What It Means to Be: Saved by Grace

I remember having a coffee one time with a retired minister. We were talking about the state of the church, specifically the state of the Christian Reformed Church in Australia. And this minister said that his heart was so happy and was so comforted to see the trajectory that our churches were going in. Not necessarily in terms of church membership or bums on seats, not in terms of new buildings built or even new churches planted, but in terms of, I guess, the focus and the richness of its preaching centred on the grace of God. This was a very perplexing and shocking thing for me to hear.

He said to me that, and this is paraphrased, something along the lines of that there existed in his generation, perhaps even just the generation removed from us, a generation back. There was an inconceivable inconsistency that in our churches, these churches founded upon and driven by the wonderfully clear teachings called the doctrines of grace, that at one time we had preachers and churches who could often teach these doctrines of grace and yet be so far from experiencing the grace of those doctrines. How is it possible? How is it possible that even in a church built on the Reformation principle of salvation by grace through faith?

How could a church have fallen into a tradition instead of harshness and legalism? A church who on the one hand reviled the Pharisees as the enemies of Jesus, yet tripped over their own feet into the very same whitewashed tombs of pharisaical hypocrisy. How is that possible? Well, friends, I want to suggest it's far more possible than you think. And I will go so far as saying this morning, you've probably fallen into it yourself.

And I know it's true because I've fallen into it myself. And I know I've fallen into it myself because God's word says our hearts will always be tempted into falling into legalism and harshness. Well, we're going to look at where in the Bible it says that, and then we're going to look at the remedy for that. Let's turn to Romans three and probably a passage that many of you will be able to say off by heart. Romans chapter three and we're gonna read from verse 21.

Paul writes to the Roman church, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.

This was to show God's righteousness because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. So far our reading. Now if you remember the progress, or the logic behind the Roman letter, the letter to the Roman church, Paul has been spending a lot of time up until this point to make one thing very clear. And he sums it up for us in our passage here.

The point that he has been making in chapters one, two, and halfway through three is everyone has fallen short of the glory of God. He says in verse 10 of chapter three, no one is righteous, not even one. No human being alive or dead is righteous in and of themselves. Verse 18 in Romans one, Paul paints this incredibly vast universal image by saying the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and all unrighteousness of man. But now in verses 21 to 26 in chapter three, Paul is going to introduce the game changer.

And that is the power of God's grace which saves. And there are three things this morning that we're going to see this saving grace, this being saved by grace, what it actually means. The first thing Paul talks about is that being saved by grace, being justified is the word that he uses, means being justified apart from the law. So how does Paul bring to bear this marvellous truth of us living in amazing grace? What does it mean to be justified by grace alone?

Well, this is the point he makes in verse 24, isn't it? He says that we are justified by His grace as a gift. Notice the apostle Paul, in order to help us understand this, is saying that being justified by grace means by its definition you are justified apart from the law. Verse 21, the righteousness of God, the righteousness of God that justifies us that we received by faith, he says has been manifested apart from the law. Even though, or although the law and the prophets have borne witness to it.

What does it mean? What's he saying? He's saying that by my doing, that by my work, I can never accomplish my rightness with God. My work can never accomplish a rightness with God. What does the law refer to then?

It's not the Australian statutory law. It's not the common law that we abide by as citizens. It's God's unchanging moral code. It is the blueprint. It is the foundation by which all of humanity will be measured and tested.

And Paul is explaining here that the idea that you could take all of God's commandments and faithfully keep them all, and then on that basis come to God and say, I have been obedient to the law. Therefore I am justified in Your sight. But Paul says, and he has proven in these first three chapters that no one will keep that. No one can do that. Paul drives again and again and again in these three chapters the utter impossibility, the utter hopelessness of dreaming that you can be saved in this way.

Because he says all have fallen short. Every single one of us. And Paul is anxious to make this point. Paul is really anxious. Three chapters to make that point.

Why does he do this? Because he needs to drive home this point. The greatest enemy to our hope, the greatest enemy to our joy in life, the greatest enemy of our liberty is the creeping and the stealthy assault of a heart that thinks deep down, life should be better for me. God should be good to me because of something in me. God should be good to me because I am worthy enough to deserve it.

You can flip it the other way around. You could say in self-loathing, I am not worthy for God. Therefore He shouldn't be kind to me. But it hinges on this idea that who we are in relation to what we can do is somehow worthy of God's second look at us. But until God has washed our minds and our emotions and our deepest affections of the false notion that there must be something worthy enough in me to warrant His love, to warrant His second look.

Unless I've been washed of that mindset, I will remain cold and desperate and poor all my life. It's only when we have genuinely come to the point of seeing the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ where we discover and we clasp our hands over our mouths with shocked astonishment that we have never ever been good enough. That there is zero reason for any expectation, zero reason for any expectation of anything good or kind from a holy righteous God since we have all fallen short. Paul will later say that the wages of that falling short is death.

And so the incredible power of the gospel that overhauls people's lives and minds from generation to generation is that it washes hearts and minds clean from all the false notions of deserving anything good. So that we may finally bask in the reality that can give lasting joy, only thing that can give lasting joy. And that is that the sheer amazement is that I have done absolutely nothing, according or not according to God's law to deserve His love.

It is only because of God's infinite grace in Christ that I'm saved. Justification in the sight of God is by grace, and therefore it has to happen apart from the law. Being saved by grace, secondly, is a salvation that is a free gift. Paul continues in verse 21 that this justification that is apart from the law is a justification that is by grace as a free gift. The ESV says in the NIV it says freely.

As a free gift, the ESV says. Now the language experts amongst us, the English teachers here or just the teachers in general that are here, perhaps the Afrikaans teachers back in the day, perhaps even the Dutch teachers here, will point out that saying saved by grace as a gift is a redundancy because the two are synonymous. A gift and grace are the same things. Grace and free gift are synonyms. And so an editor of a book, if I was to write this chapter, would have said to me or to Paul perhaps, this is a redundancy.

This does not need to be in there to say that grace is a free gift. But there's an important emphasis that Paul is really wanting to make. This great salvation that we've received has come at absolutely no cost to you. It has come at absolutely no cost to you. This is what is being underlined.

Free. Free. And you might say, okay, God's salvation has come to me apart from the law. It comes to me without the need to keep the Ten Commandments perfectly.

I can accept that. And somehow God's worked around that. But somewhere in the back of our minds we have this nagging feeling. Perhaps it means something a little bit more intangible than the Ten Commandments. Perhaps we then should start talking about my affections towards God.

Perhaps I should talk about how much I worship Him and desire Him. Perhaps that's the intangible work apart from the law that I do need to do in order to be saved. The moral code may not save me because I know I can't keep it perfectly, but now perhaps I can keep something like being a good Christian, being a nice person. Perhaps if I can just love God a bit more fully, perhaps if I can worship Him just a bit more honestly, have a better outlook on my life, perhaps things a little more vague or ideological is what I can offer God to qualify me for His love.

We see it all the time. I hear it all the time. I should be loved by God because I am a Christian. What does that mean? What does that mean?

It is a label. It is something vague that qualifies me. But verse 24 drives home the very important thing we have to understand, the absolute radicality of this salvation, and that is that it is grounded in the concept of grace. God's grace as a free gift is saying that God is not gracious to me because Christ died for me. Listen to this.

God is not gracious to me because Christ died for me. Christ died for me because God is gracious to me. If I think that God has somehow become gracious because Jesus Christ died for me, then I'm going to be inclined to think that what Jesus did on the cross was to perhaps persuade an unwilling God, a cruel God, an angry God to become gracious to a dreadful sinner like me.

But open your eyes to read the words even here. God so loved the world first. Nothing did we bring that He gave His one and only son? So God's grace towards us does not begin at the cross. God's grace is what calls the cross. God's grace finds its consummation, its perfect example at the cross.

But our friend, it's only because of the gracious love of the Father that He sent His son into the world to rescue His people. Grace, therefore, isn't something that we tag onto God and we say that is one of the attributes or that is whatever. It's not as if He chose one day to be gracious and then sent Christ into the world. God isn't gracious like us, where we have to work hard to feel real love, to care enough about someone or something in order to show grace. God doesn't wear grace.

God is grace. Grace isn't something that exists, therefore, outside of the Trinity, the Godhead. Grace is at the very centre of who God is. It's not a power. It is not a concept. It is not an ideology that has been created to exist apart from God that He taps into from time to time.

Grace is the very nature of our God. And for this reason we find this most blessed redundancy in Paul's language, that His gracious disposition of a mercy that sent His son to be my saviour. Well, it comes to me at absolutely no cost to myself. And again we can say that we say amen, and we understand that logic.

But many of us here brought up in hard working homes where if somebody gave you something, you knew you were obligated to give something back in return. If not, you knew that relationship would somehow start breaking down, and so we find it so hard to believe. We find it inconceivable that you can invite someone to your place over and over again and never receive an invite to their place. We find that unbelievable. There's a tit for tat in our understanding even of grace, even of generosity.

We say even to God, let me help you pay for that. Okay. If I can't pay for it, let me do something nice. Let me do something nice, God, for Your church. This grace that I've received, it must mean I'll go to church every day, every Sunday now, at least until I forget again.

It means that I will reach out to all my mates. God, if I can get ten people in, the tenth is a freebie. My dear child, our God says, will you not realise that all the silver and the gold, the sweat of a million lives could never in any way compensate the price of My son? You could never afford this salvation. You see, this is the danger for Christians and this is why our church, even most churches, will wrestle with this.

And it is this danger for Christians that have been around for a little while that hear theology like this, the doctrines of grace. I dare say that most of us here are these people. At one point you may have been a young Christian, a new Christian, a person that just heard the grace of the gospel and received it and said yes.

Yes. I believe I am saved. And as a person just introduced to that grace for the first time you take God's salvation and His forgiveness because it sounds like a great deal, and it is a great deal. But the danger is that the more you grow in faith, the more you grow in sanctification and start living a more holy life by the power of the Holy Spirit, the more you grow, the more you are exposed to the awfulness of the sin in your life. You realise it more and more and more.

And whilst you grow as a true believer, your introspection just gets deeper and deeper and deeper. The self-evaluation is clearer and clearer. And you start realising just how sinful you are. When I first believed I was a little sinner. Now I'm seeing more clearly.

But this is the danger. As I've grown I've also received enough grace to start fixing up things in my life, and now knowing with increasing horror on the one hand the audacity of my sin combined with a little bit of progress in holiness, here comes the thief of grace. I think I have something to give back to God. Now I do. Now I've got just a little fraction of something stored up, scraped up together, a better family, a better way to vote for my politicians.

I will give this to You God. As my guilt keeps increasing I feel. Because I'm more aware of my sin now than ever before, at the same time I'm more capable of being a good person by the power of the Holy Spirit, I fall into danger of forgetting the absolutely free nature of grace. And so to my growing in faith Christians, I wanna tell you, I want you to hear that the guilt you sense, the guilt you sense has got nothing to do with what God thinks of you anymore.

That guilt is dead. That guilt should be dead. That guilt has been paid for. Your old life has been killed, murdered on the cross of Christ. Even as you realise that there's still more refinement that needs to take place, keep reminding yourself that I am saved by grace.

That is a gift. Completely free. Utterly unrepayable. Not even the worst feelings of guilt can repay this gift. No matter how much I bash myself up can repay this guilt, this gift, this debt I have towards my God.

All I can do to honour God who gave it all, all I can do to honour Him is to receive it. That is how I honour Him. How is this possible? This gift that is so gracious. How can we have the audacity to say that my eternal salvation is based on absolutely nothing that I can do or have ever done.

Not even on the very nicest things I can do with my life. Well, it's the third and the final point. It's based on God's righteousness. Being saved by grace means God's righteousness was fulfilled. Paul says all fall short of the glory of God, yet all may be saved by His grace as a gift.

But this is only possible, he continues in the verse, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God the Father put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith. And this was to show God's righteousness. Again, the word righteousness in our Christian circles can be thrown around so much that we kind of forget what it really means. Christians, in our vernacular, sometimes we think of righteousness as being synonymous with good. A righteous person is a good person, we say.

That's not completely wrong, but it's far more specific and nuanced than that. To be righteous means doing something right according to an agreed upon set of rules. In other words you are righteous when you act according to the things you said you would do. In the Bible someone is righteous when they act according to the law of God. That is how God said a righteous person would live.

Live according to the law and you will be righteous. But Paul has been saying all along in the first few chapters of Romans that no one is righteous, not even one. No one can obey the Lord, not even one. And yet here he calls God the righteous one and says that it is because of God's righteousness that grace has been given to us. What is Paul talking about here?

Now Paul mentions in the next verse there God's divine forbearance. Let's have a look. Partway through verse 25, this was to show God's righteousness because in His divine forbearance He has passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. What Paul is referring to here is the Old Testament sacrificial system.

He's talking about the realisation, even in the Old Testament, of every true believer in the Old Testament, and what they would have thought when they went and gave their sacrifice. They would have thought that the blood of bulls and goats is never an adequate sacrifice for my sin. The true believer would have said the life of an animal for the life of a person is not a perfect substitute. And Paul says that the righteousness of God, remembering that righteousness means keeping to what has been agreed upon, demanded that payment for sin would need to be made by a man for a man. If mankind was to find forgiveness and reconciliation with God, a greater sacrifice than bulls and goats were needed.

And Paul's saying that all throughout the Old Testament God was looking forward to the cross. In divine forbearance, staying His hand, God passed over those former sins. Not meaning that He was ignoring those sins, but God delayed His punishment. Seeing the sacrifices of the animals as an act of faith, but the real sacrifice, the real satisfactory sacrifice would be paid by one man, Jesus Christ. It's on the cross that God's righteousness to His law is fully seen.

Christ would bear the holy wrath of a holy God, not only against the sin of those who stood by as He was crucified, and not only for the sin of those who would come after Him, but to the thousands and thousands that were before Him. Through the death of His son, God the Father would show that He upheld His word perfectly. God Himself behaved righteously when He fulfilled the penalties of not keeping the law even in punishing Himself in the form of the perfect man. And so Jesus becomes, Paul says, the propitiation, the satisfactory sacrifice for the sins of God's people. Where humans once put forward lambs or oxen or goats confessing their sin, placing their sin on the animal and sending it to be slaughtered as an emulation of God's wrath on sin.

Paul says in almost the exact same wording that God the Father put forward His son, put forward His son as a lamb to the slaughter, placing on His son the sins of every believer, and then He actually poured out His wrath on that sacrifice. It was the only acceptable sacrifice. The heavenly Father never ceased, however, to love His son, even in that moment. In fact Jesus would teach us that the Father never loved His son more than when the son, in all that agony, was willing to beg the Father's wrath.

He never loved His son more. John 10:17, Jesus says the reason the Father loves me is because I laid down my life. My dear friend, is that not the greatest news we will ever hear? When in all your life have you ever tasted love like this? When have you experienced ever something so absolutely undeserved?

We may have received something unasked for, something unexpected, but there was always something just leaning back in the back pocket. Unexpected, undeserved and supremely unrepayable. Here is a power that is greater than all the sin in your life combined. Here is a power that beats that sin that wages against your heart and your mind. Here is a power that the sin that tempts you to feel hopeless will overpower.

Here is the power to live a life truly free, even truly good, and the power is called grace. And it's ours. Let's pray. Father we thank You for these words again. We thank You, Lord, for the incredible emotion, the incredible freeing power of this truth that sets us free to be free indeed.

Lord when we just keep returning to that poisoned well of guilt that just seems like somehow we can go to be bad enough to warrant Your love. Father will You strike that down in us? Will You kill it so that we may know for sure that this faith, this life simply handed over to You, this clinging to the work of Jesus Christ once and for all for me is the birth of eternity, is the birth of a new life? The dead is gone. Father I pray for those of us who may not wrestle with the poisoned well of guilt, but we may drink from the cup of pride.

Where we think that we have scraped together enough of a good lifestyle, enough of a good understanding, even of the doctrines of grace to warrant a second look by You. Oh God, strike that down in us. Obliterate it from us so that we may have the humility of even the perfect son who did not raise his voice in the street, did not bellow it from the rooftops, but in meekness served those who would even deny Him. Oh God, forgive us. Forgive us of the guilt that will seek to steal Your glory.

Forgive us of the pride that will seek to rob the King of Kings of the bounty, the treasure that He has paid for in His blood. Forgive us, God. Give us the right understanding, and Holy Spirit help us to remember, to train our hearts and our minds to not go down those paths again. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.