"Grace Alone" Sermon: Ephesians 1:3-10

“Grace Alone”

[Ephesians 1:3-10]

October 22, 2017, Second Reformed Church

            We continue our look at the five “solas” – the five “alones” – of the Reformation, this morning, as we remember the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenberg.

            We have looked at Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone.  We saw that God’s Word – the Scripture – alone has the authority to tell us God’s way of salvation and how it is accomplished.

            Sola Christo – Christ alone.  We saw that the works of Christ are all the works we need for salvation.

            Today, we look at Sola Gratia – Grace alone.

            In order to understand what “grace alone” is, let’s consider this question:  if you give someone a gift, what would that person have to give you?  If I gave you a gift, how much would you have to pay me?

            When we truly – rightly – give a gift, it’s because we want to give a gift.  It is something we give to someone for free because it makes us happy – it pleases us to give it.

            My mother gave me a gift for my birthday a week and a half ago, and I didn’t have to pay her for it or do work around her house for it.  She gave me a gift because she wanted to – because it pleased her – and she gave it to me for free.

            Grace is a gift.  One commentator puts it this way:  “grace is a gift that reaches the heart and transforms it” (Hendrickson, 80).  Grace is a gift that God gives that changes us and changes our status before God by reaching our hearts – the center of our being – and transforming them.

            In this, the Reformers said that grace is the gift of God that God freely gives to us to transform us and make us into the Image of His Son.

            The Roman Catholic Church still teaches, “Canon 11. If anyone says that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost,[116] and remains in them, or also that the grace by which we are justified is only the good will of God, let him be anathema” (http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/TRENT6.HTM).

The Roman Catholic Church states that we are made right with God – we achieve salvation – when God gives us the grace to be able to work with Christ to merit our salvation.  The gift of grace, in Roman Catholicism – is only the ability to work for your salvation.

We talked about how we are born spiritual dead, and we saw that dead people can’t help themselves.  In the Reformed tradition, we understand that grace from God is a gift – grace alone makes us right with God by God transferring – crediting – imputing – Jesus’ righteousness to us, and transferring – crediting – imputing – our sin to Him – for Him to pay.

The Roman Catholic Church says that grace resurrects us from spiritual death, and then we work to merit our salvation with Jesus.

The Reformed say that grace is a free gift, given by God to people who can’t help themselves.  And this grace changes out our hearts and makes us into the Image of Jesus.

            The Roman Catholic Church says that if anyone teaches that we are made right with God – we are saved – by grace alone – by God’s free gift – through which He does all the work of salvation and gives it to us – if anyone teaches that, they are to be “anathema” – or, in English, “damned to Hell.”

            What does God say in His Word – which is the only authority – and it alone – to tell us God’s way of salvation and how it is accomplished?

            Paul opens his letter to the Ephesians with his usual greetings and salutations, and then – in the morning’s text, we find a cascading portrait of God’s salvation of us through grace alone.

            First, God the Father blessed us in Christ to be holy and blameless.

“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.”

Paul praises God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for the grace He has given all Christians – all believers – and those at the church in Ephesus in particular.

Let us notice this is in the past tense:  God the Father blessed us in Christ.  God the Father has blessed all those who will ever believe – all those who are in Christ – all those who have received Him as Savior – alone.  If we are in Christ – if we are included in the people that He came to save – the Father has blessed us.

God the Father has blessed us with “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”  That is, God the Father has blessed every believer (through grace alone, in Christ alone), with every benefit of Heaven.  We who believe will not receive any greater benefit at the end of days than what we have already received in Christ.  What that looks like is that we are now holy and blameless.  And that is what God chose us to be before the Creation even occurred.

How do we understand that?

The first thing we need to understand is what is called “double imputation” – which is something we have talked about even this morning – that’s just the proper expression for what occurs in our salvation.

Jesus was born without Original Sin – He was like Adam and Eve before the Fall – and Jesus kept all of the Law of God and never sinned.  Jesus is righteous and sinless.  Since He has – as He planned before the Creation – Jesus, sovereignly – without our help or comment – credited – imputed – all the people He came to save with His righteousness – with His holy and sinless life.  And, Jesus volunteered to be our substitute before God, and all of our sin was credited – imputed – to Him.  So, because Jesus credited His righteousness to us and our sin was credited to Him, we are now seen as holy and blameless – sinless – in the eyes of God.

And yet, that’s not our reality, is it?  We continue to sin and need to repent many times a day.  The good news is that Jesus died for all of the sins we committed in the past, and today, and throughout the rest of our lives.  So, even though we have not committed all the sins we will ever commit, and we have not kept the Law of God perfectly yet, God looks at us and sees that we are holy and blameless in Christ.

John Calvin says to think of it as a blueprint for a house and the house itself.  The architect can present the blueprint and say, “this is your house,” even though you can’t move into it until what is on the paper is built in time and space.  In the same way, Jesus finished the work of salvation, and, even though we don’t see the completion of His work in time and space yet – we have received the Grace of God alone that guarantees that is what will happen in time and space on the last day.

Paul’s language continues to cascade as he further explains what this all means.

Second, God the Father blessed us in Christ by grace alone.

Let’s take this bit by bit:

 “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,”

In love, God the Father chose a people for Himself – a people to give to His Son to save – out of all of the people who would ever exist.  And we are not merely a people that God owns, but God adopted us as sons – God has made us legal heirs of everything that is His – through Christ alone – through the work that Jesus Christ did, because God wanted to – because He loved us for His own sake.

We have received grace alone from God the Father, and through it, in Christ, we who were dead and children of wrath, have been raised to life and been adopted as legal heirs of all that God has – which is everything.  And God chose to do this – in love – for His own sake – and before any of us existed.  We did nothing to receive the gift we have been given – but that makes sense, doesn’t it?  If we earn a gift, it’s not a gift.

“to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”

The fact that God the Father chose to give us His Grace in love, in Christ, making us His heirs, reflects back on God in praise – by us and all of Creation!  Is He not worthy of praise Who saved us by His Grace alone?

 “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,”

In Christ, we have been bought from God – we were under the Wrath of God for our sin, but in Christ, our debt for our sin to God has been paid – we have been redeemed through His blood – according to the riches of His gift to us – grace.

“which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will,”

This gift God has given us in Christ is a lavish gift – excessive, abundant, beyond what we even understand it to be.  And yet, through this Grace in Christ – through this gift of salvation – accomplished by Christ alone, given to us as a gift in grace alone – we did nothing!  God the Father has given us wisdom and insight – for what? – to understand His Word and specifically the plan of salvation that the Trinity rejoiced to fashion in Their secret counsels before the foundation of the world – and especially for us, now, we who have received the indwelling of God, the Holy Spirit – we have the revelation – the mystery revealed – we have come to know the Will of God –

That, for His own glory and joy, the Triune God planned to created – even humans – and God planned to redeem some out of all of humanity after we fell into sin, because it delighted Him to do so – all alone – that we would rejoice and be thankful – especially as we come to understand what God has done.

“according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time,”

Everything that has been done for us in Christ, by grace, has been according to the purpose of God.  Our salvation was accomplished for the pleasure of God!

Remember what the author of Hebrews writes, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2, ESV).

Jesus Christ despised the horrors He endured for our sake, but the joy He received in saving us by His gift – by grace alone – was so much greater – that the horror of the full Wrath of God upon Him for our sins, became something smaller.

Consider how great the joy must be that Christ would find it best to live a holy and sinless life and then suffer for every sin of every person who would ever believe – the full Wrath of God for each act of cosmic rebellion against Him in our sin.  How immense must be His joy!

 to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

And here is the culmination of the plan – the end in which God’s greatest joy and pleasure is found:  in Christ all things will be united in Him – everyone who will ever believe and all of the rest of the Creation – save the humans who persist in rejecting Christ – all will be restored and stabilize on that last day.

We may remember what this will look like, as John uses symbolic language:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

“And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ And he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death’” (Revelation 21:1-8, ESV).

We have not and cannot do anything to merit or take part in the gift of God that is salvation by grace alone.  For God’s reasons and for His joy and to His glory, God purposefully created everything that is and will be, knowing the first and the last of all things. 

And God chose us – God the Father chose to bless us in Christ to be holy and blameless – this is a gift given by the Father to us in Christ for which we did nothing.  It was God’s free gift to us and His alone.

And in Christ, by grace alone, the Father chose to love us and save us and adopted us as co-heirs with Jesus.  Through the substitutionary atonement of Christ alone – through His blood alone – we are forgiven, made righteous, and wisdom and insight of God in the Scripture alone is given to us.

And we have the hope of the purpose of the Father to reveal the fullness of His Grace – the magnitude of His Gift – as He restores the Creation and brings us into the fullness of His Kingdom.

May we be thankful and awestruck by what God the Father has done in Christ alone for us – being thankful for the gift that God chose to give us that reaches our heart and transforms it.

And may all the glory be to God.

Let us pray:

Almighty God and Father, You Who loved Your rebellious sons and daughters and took it upon Yourself – alone – to give us the gift of salvation through grace alone in Christ alone.  Help us to be amazed and thankful.  Keep us from ever thinking that we are worthy or that You are lucky to have us.  For all that we are and will ever be is an incomprehensible, joy-filled, and glorious gift from You.  We ask this in Jesus’ Name, Amen.