Sermon Transcript

Let’s get our Bibles open to Ephesians chapter 2. If you were here a couple weeks ago—the last time I had an opportunity to speak to you—if you’ll remember, I told you the message wasn’t going to resolve. So, this is the resolve to that message. You’ve been kind of sitting there [waiting].

We’ve called this series Breath Taken, and you’ll remember I told you if I do my job right, and you do your job right, then there should be some times—as we walk through this message—there should be some audible gasps as our breath is taken away. The last time we were together we talked about how we ought to have our breath taken away by the awfulness of sin. So, just to make sure we’re each doing our job right, let’s make sure that this works here, okay? “Sin is awful!” There you go; that’s the way it supposed to work! So, that’s the bad news.

Now, the good news is this: not only is sin awful (that ought to take your breath away), but you ought to have your breath taken away by this statement: “Grace is awesome!” That’s right! We’re about to find that out!

As we’re getting into Christmas—and having been with my mom last week—I was thinking about Christmas at my house on Christmas morning. Do you remember this when you were a kid? You rushed down there to see what presents had your name on them under the tree? And I was thinking how different was, probably, compared to Rochelle’s. Rochelle is one of ten children; I’m an only child! I can remember my mom actually getting me a copy of the Sears Wish Book. How many of you remember the Sears Wish Book?

She would actually hand me the Sears Wish Book and a pen, and she would say, “I want to know what you want for Christmas.” I did damage to this Sears Christmas Wish Book, as I circled all the different things I wanted. And, lo and behold!—on Christmas morning, many of the things that I had circled were wrapped and had my name on them as a gift, on Christmas morning. And it wasn’t so much that my parents were rich—they really weren’t—but when you only have one kid to spend it on [that kid] does pretty well!

I can remember these gifts with my name on them. Do you know what that whole Christmas tradition is based on? It’s based on the verses we’re about to read right now—because whenever any parent gives a dirty, rotten, sinning child a gift, it’s an act of grace (of the parent’s grace), reflecting God’s grace.

So, let’s begin to read here, and I’ll give you the first point as we dive in.

 

1. We were dead in sin, BUT GOD makes us alive with Christ. (v. 4-7)

 

By review, let’s read these first three verses of Ephesians 2. Remember, I’m going to try to do my job right; you try to do your job right. Here we go: “And you were dead…” Alright, that did not take your breath away the way it should have! This is a breath taking statement. “You were dead!” “…in [your] trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh…” that’s bad, just bad, “carrying out the desires of the body  and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath…” Do you want me to read that again? Let that just settle in there for a second, okay? “…[you were] by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Until you have had your breath taken away by the reality of the awfulness of your sin, until you have made the connection between God’s wrath and your name, you cannot fully appreciate the grace of God. Until you’ve had your breath taken away by the awfulness of your sin, the severity of God’s wrath, you will not fully have your breath taken away by God’s gracious gift to you.

Do you understand what this verse is saying? “I was dead; I was deceived by the devil. I was disobedient, following the passions of my flesh, and I was doomed!” That’s the reality of a person who has never experienced the grace of God. Outside of Christ, that’s how we all were. But verse 4 changes the story. As a matter of fact, two words change the whole story.

Look at the first two words of verse 4: “But God!” “But God, being rich in mercy, because of [his] great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved…” Do you want another run at that? “…by grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. . .” [Ephesians 2:1-6, ESV]

You see, those two words, “but God” are the hinge on which the entire story of the Bible turns. Those two words, “but God,” is the hinge upon which every story of every saved person turns. Until you have a “but God” story, you don’t have God. You don’t have grace. And you are still dead.

I told you two weeks ago, there are only two types of people in this room. There are people who were dead, and there are people who are dead. If you don’t have a “but God” story, you’re still dead. Until you can say, “I was dead, but God but made me alive…I was dead but God sparked spiritual life in me…I was dead, but God resurrected and regenerated that in me that was dormant and dead.” Until you can say, “but God gave me life,” you’re still dead! Until you can say, “I was deceived, but God spoke truth to me and woke me up to the reality of what is really true,” you’re still in your sins.

Until you can say, “I was disobedient, but God gave me new desires and new appetites for things that I never thought I would love. Things I once hated I now love; things I once loved, I now hate. “But God” changed all this in me! Until you can say, “I was doomed as an object of God’s wrath, but God graciously made me an object of His mercy, His love and His kindness…” Until you can point to a time in which all that changed, you’re still dead in your sin!

For me, that time happened at the beginning of my tenth-grade year. I was fifteen years old…I’ve shared this with you before…and my family didn’t grow up going to church. Every now and then we’d kind of scrape ourselves out of bed and, for some reason, show up at church. But we made a mistake. When I was seven years old, we moved into a house right next door to a deacon at the local Baptist church—and he started inviting our family to this church. His daughter started dating the youth pastor, and so as he would come by to see her, he would inevitably find me out in the driveway shooting baskets, and he would come and talk to me, and invite me to church.

Eventually I began to show up; still didn’t really understand what was going on. It was kind of boring…but there were some exciting things happening.  There was pizza, there were youth camps, there was Six Flags, and there were girls! So, I was just enough interested to keep coming back.

I made it into my eighth-grade year and I got a new Sunday School teacher—and he became my Sunday School teacher in the ninth grade. This guy—his name was Randy—he would not let me miss church! And so, he sent me cards and he made phone calls and he’d stop by the house, and he wanted me to know I was expected to be in church to hear this message every single Sunday.

Last Wednesday, I walked into the funeral home and guess who the first person I ran into was? It was this guy, Randy Sellers. I took a picture with him. Humanly speaking, I would still be dead—spiritually—if it wasn’t for a guy who believed that God had grace for somebody like me! Do you have a Randy in your life? Are you a Randy in somebody’s life—that you’re still so breath taken by the grace of God that you want to get this message out?

Has that message of grace ever penetrated your heart, so that the things that we’re talking about aren’t just religious things, and aren’t just some formula for getting you to a better place? It’s not just self-help books and behavior modification. Have you been made alive in Christ? “But God.”

The word “but,” in the English language, isn’t that a conjunction? Am I thinking of my fifth-grade grammar correctly? It’s the divine conjunction that changes everything in a person’s life. Do you have a “but God” story where things changed? If not, you need a “but God” story, and you can have one before you leave this building.

There’s another conjunction here in verse 4. It’s the word “because.” You say, “Why would God be so kind and gracious and loving toward me?” “But God, being rich in mercy,” next word “because…” You see, that is the defining conjunction. Why would God do this? “Because of the great love with which he loved us…”

            The Scripture goes on and tells us, “because of His mercy,” “because of His kindness toward us…” If you somehow understand God to be a mean old ogre and a killjoy, who wants to zap your fun, you don’t know the character and nature of God. He wants to be so gracious toward somebody who’s so undeserving of this gracious gift. We were dead in sin, but God made us alive together with Him.

My stepdad, who my mom married, who just went to be with the Lord – I didn’t know his whole story. He was eighty-four years old when he passed away this past week. But he was a very good man. He was a man of integrity, a man of honor. There was a twenty-one gun salute; he was in the military, he was a Sergeant Major in the artillery, he lost his hearing. Fought in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He was a man of character and integrity in every way—a godly man, loved the Lord, loved church, was so generous, loved my Mom. But as a twenty-two-year-old boy in the Army, he understood that, in spite of all the good things that he had done, he was still not good enough—and needed a Savior! I heard his “but God” story at the funeral.

You know, one of these days there are going to be a lot of people show up at your funeral. Is part of what the preacher is going to say a “but God” story? “He was good, but not good enough.” “He was good, but realized he was not good enough.” “He was a sinner, but God was gracious!” Do you have that story? If not, you can have one! You say, “How do I get that story?” I’m glad you asked!

There are two more points to the message. We need to understand that we were dead sin, but God has made us alive in Christ. But listen:

 

2. We want to earn salvation through work, BUT GOD wants to give salvation by grace through faith. (v. 8-9)

 

I want you to see it here in Ephesians 2:8-9. Paul says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

            Do you know what the default setting is for man in relation to God? The default setting, the way that we think—which is entirely wrong—we think, because God is good, the way that we come into relationship with Him is by being good, too.

There’s only one problem with that. The gap between God’s goodness and your goodness is—still a gap! And any gap at all is a problem. It means you’re separated from God. God doesn’t grade on a curve. Did any of you teenagers take any tests this week? I heard there was an SAT test. Did anybody score the perfect score on the SAT test? And do they grade on a curve there? Uh, no they do not! And neither does God. And so, even if you are a B+, or an A-, there’s still a gap in the goodness of God and your own goodness. We think that good works will outweigh bad works.

And so, if you’re a person who has some bad works on your side of the ledger…How many of you have some bad works?  How many of you have failed to live up? There are some things you’re embarrassed by, some regrets over things you’ve done in the past? God knows all those things.

But do you know what our default setting is? We think that somehow—we know about the bad works—if we could just get the good works to outweigh the bad works, then God will look at us and say, “Well, there you go! You’re pretty good! And you’re a lot better than most. And so, come on in!” That’s the way we want to think.

But what we just read is this, “We are not saved by works.” There is no amount of work that you could do that would gain God’s favor—because you’re simply not good enough. You’re simply not as good as God! So, we must be saved by something other than our works. We are saved by grace—God’s grace—which gives us something we never could earn or deserve on our own.

So, “…we are saved…” The word “saved” is an interesting word—it’s used a lot in church. It’s probably over-used in church, because it has kind of lost it’s meaning through the years. It’s not a bad word, but we’ve probably used it a little too much. But…are you saved? Has anybody ever asked you that? “Are you saved?” Have any of you ever told somebody, “I’m saved.” How many of you are saved? Raise your hand—I want to make sure. Good! There are some people who are saved in here. That’s not a bad word. But we use it so much. Do you understand what it means? Saved.

This week, after I got back from Oklahoma, I immediately had to run over to Chicago, because on Thursday and Friday I was assigned to do two training sessions in our Harvest Bible Chapel Training Center for our next round of church planters. Did you know that there are forty guys who have spent the last four months in Chicago in training, ready to be launched out to launch forty brand-new Harvest Bible Chapels? And they’re at the end of their training, so they invited me to go over there to teach and train on preaching. That was my contribution.

So, these guys are like Coke inside a bottle that’s been shaken for four months! These guys are about to explode: “I want to go plant a church!” These guys are raring to go. I got over there – I took Pastor Tyler Holder with me, our college pastor and Mitchell Helmkamp, and those are fun young guys – we were having some fun there, and then, I grabbed Brooke, my daughter, who lives there in Chicago.

We didn’t have anything to do on Thursday night. Tyler, the director of entertainment in the group, was looking for some fun for us to do on Thursday night. “Well, we could go see a movie.” So he goes and scans—what acceptable movies could some pastor-types go to and not be too offended by. He said, “It looks like we have two options here. We could either go see Dr. Strange [the Marvel thing], or we could go see a movie called Hacksaw Ridge.”

So, he kind of did the research and he said, “I recommend that we go see Dr. Strange.” That was a bad decision; that was not quality entertainment, in my opinion, and I think we made a poor choice there. I wondered what we missed out on, so I questioned, “What’s this Hacksaw Ridge movie about?” And so, I found out, and thought, “Man, that would have been a great movie to go to.”

I still haven’t seen it, but it’s about this guy named Desmond T. Doss. This is a true story of a guy (go ahead and throw that picture up) who was a World War II veteran, who actually was a Conscientious Objector. He believed that the war was just, but he just couldn’t himself to bring himself to kill another human being.

So, he was stationed on the front lines in Okinawa as a medic, and without firing a shot, and without ever handling a firearm, he saved seventy-five other soldiers as he repeatedly went into the face of the enemy—went into the line of fire—grabbed them and snatched them out of harm’s way. There are seventy-five men who survived that battle because Desmond T. Doss went into the conflict. Do you understand that, in a spiritual sense, you were one of those men laying on the battlefield?

Do you understand, in a spiritual sense, Desmond T. Doss was a savior? That’s what Jesus did! He left the safest place in the universe and came into the conflict! At the risk of His own life, at the cost of His own life, He came to where you were—dying and wounded—and brought you out alive! We have been saved by grace. There was nothing those seventy-five men could do in their own effort to survive. There is nothing you and I can do in our own goodness or effort to survive. You and I need a Savior, just like those seventy-five men. Have you been saved?

Do you understand that when the passage says, “We have been saved,” that’s a past-tense phrasing of “salvation”? If you’re here this morning and you raised your hand a few minutes ago, you might have, “I have been saved.” But, listen! Do you know the temptation? The longer you have been saved, the less it takes your breath away regarding the grace it took to save you in the past?

And do you also understand this? You need as much of the grace of God to save you in this very moment as you needed thirty years ago to save you the first time you responded to the gospel in faith.

Do you understand that every time you hear the gospel, the only breath-taken response should be to put your faith in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation? The moment that you start trusting in your goodness and your good works is the moment that you stop having your breath taken away by God’s grace. The longer you have been saved, the more you need to hear this statement. You’re still being saved, and you’re still being saved by grace through faith.

If you have been saved, you’re still being saved, and you will be saved by grace through faith. So, every time you sin, what should you do? You should, by faith, believe the gospel. Every time you hear the gospel, it’s an opportunity to wrap your life around the Lord Jesus Christ and realize, “There’s not a single ounce of goodness in me that’s any better than it was on the day that You first saved me.” But it’s not our default.

Do you know what our default is? Our default is a works-based—or a performance-based—relationship with God. That’s why He says over and over in the passage, “It is not of your own doing, not a result of works, so that no one can boast!” You can’t boast about it because you didn’t do anything to get it.

But we don’t think that way. As a matter of fact, right now in your heart—more than likely—you identify more with the left side of this list than you do with the right side. In performance-based salvation, we understand sin to be simply bad behavior: “I said some bad words. I had some bad thoughts. I did some bad things.” But, in a grace-based salvation, we understand sin as a heart issue. “I do bad things because I am a bad person. I have a bad heart, a corrupt heart, a deluded heart, a depraved heart—and I need a heart transplant.” And that only happens as an act of God’s grace.

We think in terms of sin-solution to try harder, and if you’re not careful, you’ll go to church and you’ll hear the preacher telling you, you should try harder and be better and you shouldn’t do all those bad things this week that you did last week. Now, a good teacher’s going to tell you that, but a good preacher’s also going to tell you, you can’t do it by yourself. There’s nothing in you good enough. There’s not an effort or a desire to do better this week than you did last week. So, in grace-based salvation we believe that sin’s solution is not trying harder. It’s a change of heart! It’s something God has to give me as a gift.

A performance-based salvation starts the morning with promises to do better: “Oh, God, You know how miserably I failed yesterday! God, You know those words that came out of my mouth. God, You know those attitudes in my heart. God, You know the lust and where my eyes went. And you know the attempt I made upon my boss’s life. That was not a godly thing to do! God, I don’t want to act like that today. Would You please help me to try harder and do better? Grrrr! I’m going to do better God. I’m going to show You. I’m going to do better!” And, by 8:15 in the morning, the boss is already dead, because all the promising in the world did not give you the power to do what you promised!

But, in grace-based salvation, we understand—we’ve got to start our day with a plea for help: “I cannot do this on my own! I need God’s help. I need God’s grace!” Not only to forgive sin, but to enable the obedience not to sin! In performance-based salvation, our default is to attempt to rescue our self through personal strength or increased discipline.

And so, we read self-help books, and we might even gather an accountability group around us: “Please, would you help me? Would you encourage me? Text me, tell me the things I’m supposed to do during the day.” We come up with all these external structures to prevent us from sinning. “I’m going to get stronger; I’m going to do better!” But, in grace-based salvation, we abandon self altogether. We admit our weakness and we cry out to Christ for rescue! Do you understand the difference?

The reason why some of you are not saved is because you are unwilling to admit how weak you are. In pride, we can’t bring ourselves to say, “I can’t do this by myself!” We want to think we can do better. We think we’re better than most, and yet a true believer who has been saved by grace through faith, abandoned self, continually admits weakness and continually cries out to God for rescue.

In performance-based salvation, our default, we can never be assured that we’ve done enough, that we’re good enough, that we’ve tried hard enough; that we’ve built a big enough resume to present to God to say, “Here, look at it; here’s all the good things I have done.” You can never know if you’ve done enough! And there are some faith systems that will teach you that you can’t ever really know if you’re saved until you finally get there—until God kind of tallies the score. That’s not the teaching of the Scripture.

The teaching of the Scripture, what we just read, is this: You can have an absolute confidence that Christ has done enough on your behalf. His resume is just fine—thank you! All you need to present to God the Father is His resume in place of yours through faith. “I’m going to stop believing in myself. I’m going to start believing in Christ and trust Him as my substitute.” The offer of Christ is an act of grace that God gives you because of His kindness, His love, His mercy upon a pitiful person like you. Some of you are too proud to admit that you’re pitiful. Because you want to grab hold of the left side of this chart. It is by grace we have been saved.

The teaching of the Scripture is simply this: We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone! We’ve talked about that divine adjective, “but God.” We’ve talked about that defining conjunction, “Because of His love toward us.” There is a diluting conjunction that’s missing in this text. Do you know what it is? It’s the little conjunction, “and.”

Look at it, verse 8: “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Notice there’s a period and not a conjunction. We want to say, through faith and church attendance. Through faith and sacraments. Through faith and baptism. Through faith and giving a lot of money to worthy causes. Through faith and. And the list goes on and on and on. We want to put the “and” after the “faith.” But it is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. It’s not Christ and the church. Not Christ and the Pope. Not Christ and the pastor. It is only Christ who can save you for the glory of God alone, so that you can’t take any credit for it or boast in anything but Christ!

Now, I know what some of you are saying: “Now wait a minute, Trent, if I believed what you’re saying right now…What would motivate me not to kill my boss? What would motivate me to stay married in a difficult marriage? What would motivate me to love difficult teenagers? What would motivate me to obey difficult parents? What would motivate me to do anything? If I knew that it was a free gift of God—I don’t have to do anything to get it—then why in the world would I ever obey Him?” It is because of this truth: Even though salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone—the faith that saves is never alone.

In the book of James, James was thinking about this, and he asked this question, “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” [James 2:14] It’s a rhetorical question. The answer is obvious. I’ll ask the question again. You give the obvious answer. “Can that faith save him?” No! “So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” [James 2:15] Does that mean we’re saved by works? No! What is means is the faith that saves, works. And that’s why we have verse 10 in this passage.

You see:

 

3. We can’t be saved by good works, BUT GOD created us for good works. (v. 10)

 

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Why would I not kill my boss? Because God has prepared beforehand for me to forgive him and love him and to serve him as an act of grace. He doesn’t deserve it, but I didn’t deserve it either. And so, I bend this vertical grace horizontal. He gets to live because I got to live.

The grace of God changes my behavior. It reorients what I do. It creates good works in me as the overflow of grace that God has deposited in me. The outline is very simple: God has done all the work for me, but God also wants to work on me. Verse 10 says, “We are His workmanship…”

How many of you guys have a workbench somewhere in your home? Garage? How many of you currently have a project on the workbench that has been there far too long? Yeah, alright, thank you for those honest confessions in church this morning. Do you understand, God has a workbench? Do you know what’s on the workbench? Some of you are thinking, “It’s my wife!” It’s you, buddy! It’s you! You are an unfinished project.

As God extends grace to you, even though He’s done all the work for you, He’s not finished working on you. He wants to scrub off all those rough edges. He wants to change those attitudes in you. He wants to put new desires in you. He wants to give you courage to risk and lead, and do things that have not been done so far in your life—because His grace is enough, not only to secure your salvation; His grace is enough to motivate you to show grace to others. So, God works for you, God works on you, and God has some work He wants to get done through you—some work that He has prepared beforehand. He’s already ordained it; it’s already on His list, He’s gonna get it done, He’s gonna get you to do it. It’s all an act of grace, and you don’t get any credit for it, because you wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for God’s grace in your life!

Are you saved? How can you know? You can know because you can look back and there’s a “but God” chapter in your story, and you can begin to see some work that God has done on you, to change you. You can see some work that God has done through you—that you never would have done if it wasn’t for God making you alive in Christ. There are only two types of people in the room: those who were dead—and those who are dead. Have you been saved? Are you alive in Christ? Do you have a “but God” story? If you don’t, you can get one today.

You say, “What do I have to do?” By grace, through faith, you have to believe that you can’t do anything and you have to believe that Christ has done everything on the cross. You were a child of wrath—you were an object of God’s wrath—but God devoted His wrath to Christ on that cross so that you could simply be an object of God’s grace! Do you believe that this morning? Do you believe that you’ll never be good enough?

Are you ready to turn from that sin, and even turn from self-righteous efforts to earn His favor, and rest your confidence in Christ this morning?