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SECTIONS - About Grace...
Unknown
Unexpected
Undeserved
Unvalued
Summary |
“AMAZING GRACE”
— isn’t it true? Among the most amazing things in all
creation — that’s grace. It’s no wonder that John
Newton wrote that hymn. Grace is amazing from start to end.
Throughout the history of Christianity,
men and women have been struck by the immensity of God’s
grace.
Paul wrote,
By grace you
are saved through faith.
John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s
Progress, also wrote an autobiograph called Grace Abounding
to the Chief of Sinners.
John Newton wrote,
Amazing Grace,
how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
As the other old hymn says,
Grace, ’tis
a charming sound,
Melodious to the ears...
There isn’t time to talk
about how Charles Finney discovered grace while he was praying
in the forest, or about how John Wesley discovered it at a little
meeting house. There isn’t time to tell the story of Luther
or Augustine. Our time today is for telling the story of grace.
We need to think about, to know, what grace is.
Have you experienced grace? Do you know what grace really is?
Is there a testimony here this morning? Has grace touched your
life?
If you don’t know God’s grace, you need some now; if
you do know God’s grace, you need more of it. Can you pray
now, “Give me more grace, Lord?” There’s an old
song,
On Monday, he
gave me the gift of love;
Tuesday, peace came from above;
Wednesday told me to watch and pray,
Thursday told me just what to say;
Friday gave me the gift of faith;
Saturday gave me a little more grace;
Sunday gave me the power divine —
To let my little light shine.
We can all do with more grace.
Paul experienced grace on that
day when he went to Damascus.
- He didn’t know about grace,
but he found
grace.
- He didn’t expect grace,
but it found him.
- He didn’t deserve grace,
but he received it.
- He didn’t want grace, but
grace wanted
him.
- He didn’t value grace,
but grace valued
him.
Unknown Grace
If there was one person in Jerusalem who absolutely didn’t
understand grace, it was Paul. He describes himself as
...a Pharisee
of the Pharisees.
He was a man who had
...a zeal for
God, but not according to knowledge.
To him, the message of Christ
was nonsense and blasphemy. He was so enraged by the gospel that
he made it his special crusade to scour the countryside to find
believers in Jesus, to find them to arrest them and to bring
them to what he believed was justice in Jerusalem.
We begin chapter 8 of Acts with
Paul at Stephen’s stoning, and we read,
...Saul was there,
giving approval to his death.
To Saul the whole point of religion
was to do the right thing in every way. No point of the law was
too insignificant to bother about. To him, God could be bribed.
Do all the things God wants, and he will have to honour the bargain
and let you into heaven. The only problem was, how do you know
when you have done enough to please God and satisfy his demands?
When I was on a local Police Community Committee, we had a seminar
on a new way of dealing with young first offenders.
Talkback radio announcers often seem to argue that the best way
of dealing with any criminal act is to punish people to the fullest
extent, specially young offenders. My impression is that I have
heard both Stan Zemanek and Alan Jones talk along those lines.
The problem is that so many young criminals go on to re–offend,
even despite the harshest of punishments, and many spend their
next 30 years or so in and out of gaol.
There are more chickens and eggs in this question than you can
poke a whisk at. Are these people so criminal that they should
stay in prison, or are they so often imprisoned that they stay
criminal? The evidence shows that imprisonment makes bigger criminals
of people who would otherwise wise up and go straight.
So the police were telling us about a new scheme. If a young
offender would confess to the crime, instead of putting them
into the criminal system, they were to be brought to meet the
people they had harmed. They would learn how they had affected
their victims. They would work out a way of repairing some of
the damage done, and, if they did what they agreed, there would
be no criminal record.
The scheme began with the Maori in New Zealand, and was highly
successful. Crime rates dropped dramatically among young Maori
men. Now they wanted to try it in Australia, too.
I was rapt! This was grace at work, not giving these young men
what they deserved, but giving them what they truly needed: pride
in themselves, a sense of responsibility, an experience of achievement.
I said, “This is excellent! This is grace put into action!”
Grace does that. It breaks the deadlock between justice and forgiveness;
it makes
...Love and faithfulness
meet together;
righteousness and peace kiss each other. (Ps 85:10)
I used to work with a man who
loved to blaspheme and then pose, waiting for God to strike him
with a thunderbolt from heaven.
If God had acted according to strict justice, surely he would
have struck Saul with lightning as he neared Damascus. But, instead,
Jesus appeared, and said,
“I am Jesus,
whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up
and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”
Think about this: Saul is on
his way to have Christians killed. Jesus says to him, “When
you persecute them, you persecute me. So I will change your life.”
Not a word about punishment!
Saul didn’t know about grace. He didn’t want to know
about grace. He certainly had no grace for the believers he was
persecuting, but he found grace, because Jesus found him.
In the same way, you can find that grace, though it is so far
unknown to you — just ask!
Unexpected grace
The devil and our human flesh conspire together. They seek to
undermine our view of God. Satan doesn’t want us to see
how great, good and wonderful our God is; and our flesh doesn’t
want to admit that we are anything but perfect.
So Saul had no idea that he was doing anything but honouring
God. He thought he had no need of grace, because he was obeying
the law as he understood it. He had found an underground movement
among Jews which saw Jesus as having an essential unity with
God the Father. But who could be, in any way, a partner with
God? It had to be the most sickening lie against the unity and
majesty of God.
How could he need anything from God, if he was fulfilling God’s
will? Saul couldn’t see that his whole attitude in fact
cut him off from God. He couldn’t see that God wants relationship
with us, not rule-keeping.
The law is for our good, not for God‘s benefit.
Saul assumed that if, for example, he kept the Sabbath. God would
be lying back on his couch in heaven and would say, “Boy,
that feels great when Saul keeps the Sabbath. Hey, Saul! Do it
again — I like it!”
But that’s not God. In fact, when Saul kep the Sabbath,
God would probably be saying,
“Saul, it’s good that you took the rest you need. Don’t
forget to rest when you have to.”
God wants us to keep his laws mainly because our lives go better
when we do, and because we don’t hurt each other if we keep
those laws.
You see, when we hurt each other, then God definitely feels it.
When you and I wound someone, it wounds God, too. And when anyone
persecutes his people, in a very special way, God himself is
persecuted. God is out there with those who suffer, and specially
with his children when they suffer.
Saul couldn’t see all this, yet, in grace, Jesus our Lord
reached down to him, met him face to face, and revealed himself
to Saul.
He didn’t expect grace, but it found him.
Grace is always like that. When you don’t even think about
it, it breaks out and touches your heart. There is always an
element of surprise when God’s grace suddenly reveals itself
to us, because, we all imagine that we are so virtuous that we
don’t really need grace, so we don’t notice it even
when it is all around us.
Undeserved grace
You certainly couldn’t say that Saul in any way deserved
grace. But that’s the whole point of grace: no one deserves
it. If you could earn it, it would be a payment, not a free gift.
I’ve sometimes heard Catholics saying, “Well, yes,
we are saved by grace, but we will be more likely to receive
and retain grace if we show God our desire for grace by doing
good.” Many Catholics wouldn't think this way, but some
still do.
It sort of makes sense if you think about it. But if you think
about it even more closely, you’ll see the flaws in this
theory.
It still assumes that we can somehow deserve grace. It also suggests
that God is somehow arbitrary in the way he gives grace, that
he gives it to the good guys and withholds it from the bad. Tough
luck for Saul!
It’s the same kind of error that some Calvinists make when
they say that God chooses some to receive grace and some to remain
outside his grace. Once again, an arbitrary and unfair God.
We don’t deserve it, and we can’t deserve it, but God
gives it anyway. The most we can do is to receive the grace which
is already there for us. Ask and receive by faith.
It’s no wonder that, years later, Saul, who was now known
as Paul, the great apostle, wrote,
...while we were
still sinners, Christ died for us.
Never forget Jesus, whipped until
sheets of flesh were stripped from his back, until chunks of
muscle were torn from him. Never forget the beating that left
him so disfigured that he was barely recognisable. Never forget
the 30cm thorns driven into his scalp or the spikes belted through
his hands and heels. That is what your sin and mine did to Jesus.
That is a measure of how undeserved grace is.
He didn’t deserve grace, but he received it.Unwanted grace
As much as Saul also didn’t deserve grace, he didn’t
really want it.
Saul had heard the entire defence of Stephen. We read that he
consented to Stephen’s death. That implies that he had an
active and an official role in the sentence.
Saul had heard about grace from Stephen, yet he rejected it,
and refused to accept it. By stoning Stephen — though it
seems that he didn’t personally throw any stones, just helped
others who did the actual killing — by stoning him, he drowned
out the voice which confronted his entire view of God and himself,
and the society he belonged to. But he couldn’t drown out
God. He couldn’t prevent Jesus from revealing himself.
Few of us really want grace until we are at the end of our tether,
and know that we have nowhere else to go. Saul mightn’t
have realised it, but he had boxed himself into a corner. He
couldn’t keep drowning out the voices of his victims, and
he couldn’t just walk out and say, “I want nothing
to do with either side.” And in his dilemma, Jesus appeared
and broke the deadlock.
He didn’t want grace, but grace wanted him. And it found
him. And, whether or not you want grace, it is there for you:
it has found you already, because you have heard the message:
By grace you
are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves it is the
gift of God.
It is up to you whether or not
you will respond to that message. Saul could have said, “I
dont want it, so wont have it.” But he chose to respond
and receive.
Unvalued grace
What this boils down to is that our human nature is opposed to
grace. We don’t value it, because we don’t want to
hear that we need it. Grace challenges our self–sufficiency.
At College, one of the girls had a problem with her jug cord,
and asked me for a screwdriver. I gave her one, but she still
couldn’t fix the problem. I offered to do it, but she was
angry and said she was quite capable of doing any of these basic
tasks without help, then you very much! (She also got angry if
I held a door open for her to go through first.)
I hung around, and in the end she gave up and dropped the cord
in my lap, thinking that it was beyond repair anyway.
I had a close look. The thread on a tiny brass bolt was damaged.
I got a fine file, cleaned up the damaged part, and screwed it
all together again.
That girl rejected help, because it would show up that she didn’t
have an answer to every question in life. I knew that —
no one has. But it was hard for her to admit to herself. So she
didn’t value my offer to try to fix what she couldn’t
fix.
Whilever we want to prove that we have it all together, that
we are capable and together and really alright, we will never
value grace. Saul didn't: he hated it so much that he had to
kill people who reminded him of his need. I’m glad that
girl didn’t go as far as Saul, or I wouldn’t be here
today to tell you the story!
He didn’t value grace, but grace valued him, because grace
found him out, and drew him to Jesus, the Lover of his soul.
Summary
What an amazing thing Grace is: it saves even wretches like you
and me. It works through faith alone, because you can never earn
or deserve it. So how do you respond today?
AMEN |
