Gospel Prism

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:8-10

If I may give you one more reminder about why we are in this exploration of the connection between grace and faith. God is not interested in a show of faith. As the Lord tells Samuel in 1 Sam 16:7: “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” He doesn’t care about appearances if the heart is not truly transformed. But this transformation occurs not because we somehow tip the scales of works towards our favor against our disfavor. As Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” And so I wanted to continue to explore a few more ways in which our faith is truly expressed in light of God’s great grace.

Sanctification

First, let’s explore sanctification. By sanctification, I mean God’s work by His Spirit to make us more like Christ. It is what most of us think of when we say words like “the Christian life,” or “our journey,” “our walk with Him,” “our life of faith,” “a life of holiness.” In many ways, this word ‘sanctification’ typifies Ephesians 2:10 which says: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” It is God molding us in Christ to ‘do good works’ or to reflect Christ. This premise of sanctification is crucial, that God is the workman. The Bible is quite clear that God is the one who sanctifies us (makes us holy), not ourselves. Paul tells the church in Corinth: “And because of him [God] you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” (1 Cor 1:30) Paul leaves no room for us to think that God is merely an encourager. Without His direct leading, we would never want to love Christ, and therefore, there could be no sanctification.

Now how does this work its way out in our lives? You might have mistakenly believed that God saves you at the moment you trust Him, but now to live a life of faith, you need to do your part. You might have heard 2 Corinthians 5:17 spoken to you: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” And listening to that verse you think: “Wait a second. If being a new creation means the old has gone, and I still have some very old, crusty, sinful stuff in my life, then I must not be a Christian,” or you might think because of this sinful stuff, you need to do something about it quick and get on that spiritual exercise regimen to ‘become right with God.’ But listen to 2 Cor 5:18-19 and see if it gives you some perspective on 2 Cor 5:17: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” All this is from God! He did the work through His Son! And so what is the result? Verse 20 tells us, “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.” We don’t become a new creation by working up a spiritual sweat of spiritual disciplines to become better Christians. Instead, we are in awe of what Christ has done for us by NOT COUNTING our trespasses against us because of His bearing of our punishment. And praise God for the grand verse of verse 21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

We do ourselves a terrible disservice by attempting to gain favor with God solely by acts of holiness. And instead of freedom in Christ, we feel the burdens of a law that we were never intended to carry as Christians. If ever you feel following Christ, living the life of faith, and serving Him is a burden, I want to forewarn you that perhaps your obedience is spurred on more by your own righteousness than a receiving of the righteousness of Christ as your new identity. Listen to what John says about obedience to God’s commands: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:3) The person who knows the love of God fully, what Christ has done for us in spite of our initial lack of love for Him, loves to obey Him. And this obedience is never a burden, but a joy.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to obey a person when you know you are truly loved? Most wives will submit to their husbands quite willingly when their husbands love them with the self-dying love of Christ’s love for the church. Husbands are often quite willing to serve their wives, even change old habits (like wearing old ratty t-shirts) joyfully, when they feel as though their wives respect them and love them genuinely and not merely have an agenda to change the man to be a ‘better man.’ I have seen dating men willing to make cute crafts, drive hundreds of miles, and bear the burden of rejection of the woman’s disapproving and scornful parents, without it being a burden to do so. If this can happen in our earthly lives, then wouldn’t it seem to make sense that if God’s commandments seem burdensome to us, the solution is not merely to ‘tough it out’ to be sanctified? The solution is rather to see if we really understand God’s love for us in the first place.

Ephesians 2:8-10 teaches us that God has done something for us already. He has given us His Son graciously so that we can have a right relationship with Him. His Son bore the punishment we deserved and in our gratitude and delight and love, in response to His first love, we obey. And God assures this work in our hearts as true through the power of His promised Holy Spirit. So Paul makes this great statement in 2 Cor 3:18: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” The Spirit does the work of transformation in our lives to make us more like Christ. The Spirit points us to understand just how incredibly gracious God is through His Son. And He gives us the desire to love Him and love to obey Him.

There is a stark contrast then between sanctification and self-righteous external holiness. Sanctification comes from a Spirit-induced focus on the work of Christ and a deep love for Him because of His grace. Self-righteous external holiness leads us to focus on ourselves and how our works make us more important to ourselves rather than focusing on God’s glory. Jerry Bridges gives the example of his early encounters with a pool hall. His parents told him that going to a pool hall was bad because of the unsavory characters that hung out there. The problem was that his parents never explained to him why she should avoid the pool hall. He was simply told he was not allowed to go there. Thus, he grew up thinking that playing pool was a sin. But then he went to a Christian conference center only to see a pool hall there and ‘godly men’ playing pool! Imagine that! (Jerry Bridges, Transforming Grace, 124)

For Jerry’s parents to warn him as a youngster from going to the pool hall might have been wise. But without ever explaining why, the law dictated his life. This was not sanctification but self-righteousness. And so Jerry’s natural tendency was to construct a law and judge people’s sanctification on the basis of his law. How many of us have viewed sanctification on such terms? We might have believed that to be holy meant to stay away from wine, cards, pool halls, arcades, dancing, clubs, and to only frequent church, rated G movies, go-fish games, Bible societies. Don’t get me wrong. Spiritual discernment is very important to one’s Christian life. And holiness/Sanctification should lead one to make God-savoring choices in life. But those choices must flow from one’s progressive growth in living in light of the Gospel. Doing those things and not doing those things NEVER dictate one’s sanctification. As we have learned, God does the work in our hearts by His Spirit to conform us to Christ. And so the more we are being transformed, the more we love Him and live for His glory, whether we’re at a bar with co-workers or whether we’re watching Ratatouille with our family. Sanctification is about God initiating in us a love for his Gospel (grace) and our living in light of this grace for His glory (faith). The more this truth progresses in our lives, the more we will be sanctified and grow as a Christian.

Forgiveness

Have you ever been hurt by someone so deeply that you simply could never imagine your relationship with that person to be fully reconciled? I am sure that some of us have such a relationship in mind. When you have experienced betrayal, hurt, pain, sorrow, grief at the hands of a friend, or confidante, or companion, or spouse, it seems like there is no turning back. I remember an occasion where a good friend of mind criticized me in such a graceless way, that as he sat there lambasting me (though looking retrospectively, I definitely was not faultless), it literally seemed like the physical distance between me and him was growing. The pain was so deep and so hurtful, it seemed as though our friendship would never be able to weather this moment. How many of us have felt such pain? So how could you ever forgive the person who seems unforgiveable to you? Of how can you ever make amends to the person you have deeply hurt? Most people just chalk it up to a relationship ruined and a bridge burned. But is there any more evidence of the necessity of God’s grace taking an initiating action and our response of faith than forgiving a person?

Listen to what the Lord says in Jeremiah 31:31-34: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” God will change their hearts by His grace before anyone comes to worship Him. And through His law being written on their hearts, God will forgive them of their sins completely. This forgiveness not only leads to a sinner being forgiven, but because he or she truly knows what it means to be forgiven, he is ready to forgive others. So Paul writes in Colossians 3:13: “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” And Jesus Himself says in Matt 5:14-15: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” In other words, the person who truly understands what it means to be forgiven will be the person who can forgive others who have hurt them.

Do you see what Scripture is saying? It is impossible to conjure up enough forgiveness in yourself to forgive someone their hurt against you. We simply do not have enough will power in ourselves. But there is only one way we could ever have enough power to forgive another person and that is through our own understanding of what God has done for us. When I think of forgiveness, I can’t think of a better example of God’s grace and human faith than Reaksa Himm. For those of you who were not here when Reaksa spoke, he was the man whose whole family was viciously murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia right before his eyes. Well, I randomly opened his book After the Heavy Rain, and not that I am in the habit of doing this, but here is what I read:

Unforgiveness brings the deepest darkness into one’s life, and although I had been a Christian for more than five years, my life had not been transformed from darkness to light because I could not forgive. This darkness not only hurt me but also blinded me from seeing the gift of God. God first forgave me, and he asks me to forgive others who sin against me. (Sokreaksa S. Himm, After the Heavy Rain, 101)

If there is anyone who deserved to be angry and to withhold forgiveness, it was Reaksa. But he grabbed tightly onto God’s gift to Him, which was the forgiveness of His own sins. In doing so, he was able to forgive those who butchered his family with an impossible forgiveness. This type of forgiveness is in no person. It is a gift of God, that is grace through the lens of the Gospel.

So how do you forgive others? You need to remember what Jesus Christ has done for you. Go back to texts like Ephesians 3:17-19: “So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Turn to 2 Cor 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Remember Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” If what Christ has done for you through His suffering and death does not strike your soul, you will not know how to forgive those who hurt you. If you are hurt or sinned against or disappointed by people, unless you remember and are deeply struck by what Christ has done, then you will never know how to forgive and you will not forgive. It starts at the cross and it ends with Jesus’ own words of forgiveness at the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Prayer and Fasting (or any spiritual discipline)

If there was one spiritual discipline that you would think is about your efforts, it might be fasting. Fasting certainly seems like something that God would always accept as an act of holy merit. Surely, fasting couldn’t be from God’s grace, could it? We need to turn to Isaiah 58 to see the Bible’s answer on fasting in light of faith and grace. If you look at verses 2-3, the Israelites were doing some seemingly great things before God. They were fasting (v. 3). They were seeking God daily (v. 2). They were delighting at some level to know God (v. 2). They enjoyed coming together in God’s presence. And yet, these outward practices according to Isaiah were nothing but a sham. Why? The answer lies in verses 3-5.

In fasting, they weren’t honoring God, but rather, they desired to look good in front of others. They wanted to be regarded as holy. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for such blatant displays of empty religion that only seeks to glorify the self when he says in Matt 6:16: “And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.” As they’re practicing these religious duties, they are “oppressing workers,” that is, caring more about lining their own pockets than a concern for people. They are irritable, contentious, gossipy, petty, envious, wanting to pick fights according to verse 4. And so God asks poignantly in verse 5: “Is such the fast that I choose?”

The problem with fasting as a work of faith apart from God’s grace is how much credit we give ourselves for “starving ourselves for God.” And since only our outward appearance is affected by fasting, there is no humility of the soul, there is no love for God and His glory, and there is no desire to do genuine good works. If you read the rest of Isaiah 58:6-14, the Lord teaches His people that what God longs for is a fast that is filled with a love for God and for people, for the poor, the downtrodden. And verse 11 is a critic verse: “And the Lord will continually guide you.” As you walk with Him in faith, as your fasting is one that loves others and leads you to have the very things that concern God’s heart, the Lord continues His guidance of giving you grace to want to know Him. God’s grace leads you to love Him. Fasting is not about determining your spiritual character and religious willpower. What is fasting? John Piper sums it up for us when he says:

When you take your stand on the finished work of God in Christ, and begin to drink at the River of Life and eat the Bread of Heaven, and know that you have found the end of all your longings, you only get hungrier for God. The more satisfaction you experience from God, while still in this world, the greater your desire for the next. For, as C. S. Lewis said, ‘Our best havings are wantings.’ (John Piper, A Hunger for God, 23)

What makes fasting a picture of our hunger for God rather than mere self-immolation is fixing our eyes on how great a God we worship. As Piper notes, we take our stand on that finished work of Christ. There is nothing more spectacular than knowing that it cost God our Maker His own Son to bring us back to Himself so that we might receive God’s full joy and pleasure. God crushed His Son so that He would not have to crush us because of our rebellion against Him. And so, our fasting can never be payback. How can a feeble few missed meals payback the eternal price of God’s Son’s blood? It is foolish to think in such a way. And that’s why to even be proud of it is even more nonsensical. No, the Gospel of Christ leads us to fast because we simply want to remind ourselves that to God’s presence is better than any other earthly pleasure. And because we know such earthly pleasures often get in the way of that hunger for God and we are reminded of God’s grace, we fast as an act of faith in response to that grace. Simply to be morally good, or outwardly holy, or famous, or self-justified could never create enough will to do the things that lead a Christian to give His life for Christ. Something else must drive even our joyful willingness to deprive ourselves of the most basic of necessities such as food. Charles Spurgeon gives this picture of a woman who has such a desire:

And what emboldens that timid female to walk down that dark lane in the wet evening, that she may go and sit beside the victim of a contagious fever? What strengthens her to go through that den of thieves, and pass by the profligate and profane? What influences her to enter into that charnel-house of death, and there sit down and whisper words of comfort? Does gold make her do it? They are too poor to give her gold. Does fame make her do it? She shall never be known, nor written among the mighty women of this earth. What makes her do it? Is it love of merit? No; she knows she has no desert before high heaven. What impels her to it? It is the power of the gospel on her heart; it is the cross of Christ; she loves it, and she therefore says—

“Were the whole realm of nature mine.
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

Conclusion

Having an Eph 2:8-10 grace-faith perspective gives you confidence to live the life of faith with passion, zeal, and expectancy. And we know that God through His precious Son, will always do things for your good according to Romans 8:28. And this good does not mean material, prosperity and health blessings, but rather that you will come to conform more and more to be like Christ which will satisfy your soul and give you more joy than any outcome you could put together for yourself. An example of this view is the life of George Mueller. He pastored a church in Bristol, England in the 1800s for over 65 years. He initiated many great movements in England for the Gospel, but what he was most known for was his care for orphans. He built 5 large orphan houses that cared for over 10,000 orphans. And even more remarkably, he was a man who was known to have never asked anyone for anything to care for these orphans. He simply prayed to God and therefore, was known as a man of great faith. But if you read his biography, you come to know that George Mueller had a strong view of God’s sovereignty and grace.

Yet, because of this view of God’s sovereignty, he believed his faith was empowered by God’s grace, not limited by it as some might argue. Could you imagine the logistical nightmare of caring for 10,000 orphans? And not once did he ask anyone for money. He went to God to ask for provisions. He was not a man of great faith in a sense. He simply believed God was who He promised to be. And so every decision he made, was with this premise in mind. And everything he received from God, even the most difficult of circumstances, was something he believed was for his good. So if there was one man who should have received material blessings on the basis of his good works, it was George Mueller. And yet this was not to be. His cherished wife Mary was suffering from typhoid fever. George Mueller had prayed fervently that the Lord would heal her. And yet, she eventually died. In reflecting on how he was strengthened during the difficult time of her death, George wrote:

The last portion of scripture which I read to my precious wife was this: “The Lord God is a sun and shield, the Lord will give grace and glory, no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.” Now, if we have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have received grace, we are partakers of grace, and to all such he will give glory also. I said to myself, with regard to the latter part, “no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly”—I am in myself a poor worthless sinner, but I have been saved by the blood of Christ; and I do not live in sin, I walk uprightly before God. Therefore, if it is really good for me, my darling wife will be raised up again; sick as she is. God will restore her again. But if she is not restored again, then it would not be a good thing for me. And so my heart was at rest. I was satisfied with God. And all this springs, as I have often said before, from taking God at his word, believing what he says.

George Mueller’s faith was ultimately not in his wife’s healing. He claimed nothing before God. His good deeds of caring for the orphans and pastoring over many people did not buy him favor with God. Instead, he looked to how gracious God was to save him, to save his darling wife. And with this came a heart of rest. And like George Mueller, we need to be satisfied with God and be so ever thankful that God acts graciously apart from our good or evil works. Jerry Bridges insightfully observes:

The Bible is full of God’s promises to provide for us spiritually and materially, to never forsake us, to give us peace in times of difficult circumstances, to cause all circumstances to work together for our good, and finally to bring us safely home to glory. Not one of those promises is dependent upon our performance.

And that is the best news you’ll ever hear. Grace means God loves you no matter what you do, no matter how far away you are from Him. You never have to earn His favor. And faith is the natural response you have in being God’s workmanship. So you will strive with all of your heart to do good works, not because you owe Him, not because you have to obey His law, not because you ought to, but because you want to and because you love Him more than anything else. And so you live by faith and you obey His commands and you do good works because you know there is no greater road to joy in light of what God has done for you by grace through His Son’s suffering and death. That is the good news of the Gospel. That is grace and faith working perfectly together for God’s glory and your joy.