I would want to concentrate this evening on verses 42-45 of this passage. From those verses I would say: God wants us to live in His grace: He wants us to receive, experience and enjoy His grace and He wants us also to express His grace in our lives. Can I repeat that?
God wants us to live in His grace: He wants us to receive, experience and enjoy Hid grace and He wants us to express His grace in our lives. Here we have the very heart of the Christian Gospel: a Gospel which is summed in Mark 10:45
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many
The word ‘ransom’ means that the Lord Jesus Christ came to set us free. he came to set us free from sin; free from its guilt and its power and eventually, in glory, from its very presence is our lives. Romans 3:23 reminds us that all have sinned. All of us. Our human condition is sin and sin results in separation from God and in his condemnation on sin. Yet Jesus came into this world not to condemn but to give us that which we can never deserve. He did this by giving up His very life and his very life-blood that we might walk free from condemnation. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus- so Romans 8:1.
There’s a shocking boldness in this. There was a shocking boldness in Jesus’ association with the tax-collectors (Matthew was in his band of 12; he visited Zaccheus, and his grace turned Zaccheus’ life around). He associated with the prostitutes and set them free from the bondage they lived in. His grace scandalised the religious leaders of the day and it’s scandalised many in the Christian church. It scandalises and offends our human pride and dignity. We feel that there is something we can do; something we can do to earn God’s favour and the idea that there is nothing can scandalise and does scandalise and offend. The Roman Catholic doctrine is that we earn salvation- through faith in Jesus Christ, yes, but it’s faith plus works, plus good deeds. This concept bound the church in the Middle Ages. It bound Martin Luther. He became a monk to please God. He lived that life of self-denial to please God but as time went by he became ever more tormented by his conscience and by his concept of a distant, law-giving, vindictive God. He nearly went insane. Eventually he made a pilgrimage to Rome to win favour. Flagellation. That surely would please God. Then he saw a crucifix and the words of Scripture The just will live by faith. In a blinding flash Luther saw God’s grace He saw that that figure on that Cross had given himself that he, Martin Luther, might be free!
American authors Dorothy and Gabriel Fackre wrote this:
Luther was overwhelmed by this Good News: God accepts the unacceptable! God loves the unlovely! Those pointing fingers of Christ that he saw as he looked up were really outstretched hands at the end of open arms, reaching to lift us up. Christ so welcomes us with infinite tenderness. The hard Work done on Calvary is all there, right now for us. All we have to do is accept it with trust. And so we are declared righteous (just) before God.
God’s grace is just that. It is a gift- it is ‘gratuitous’, ‘gratis’, free! God desires only that we accept it, experience it and enjoy it. To revel in it. Remember the parable of the Prodigal Son. The father threw a party and the elder son, of course, was offended at the revelry going on because this good-for-nothing brother had come home. It’s folly in the eyes of the world, which lives by the opposite of grace. Take, not give. Just deserts for the miscreant. To get what you deserve, and if you fall foul of life- well, you deserved it. “Serve you right”
That is not the arithmetic of God’s grace. The arithmetic of grace is well counted in that acronym for GRACE: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.
The Son of Man came....to give His life as a ransom for many.
We can’t earn God’s favour. How often we try and tear ourselves apart in the process. As we shall think in a moment God desires that our lives express His grace and that grace transforms, but it is not earned. I had two JW ladies at the door recently and I tried to explain to them about Jesus and about grace. Salvation they could accept as a concept, but something you had to earn. It was only after they left that I wished I had though of the penitent thief who died on one of the crosses alongside of Jesus. Today you will be with me in paradise. And what could that thief ever have done to earn salvation, to earn grace. ‘Earn grace’ is a contradiction in terms
God’s riches at Christ’s expense, and before I move on I would like to quote from C S Lewis, from his book Miracles, and as we listen we shall see something of the transforming power of grace, which I wish to move on to:
In the Christian story God descends to reasscend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity...He created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world with Him...One may think of a diver first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the deathlike region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs bursting, till suddenly he breaks the surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light; down where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour too.
Do you remember something else I said when I started apart from God wishing us to know and receive His grace? May I remind you? He wants us to express His grace in our lives.
That great statement of the Lord Jesus Christ that he came to serve and give His life as a ransom was prompted by yet another of those arguments among his disciples about power and precedence. He draws them together and He says this to them- we have it in verses 42 to 44:
You know that those who are rulers among the Gentiles lord it over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever among you wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.
Nothing wrong with ambition! What is wrong is wanting to ‘lord it’ over others. The Christian achieves greatness when he has within him the attitude of service; the attitude of being least. As the apostle James says in his letter, true faith will be shown by being accompanied by works- and the life of grace will show itself by works without seeking to establish favour with God by those works.. Can I repeat that?
The life of grace will show itself by works without seeking to establish favour with God. The true life of grace knows that God’s favour has already been bestowed as a gift. That is the transforming power of grace. Larry Hart says that “the believer’s life becomes an expression of the grace of God” and he goes on in turn to quote James Dunn- “Grace gives the believer’s life both its source, its power and its direction. If we have truly received and known God’s grace then we shall want to live the life of grace. We shall want our lives to express the grace we have received. As we have been served; received- so we shall want to give in service. And we will cease being judgmental. The life of grace will show itself by works without seeking to establish favour with God.
Yet reality proves to all of us that we so often live lives that are ungracious; we live lives where we desire or in actual fact fall short and end up pleasing and serving self more than others. We need to heed to advice that Paul gave to his listeners in Pisidian Antioch, where he urged them to continue in the grace of God (Acts 13:43). It’s so easy to get on a guilt-trip and to feel that we have hopelessly, or that there is, after all. Something we have to do. No! If we fail- confess it as sin and received the promised forgiveness! And remember God hasn’t finished with you; He hasn’t given up on you! Rather as he says in Philippians 1:6:
(be) confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion in the day of Christ Jesus.
There’s good advice in the Life Application Bible:
Do you sometimes feel as though you aren’t making progress in your spiritual life? When God starts a project, he completes it! As with the Philippians, God will help you grow in grace until he has completed his work in your life. When you are discouraged, remember that God won’t give up on you. He promises to finish the work he has begun. When you feel incomplete, unfinished, or distressed by your shortcomings, remember God’s promise and provision. Don’t let your present condition rob you of the joy of knowing Christ or keep you from growing closer to him.
To conclude: remember what I said at the start:
God wants us to live in His grace: He wants us to receive, experience and enjoy His grace and He wants us also to express His grace in our lives
The key is: ‘faith’ And what is the essence of faith? It is ‘YES!’ Saying ‘Yes’ to God’s grace as His gift and as the controlling factor in my life
The essence of grace is captured in Philip Yancey’s book What’s so amazing about grace?. There he says this:
“Occasionally, all to occasionally, I sense the truth of grace. There are times when I study the parables and believe they are about me. I am the sheep the shepherd left the flock to find, the prodigal for whom the father scans the horizon, the servant whose debt has been forgiven I am the beloved one of God.
