The Grace of God

We've been considering the attributes or perfections of God for some time now.

This morning we're going to consider the grace of God, the grace of God.

And I, what a privilege it is to seek to unfold this perfection of God before you this morning.

There's a reason that our church is named Grace Bible Church.

There's a reason that the press is called Free Grace Press.

Grace is such a central element of all of our hope, of our lives, of who God is, of God's plan, of redemption. We will spend eternity considering and rejoicing and being in all of the grace of God that is shown to us in Christ. There's a really wonderful stanza in the hymn that's titled"How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds." It's a hymn that John Newton wrote. The stanza goes like this,"By thee my prayers acceptance gain, although with sin defiled, Satan accuses me in vain, and I am owned a child." What a contrast. The accusation of the enemy, Satan, God's adversary, accusing his people, accusing us, and we are adopted as children. Each state has its own adoption laws and processes and procedures. You may have been a witness to some of this, or maybe even participated. Usually an adoption process culminates with a courtroom hearing in which the child is officially and legally made to be a son or a daughter of the adoptive parents.

During this hearing, it's common for the judge to interview the parents and to ask them questions and to tell them certain things about this monumental step that's taking place.

A common question that's asked by the judge to the parents is something like this,"Do you understand that this child will have equal rights and claim to your inheritance, the same as if it were a biological child?" I've heard this multiple times, and there's other questions that go along with that. Every time I hear that, and just recently the Moon family, it strikes me as just this incredibly powerful picture of what God does of the gospel. This is a picture of grace. The child that is being adopted is being grafted into a family that's not their own, and they're being grafted into that family for a reason that has nothing to do with that child's merits. That child brings nothing to the bargaining table. They haven't paid their way into this family. They haven't earned their way. It's not justified by something that's contained within them. It's because of the kindness and compassion and the love of the adoptive parents. It is because of grace. The orphan child isn't adopted because the parents are hoping that the child will become rich one day and pay them back. Rather, they're brought into the family because of grace. Now, this is a picture of what God has done for us, what God is doing for us right now for those of us who are in Christ. In the passage we just read of Ephesians 2, Paul is describing a spiritual adoption. He makes plain the fact that those who are children of God now were before lifeless and hopeless. Their adoption into the family of God was all of grace. It was all because of grace. Let me make it personal. You have been adopted into the family of God. You are a son or a daughter of God purely because of God's free grace, not because of a single thing that was found in you. In fact, everything that was found in you would lead to the conclusion that the opposite should have been done. Yet because of God's grace, you were adopted. So what is grace? Let me give you a definition. This is a bit complex, but it's important to lay these points out. But I do want us to get to the heart of it. I want you to leave here filled with joy and thanksgiving because of this reality. But AW Pink defines it like this. He says, "It is the eternal and absolute free favor of God manifested in the vouchsafement or the giving of spiritual and eternal blessings to the guilty and the unworthy." Let me read it one more time. "It is the eternal and absolute free favor of God manifested in the vouch safement or the giving of spiritual and eternal blessings to the guilty and to the unworthy." Now, if you want a shorthand version of this, you would just say unmerited favor. Unmerited favor. It's the giving of a gift to an unworthy recipient. So there are a few characteristics of God's grace that we ought to keep in mind. These are the three principal characteristics of the grace of God. Here's the first one. It's eternal. It is eternal. Grace was planned before it was exercised. There wasn't a moment of decision after you were born where God looked upon you and said,"Well, which way will I show grace to him or not?" God's grace towards his people was planned before it was exercised. It was purposed before it was imparted. 2 Timothy 1.9 says, "Who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began." And because grace was never bestowed upon you because of your worthiness, it will never be taken away because of your unworthiness. In fact, you are unworthy. That's the definition of grace. The only requirement for grace is that you be unworthy. That's the definition of it. "He who began the good work of grace in you will be faithful to complete it." Grace will complete what grace began. This is the foundation of any assurance that we have in our preservation, in our hope to get to heaven. It's one thing to say that, yes, Christ wiped the slate clean. When we came to faith in Christ when we were born again, it was like we got a fresh start. You get a second chance, right? You even hear that sometimes.

"The Lord gave me a second chance." May it never be. If you got a second chance, well, you're going to do the same thing that you did with the first chance. It is all of grace. If you are in Christ, everything about you, everything about your life, all of your circumstances, all of the things that you've gone through, all of the stages that you've passed, the relationships that you've had, the struggles that you've had to fight against, it is all permeated with the grace of God in Christ. If you were in Christ, that is true. Before you were in Christ, it was all of grace leading you to Him, all of it. Since that point, it's been all of grace keeping you in Him. You might say, "Well, you don't know what I... I've gone through really hard things. I know." It is the grace of God that has sustained you, that's kept you. When you woke up this morning, you continued to believe in Christ, didn't you? The morning previous and last week, and as you got up from your bed, you weren't an atheist, were you? Why? The grace of God, sustaining you. You're not keeping yourself believing. You're not keeping yourself saved.

You are not keeping yourself in Christ. God does that, and it is His grace.

The second principle characteristic is that it is free. It is free. It cannot be purchased. No one can barter for it. It cannot be earned. If it could, then it would no longer be grace, as Paul says in Romans. But free grace, it doesn't just mean that we don't pay for it. Yeah, that's a part of it, but it's bigger than that. If you... let me say it like this. Free grace means that God is completely free in His distribution of grace. In other words, there's nothing that is forcing His hand to show this favor to anyone. He is not obligated for any reason to give grace to anyone. God gives grace according to His good pleasure. Romans 3, 24, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace," says, "as a gift." In other versions, it says, "by His free grace." By His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

And here's the third point. It is sovereign. And this follows from the freeness of His grace. God's grace is also sovereign. It means that He exercises it toward and bestows it upon whom He pleases according to His sovereign will. God sovereignly bestows His grace upon whomever He chooses.

This can get... this gets some people tied up in knots a little bit thinking about this. We have to be careful here and not set ourselves up. When we deal with any of these questions that have to do that touch upon the sovereignty of God, and really all of them do, but we have to be careful here not to set ourselves up in the judgment seat. It is good to seek truth, to ask questions, and to even to struggle with things. It is not good, however, to exercise judgment over God and say,"God, you shall not be like this. You will not do this because I feel uncomfortable with it." What we have to remember is that if God did not exercise His sovereign will and bestow His grace upon us freely despite our unworthiness, then no one would be saved. It's not a question of, "Well, why isn't this person saved?" or "Why would this person not be saved?" The question is, "Why would God save anyone?" He saves us not because of any merit in us or any deservings of our own, but because of His sovereign grace. Divine compassion redeemed us, and when we were far off, infinite pity brought us back. Now, let me touch upon a couple of points here having to do with the grace of God. The first is the occasion for His grace. We've already seen this, but let me try to drive this point further home. But before the creation, God was gracious, but there was no occasion to exercise His graciousness. There was no need for it. Not that He wasn't, but there was no being upon whom to lavish it. Now, have you ever heard of about a person who spent many years in prison, only to be found innocent of the crime? Maybe spent decades, and there's a big news story he's finally released, and he's been shown to be innocent. It was a wrongful conviction, and now the truth has come out, and they are finally free. It's not uncommon to begin to think of the gospel and our redemption in those same terms. You may even begin to have the idea that Christ came and rescued you from a wrongful conviction, as if the devil accused you, and you were put in prison, you were made His slave unjustly. And Christ came and vindicated you, and you have now been proven to be something different than what you were accused of. But that's not what happened at all. Christ did not come to overturn a wrongful conviction, because your conviction was not wrongful. Everything the devil accused you of was absolutely true. In fact, all of the sins that you have committed against God that you could name this morning aren't even half of the sins you've actually committed. Remember the lines I read at the beginning from Isaac Watts, "Satan accuses me in vain, and I am owned a child." Satan's accusations against you aren't in vain because they're untrue. That's not why they're in vain. You were on death row and it was justified. It was deserved. So Christ didn't come to overturn a wrongful conviction. He came so that when your name was called for the gallows, He could step in and take your place. Christ didn't die for an innocent man. He was the innocent man. He died for his enemy, you, in order to make you his friend. That's why Satan's accusations are in vain, because the penalty has been paid. So this is the occasion for the demonstration of the grace of God.

We can define the grace of God and talk about its principal attributes, but if you want to see the grace of God, look to the cross of Christ. This is the grace of God illustrated before us working on our behalf. Consider for whom Jesus came. He came for you, a sinful man or woman. You had to face His image. You had abused His love. You were rebelling against Him. Yet He came to you and He was resolved to conquer your stubbornness with His kindness. Why would He choose you? Why did He not go to the fallen angels? They're of a more noble origin. They're more intelligent. They're more skilled.

They're more able for service than you are. But behold the grace of God in Christ. He did not come for the fallen angels. He came for you. He came for you. It's like a magnet. A magnet will not draw gold or pearls to itself, but plain old common iron, an inferior metal. In the same way, Christ leaves aside the angels, the gold, the pearl, and He comes to you, a poor, weak, and sinful man or woman and draws you into His embraces. Wonder of wonders, what grace! The Scriptures correctly describe us when we read in Ephesians 2. You were dead and your trespasses and sins in which you once walked. You followed the course of this world. You followed the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. You all once lived in the passions of your flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. You were by nature children of wrath. You were children of the devil without light and without hope. Your only hope was grace, grace, God's grace. So this is the mechanism of grace. Christ crucified for sinners. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoptions, adoption as sons.

This is God's working of grace toward us, the operation of God's grace. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. But God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead and our trespasses made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved.

So how does this work? If you're unfamiliar with the theological term, double imputation, you need to understand the meaning of that. 2 Corinthians 5.21 is the key verse for that. This is the way that God's grace works through the cross of Christ. The verse says, "For our sake He made Him." So God made Christ and all of this for our sake. For my sake, for your sake, God made Christ to be sin. Who knew no sin? So the one who knew no sin, the innocent man, was made to be sin. Our sin placed upon Him, our sin deposited into His account. Why? So that in Him, in Christ, we might become the righteousness of God. It's known as the great exchange.

Our sin is reckoned or imputed or placed upon Christ. Christ's righteousness is reckoned or imputed or placed upon us. That's the great exchange. That's double imputation. That's 2 Corinthians 5.21. That is the grace of God in Christ. Now, if you are in Christ, when God the Father looks upon you, what does He see?

The righteousness of Christ. You are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That is how God the Father sees you. You are eternally in that position. The last point to end our time, the works of grace. The works of grace. Or in other words, what does grace do?

Well, the grace of God, because of the grace of God, we now have a way to the Father through Jesus Christ. When grace begins to work in us, something happens. I love an illustration that a brother of mine shared in Kenya one day. He was talking to the Kenyan men and he said, "Brothers, what if I stood up before you this morning and I told you that on my way to class this morning, as I was walking towards the church, that an 18-wheeler, an 18-wheel big rig truck ran over me on my way. Now, thankfully I survived and here I am and we're going to go through class today. What would you say?" We would say that you're lying. You're not telling the truth. Why? Because there's no evidence whatsoever of it. Your clothes are clean. There's no blood. There's no broken bones. You look totally fine. How could an 18-wheeler have run over you? Well, the fact of the matter is when God begins a work of grace in the heart of man, things change. It is a powerful effect. It's like an 18-wheeler running over you. The first thing that happens is the exercise of faith and repentance.

That's what happens when the work of grace begins in the heart of a man. He places his faith in Christ and he repents of sin and he never stops. He continues believing upon Christ and he continues repenting of his sin. Of course, he's born again. That's the moment of justification and becoming a child of God. A person who has a work of grace begun in his heart has a new orientation in his life. Whereas before he was walking toward the pit of destruction, he was walking on the wide road following the ways of the world, the desires of his flesh, the lust of his eyes. When the work of grace begins in the heart of a man or a woman, they begin to walk down a different road, the narrow road toward the celestial city. They desire the things of God. Now, none of this is done perfectly. I'm not saying that you become a perfect individual. Of course not. But you have a new orientation. You're headed toward God. You walk in his direction instead of away from him. So, you desire those things. You desire to be a part of the family of God. You desire to read his word and be obedient. And when you fail, you repent because of that desire. You seek after the things of the Lord. You want the things of the Lord. Now, the other side of that coin is that you flee from sin. That is no longer your orientation. Do you fall into sin? Yes. That's a part of sanctification.

You're still battling against the old man. Sin still has influence and power in this world.

But you don't orient your life toward it. You flee from it. You sin less and less as your life goes on. When you do sin, you repent of it. You don't lust after it as you did in your previous life.

This is the effect of the working of grace, of God's grace, in the heart of a man or a woman.

I'll close with this. If you find that there is none or maybe what you feel to be too little evidence of the working of grace, then it is good to examine yourself. And it may be that the Lord has not begun a work of grace in your heart. Maybe you have not been born again. It is good to examine ourselves. The last thing I want to do is push someone into a place where they're doubting their salvation. That's not my desire here. My desire is if anyone is struggling with that, please come talk with one of us, with one of the elders. It would be a great privilege for us to sit with you and counsel you through those questions and concerns and doubts that you have.

And examining yourself for evidence, the evidences that I just mentioned are a wonderful way to examine yourself.