s minor disciplinary issue. Grace is His unmerited favor in the face of deserved wrath.
How do we embrace this?
Faith is the means by which, we might say the embracing, the connecting, the way we appropriate grace and salvation.

By faith we trust Christ to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

By faith, we receive God’s grace.
Grace through faith – it’s a gift of God, and that word is so profound. It’s something God GIVES.
When we were adopting our first child, a neighbor that I barely knew walked across the street and handed me a check for a thousand dollars. It was the largest gift anyone had ever given me in my life. I was stupefied. I said, “Charlie, why are you doing this?” He said, “Martha and I love you.” I said, “You don’t even know us.” He said, “Oh, we’ve been watching you for about a year.”
“Why would you do this?”
“We just love you.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Not a thing. We want to help you. It’s a gift.”
It still blows me away to think about that.
It’s a gift. No good work earns a gift.
Good works gain no attention before God, before a person knows Jesus Christ.
No good work will gain God’s attention before we know Christ.
Years ago I was talking to a friend about how to communicate this and he had a great illustration:
Imagine that California is earth, and Hawaii is heaven. That’s not hard to imagine, right? And imagine you’ve got to swim from California to get to Hawaii to be saved.
Your ability to swim is not your physical prowess like some world class swimmer, your ability to swim is your good works. So when the time comes, we hear a big noise from God: Go! And all of humanity, standing on the edge of the California coastline, starts to swim like crazy to get to Hawaii. Those who have the best “works” win.
You’re swimming along, swimming like crazy because you’ve got a few good works–and there goes Mother Teresa. Nobody can swim faster than Mother Teresa, maybe DL Moody’s out there swimming like crazy. Maybe Billy Graham’s walking on the water. Maybe Florence Nightingale’s floating over the water. I don’t know.
If good works gets you to Hawaii, that’s whose coattails I’d want to be on – but good works get no attention from God.
We all say, “Yeah, it’s a gift–” but look at Ephesians 2:10: For we are His workmanship.
You are God’s work.
Why?
You were made to do a work.
That’s what the verse says, keep reading: Which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
He’s separating works from salvation so clearly and we missed it entirely.
You can’t do it. You are a product of work and, by the way, your works are what God designed you to do. Not for salvation, just to serve Him.
The best way I can articulate it is this:

Your good works and mine are a small way we say, “Thank You,” to God for a salvation so rich and so free.

I remember getting one of my children a bike for her birthday when she was four years of age and for about a week she said, “Thank you daddy. Thank you daddy.” We showed it to her on her birthday and she goes, “Is this mine?” She was stunned. She looked at it, sat on it, hugged it, kissed it; and she said “Thank you. Thank you for my bike. Thank you for my bike.”
Do you know what it does to a father’s heart when their child says, “Thank you.”? There’s no greater joy.

Your Father in heaven who loved you when you were unlovely; who, by grace through faith you appropriate salvation so rich and free––He said, “You can’t do anything that gets my attention, but here’s a gift.”

You welcome that gift, and for the rest of your life you say,
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What do I do to show my thanks?”
“Do the good works I gave you to do.”
“How do I show thankfulness?”
“Do the good works I gave you to do.”
There’s not a thing wrong with good works, men and women. They’re downright Biblical.
Christ Jesus made you for good works that you should walk in them.
This is the issue the Reformation was about: what do we have to do to get saved?
This separated the largest schism in so called Christianity, historically.
The law only proves wrong. The law of the one prohibition in Adam: If you do this, it’s all over, but you can do anything else. So what do we do? The one thing we shouldn’t.
He gave us the ten commandments to see if we could manage those. We couldn’t manage those.
He gave us three hundred laws as the prophets continue to add on. How did we manage those? Very poorly.
Law only shows what I do wrong, it never awards for doing right.
Mingled in our bloodstream, we have this moment right when we’re caught. When you and I sin, we know we’re guilty. After we move from the blame-casting and defense mechanisms, there’s something in our conscious that says, “You know what? I’ve got to do something right to fix this.” Right?
There’s something in your soul that, when you know you’re busted, that cringes and says, “What do I need to do now?”
That proves the law is incapable of producing good. All the law can do is show us how bad, it can’t show us what to do for good.
Luther said, “were beggars all.”
I had a professor in grad school who said, “Every year someone comes back and says, ‘you know, I lied. I cheated, I stole, I did wrong.”
This professor was very interesting. He sort of liked to let people squirm, and as this person would squirm in the office, cry and confess, the professor always said this,

“You know that’s the problem with sin. It makes a big mess and you can’t ever clean it up.”

Then he said,

“the school has no policy on these things. We don’t hold it over your head. We don’t pull your diploma, and the fact that God’s been working over you means more to me than anything. For my part, you’re forgiven. God bless you, stay strong, keep short accounts. The next time you sin, just admit it right away and don’t let it eat your lunch.”

I was once a witness to a restoration service where two people had egregiously offended God and the church through some sordid affairs, divorces, and remarriages, and had come back to ask for forgiveness.
I heard a woman standing in front of a completely packed meeting room of two thousand, say, “I have not had a decent night’s rest in seven years because of my sin. I will walk over glass to get rid of the guilt.”
I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Because when we sin, there’s something inside us that says, “What do I DO to get rid of this sin?”

The person and work of Jesus Christ is the only sufficient means for our sin condition.

If there were another way to get saved, why would He have sent His Son?
I have a friend in a religious tradition with all the ritual and all the merits and all the things you have to do, and they say with clenched hands and broken hearts, “I know Jesus died for my sins, but I must do all that I can to atone for them.”
It breaks my heart that they just can’t see beyond the foolishness of good works before they trusted Jesus Christ, and the inefficiency of good works to secure, or ensure their salvation.
Justification, redemption, other terms become whetstones for how we understand this.

How is a person made righteous?

Romans 3 is a chapter you and I should know inside and out. It’s the sharpening, the concept of how we are made righteous––what justification by faith means.
Justification is not “just as if I never sinned.” That’s a horrible definition of justification.
Justification is the work of Jesus Christ to declare you righteous.
It’s not just as if you never sinned. Jesus Christ’s sacrificed life, death, burial, and resurrection––calvary, overcoming the grave––paid for your sin and Christ is able to say to His Father, “I paid for that. I justified them. I declared them righteous. They can’t do a thing to get your attention apart from me.”

It is all about Christ from the beginning to the end.

He’s the only one who can provide our salvation so rich, and so free.
A good compression of a number of these ideas is found in 1 Peter 1:3-5
Do you think about the inheritance waiting for you?
Greek:
Kleronomia (κληρονομία, “klay-ron-om-ee’-ah”): heirship, i.e. (concretely) a patrimony or (genitive case) a possession: inheritance.
Kloeronomos (κληρονόμος, “klay-ron-om’-os”): an heir, an inheritor.
Kleron (κλῆρος, “kléros”): a lot, a portion assigned
I’ve studied those and all the tangent words about inheritance. I don’t know what it means to you, but I will tell you that somehow sewn into your salvation is this inheritance that is imperishable and awaits you.
There’s a current reality to our salvation and an ultimate reality to our future. Let me give you four final observations:

1.  Salvation is only through innocent blood. Hebrews 9:22
2. Salvation is only through a person. We have all kinds of illustrations whether it’s an advocate in a courtroom, a transplant operation for someone who is going to donate an organ for you to live and die. There has to be substitution. There has to be a person.
3. Salvation is only by grace. It’s the means by which we are saved, that God was gracious towards us.
4. Salvation is only through faith. The only way to embrace salvation in Christ Jesus is to put your trust in Him to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. That’s what it means to believe––to trust, to have faith.

From Lewis Sperry Chafer in 1945:

“The preacher is an important link in the chain which connects the heart of God with the souls of lost men. Concerning all other links in this chain, it may be remarked that there is no deficiency in the provision of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ. There is no flaw in the record of that redemption revealed in the oracles of God. There is no weakness or failure on the part of the Spirit. There should be no omissions, defects, derelictions in the preachers presentation of redemption to those for whom it is provided. When seriously contemplating the responsibility of gospel preaching, one cannot but solemnize the heart and be the cause of an ever increasing dependence upon God. It is not to be wondered at that the apostle speaking for the Holy Spirit declares with that unique emphasis, a twofold repetition, but though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you, than which has already been preached to you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so I say again, “If any man preach any other gospel unto you, other than that you have received let him be accursed. Galatians 1:8 and 9. This Anathema has never been revoked, nor could it be so long as the saving grace of God is to be proclaimed to a lost world. From the human point of view, a misrepresentation of the gospel might be so misguided that a soul might lose his way forever. It behooves the doctor of souls to know the precise remedy for which he is appointed to administer. A medical doctor may by error terminate what is at best only a brief life. But the doctor of souls is dealing with an eternal destiny. Having given His Son to die for lost men, God cannot but be exacting as to the great benefit it is presenting. Nor should He be deemed unjust if He pronounces an Anathema on those who pervert the one and only way of salvation. A sensitive man realizing these eternal issues might shrink from the responsibility so great, but God is not called His messengers to such failure. He enjoins them “Preach the Word,” and assures them of His unfailing presence and enabling power. Probably at no point in the whole field of theological truth is the injunction more applicable when Scriptures says, “Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth.”

You and I have the very gospel of Jesus Christ, the only means of salvation. How will you handle it?
Prayer: Father in heaven, we marvel at salvation, so rich so free, so great, so hard to grasp. We wonder why you would love the likes of us? But we sure thank you! Enlarge our vision of your salvation. Encourage us to be the best representatives of Christ, by your Spirit’s power we ask. Amen.