Grace Alone

Grace Alone
‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through Faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast’ Ephesians 2:8-9

Intro to the series
Well since the beginning of time, mankind has asked questions about, ‘what is the meaning of life?’. Which implies the next logical and personal question doesn’t it? In ‘what is the meaning of my life?’ and it seems reasonable to say, those two things are likely to be related aren’t they?

And throughout history this question of the meaning of life has more often than not, been tied back to the question of is there something that ties all of life together, the question is usually framed as ‘Is there a God?’ and again the subsequent questions of ‘If there is a God, what is he or even she like?’.


Well the group of Christians called the reformers asked similar questions of their age, and in particular they asked it of the Church they found themselves part of in the Roman Catholic church in the middle ages, and the period we are focusing on from 1500-1600 in particular. But these reformers asked these questions in light of what they felt were the unsatisfactory teaching of the Church in response to these questions.

But in particular one question stood out for them, one that the Church just didn’t offer an answer that they felt was convincing, much less satisfying. You see the question, ‘what is God like?’ is a good one, but a better question is the personal one, the scary one, the one that changes everything, the question the reformers asked was, ‘What is God like towards me?’.

How am I seen by this God, and how will find him when I meet him. Will he be angry, my judge, or just not interested. It’s a big question, ‘what is God like towards me?’.

And the answer the reformers were to find in the Bible, was to rock the foundation of the Church they belonged to, and it even tore at the fabric of the societies they lived in. In fact this question and the answers they found changed the face of society across the entirety of Europe, and would go on to shape the nature of societies throughout the later developed world, including the USA and even Australia.

The answer to the question, ‘What is God like towards me?’ would come in the theological declaration that a person could be right with God, that a person need no longer fear God based on five great truths of the Christian faith found in the Bible. The five statements called solas, which is latin for alones were, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, Bible alone and To the Glory of God alone.

And over the next four weeks we are going to look at the first 4 of these Solas or alones. The summary of the reformation teaching we will look at over the next four weeks is the theological statement:
‘Justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Which is the heart of the Gospel message we learn from the Bible Alone.’

Now if that phrase doesn’t kind of instantly ring true in your head, or you even think, I have no idea what he is talking about, well relax, it’s ok, it can sound a little technical with a lot of definitions to understand, so if you don’t catch all the detail, don’t sweat it, that’s ok, just let the general sense of the things kind of wash over you and sink in.

God saves us by his grace – his gift to us of Jesus who died on the cross. And because of this we can be children of God. And all we can do is accept this gift and add nothing to it – nothing at all!

Grace is the antidote to sin. Grace Alone deals with the power and the penalty of our sin.

Over the next four weeks we will unpack and explain these great biblical ideas of justification, grace, faith and Christ, that reveal and reinforce for us the great riches of God we find in Christ alone. These great ideas explain the answer to the question, ‘What is God like towards me?’

Essentially the first and probably most famous of the reformers was Roman catholic monk, a monk in the Augustinian order, called Martin Luther. Luther lived in the first half of the 16th Century, so around 1500-1550ish. Luther was sincerely devout monk. He had become a monk after promising that he would if he survived, when he found himself caught out in the open during a particularly bad electrical storm. Luther was a devoted monk, undertaking the extreme religious practices of the abbey he was part of and yet he could find no ease for his conscience, and no rest for his soul, all he saw was his wretched sinfulness of his life before a Holy God. Deep down Luther feared that God really could be his enemy.


Luther’s almost crippling concern of his standing before God might sound a little crazy to us, but we need to understand a little of his world view, his mental furniture if you like. He lived in a world that had been decimated by the plague, where the people died young and suddenly, and people didn’t even know how the plague was transmitted. It was a time of great personal uncertainty, quite a contrast to the days of fiscal certainty and medical marvels we know and take for granted today.

The one real hope for people, was the hope for some sought of relief in eternity. The hope for Luther’s society was from the church and its’ saviour. But, it was a culture that was being held to ransom spiritually by the same Roman Catholic church. You need to understand, that to die outside the Roman Catholic church was to die outside of salvation, to die outside of Christ. To Die belonging to the church was to have a hope in Christ.


The Roman Catholicism of Luther’s day had an extremely sacramental view of a relationship with God. What I mean is, it was about doing the right things in the eyes of the church foremost over anything else. It was about being Baptized, taking the mass, saying confession and even having a Catholic burial.

The Catholic teaching of the day was, you need to be holy to be sure of your standing before God. Let me say that again, if you want to be sure of your standing before God, you need to BE HOLY! You need to be perfect in your person and life. Not sincere, not devout, but holy! Anything less than holy, and your only hope was for purgatory. A place where you can earn off the debts that remain outstanding from your sins when you die.

Life was one big ledger, of Good Vs Sins. The debt of Sins were worked off here through Earnest religious rituals. This was the essence of being a ‘godly’ or ‘righteous’ person.

In the middle ages the Roman Catholic church could in practice offer you no personal assurance, only a general sense of hope in purgatory. And the best you could do was minimize your time there before heaven by performing rituals prescribed by the church, like saying hail marys etc. Or through the purchase of indulgences, a token bought from the church to buy time off.

And this action was the last straw for Luther, and it is what sparked the reformation, and in deed the protestant faith. If the church had salvation to give, why didn’t it give it for free rather than charge for it?

The roman Catholic church did not offer any personal assurance of God towards ME, but highlighted that Salvation belonged to the church, to be earned or even bought. In Luther’s world Jesus was lost amongst a clutter of other intermediateries who could buy off your time from purgatory, from Saints to Mary the mother of Jesus, to the Church itself.
This clutter was to take away from the startling supremacy of God’s purposes for creation found in Jesus Christ that was for lost people, not just people who attend a Roman Catholic Church.

Intro to this talk
For Luther the offers of the church for personal assurance basically boiled down to ‘just try harder!’. I mean sure they offered with the grace of God working in you, but Luther knew well in his own conscience and from his reading of the Bible and the book of Romans in particular, he knew he couldn’t do any better and he knew he couldn’t do enough. And he was the most devoted of Monks! All that was left was for him to buy his way out, an idea that he despised.

Luther set in motion a search for certain forgiveness from God. How can I be sure that God my creator, will be and is God my saviour, rather than God my enemy and my Judge. How can I be sure that God is for me and not against me.

The reformers clear, bold and confident answer to this question based upon the teaching of the Bible and the Bible alone that ‘justification is by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone’, would stand in stark contradiction to what the Roman Catholic church taught in the middle ages, and is in fact still a stark, important and clear contrast to what the Roman Catholic church teaches today.

The first problem with the teaching of the Church that the reformers found is that the Bible teachers, not that you are essentially able to do good, but in fact it teaches you are dead. Very Dead. So as we look at the passage of Ephesians we read earlier, we are going to look at some aspects of this text as it relates to this wider issue of the teaching of the Bible on salvation, and more particularly Grace Alone.

You were Dead!


2:1 As for you,
you were dead
in your transgressions
and sins,
2 in which you
used to live when you
followed the ways of this world
and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air,
the spirit who is
now at work
in those who are disobedient.
3 All of us also
lived among them at one time,
gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature
and following its desires and thoughts.
Like the rest,
we were by nature objects of wrath.


You were dead, disobedient, and objects of the wrath of God. All of you, every single person alive, Jews and Gentiles, all the children of Adam to use the language of Romans 5, are Dead. Spiritually dead towards God. And there is one thing that dead people cannot do. That one thing is ANYTHING! We have all sinned are rightly held to account for it by a holy and just God.

So, the first problem the reformers saw from scripture is the Church taught a confidence in man’s capacity to know and do good and help their own predicament before God, that the Bible’s witness doesn’t seem to support.

And consequently you can see that it is so important as to how you frame the question of salvation, and in particular man’s natural state, as to how you think he will be saved.

So What is man’s natural condition before God? This has been a massive question through out the history of the church. Now in the 4th Century AD, a guy called Pelagius would teach that man has everything with in him, to do good, and therefore be right with God. So you get that, it is a very positive view of the human condition, which is not unlike our society today is it? I’m a good person, I’ll be alright.


Now not surprisingly, some members of the Christian church opposed Pelagius, and in particular a man Called Augustine opposed him, and said ‘we are dead, it has to be grace alone that saves us’, because Augustine was aware of the Bible teachings but also his own frailties. And thankfully Augustine seemed to win the day, and that was good for the church.

But later under a number of influences of the time, in particular one philosopher, the middle ages Roman Catholic Church lost it’s way and came up with and idea that is called semi-pelagian. Now this technical little name means, we start on the path to salvation by the grace of God, but we also have the capacity to do ‘our bit’ of good as well. So ‘our bit’ became religious ritual, but the impact of this idea is, ‘how do you know you have ever done enough to please God?’ How much of this salvation is ‘your bit’ and how much is ‘God’s bit’?

Now for the reasons we mentioned earlier, Luther saw the madness of this position, in light of the Bible’s teaching, but also it probably had to do with the fact Luther was an Augustinian Monk, he knew what Augustine had said, and saw clearly how the Roman Church was deviating from him.

And what did the medieval Roman Catholic church do in response? Thank you Luther for helping us to see how we have wandered from the truth of the Bible and our earlier teaching?

Not likely, they excommunicated him. Which means not only is he a criminal who can be arrested on sight for trial, but he (in their minds anyway) has been excluded from salvation. Luther bore a heavy price for the truth of the Gospel, a gospel that has been passed on to us and assures us of our salvation.

And in summary the Roman Church formalized the teaching of semi- Pelagianism (So God does most of it, but we have to so our bit, to save ourselves – God is like a spiritual set of training wheels to get us on our way) as the official teaching of the Church at the Council of Trent.

But the Bible teaches ‘You were dead’. The dead cannot do anything, most especially they cannot revive themselves.
Ephesians continues:
But God Saved us! And it is By Grace you have been saved!
It is all God’s activity from start to finish, from death to certain new and eternal life.
4 But
because of his great love for us,
God,
who is rich in mercy,
5 made us alive
with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—
it is by grace you have been saved.
6 And God
raised us up with Christ and
seated us with him
in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,
7 in order that
in the coming ages he might show the
incomparable riches of his grace,
expressed in his kindness to us
in Christ Jesus.
8 For it is by grace
you have been saved,
through faith-- and this not from yourselves,
it is the gift of God--
9 not by works,
so that no one can boast.
10 For we are God's workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus
to do good works,
which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Grace literally means ‘gift’, it is a present, not a contract, not a contribution towards a solution but a gift. Grace in the context here, also describes the nature of the gift and in turn the nature of the giver. God and his gift to us is ‘gracious’, it is generous, it definitely is not owed to us. No one can say to God, you owe me salvation. We are dead and deserving of God’s judgment, but he shows that he is generous, because he gives us a gracious gift of salvation, one that is complete, ‘you have been saved’, the Bible tells us, not you will be saved if you do enough good after what I have done for you, but ‘you have been saved’ and it is by God’s grace. Not by works so no one can boast.

Not one of you who know God’s salvation received it because you deserved it. You might find that a little staggering actually. But just because Mum and Dad were Christians, God owes YOU nothing. Just because you always have been at church or youth group – well woop de do ‘God owes you nothing!’. You might have even done some great Christian things, been to a Christian school, been on mission for God and done great things, well woop de do ‘God owes you nothing’.

You were Dead! And all you did were dead works. But God who is rich in mercy has made you alive, you have been saved, and it is by his grace, not by any works lest any of you think you deserve what God gave out of his generosity, and even worse if you think you deserve it more than others. Others who maybe aren’t from a Christian home, or aren’t as smart, or dare I say it as cool, or who don’t do up the front stuff at church. It is by God’s grace you have been pulled from the mire of your own sin. By God’s grace alone.

The Bible from start to finish teaches that God saves people from his Grace Alone.
God’s grace is his sovereign action and his sovereign action alone. When God saved the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt was it because they deserved it, was it because they were impressive. Nope not in least, in fact the Bible tells us that it is because it was God’s grace alone that they were saved, they weren’t impressive they were in fact the least of all people. They were dead in their slavery to Egypt and God saved them by his grace. The Israelite people didn’t save themselves and neither did we.
You cannot have God under an obligation to act.

What about the thief on the cross with Jesus, who asked him to remember him when he came into his kingdom. And Jesus answers, today you will be with me in paradise. Exactly what good things was the thief going to do on the cross to ensure his salvation. It had to be nothing didn’t it? For it is by grace alone that God saves. God’s gift, a complete gift, not a gift like those ones where batteries are not included.

Salvation is by grace alone.

So if you remember the reformers question was, ‘What is God like toward Me?’ and in the pages of the Bible they found the great answer, that ‘God is for me’. But not just in an abstract way, God is for me in Jesus Christ.

God is for me In Christ – which is another way of saying God’s ‘Grace Alone’ is found in ‘Christ Alone’.
4 But
because of his great love for us,
God,
who is rich in mercy,
5 made us alive
with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—
it is by grace you have been saved.
6 And God
raised us up with Christ and
seated us with him
in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,
7 in order that
in the coming ages he might show the
incomparable riches of his grace,
expressed in his kindness to us
in Christ Jesus.
8 For it is by grace
you have been saved,
through faith-- and this not from yourselves,
it is the gift of God--
9 not by works,
so that no one can boast.
10 For we are God's workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus
to do good works,
which God prepared in advance for us to do.
All of God’s purposes for mankind centre on and are found in Jesus Christ. We are saved by Jesus Christ Alone. We are saved by his work alone, which we receive by grace alone.
Luther had a moment of discovery that was jaw-droppingly simple!

Luther saw that Christ is the centre of the scriptures, because he is the centre of God’s purposes. And the centre of Christ is his work on the Cross. And in Luther’s day the church had mislaid the treasure of the Cross. But then again, that is what many ‘churches’ still do today isn’t it?

We are saved by grace alone in Christ alone. Luther talked about salvation in this way, ‘Jesus takes all the filth of my life, that is mine alone, and my doing and he makes it his at the Cross. Then he takes all the riches that he received from his father, because of his obedience, and he makes them mine’. Luther called it the great exchange. God’s gracious gift. A gift we receive by faith, which we will talk about a little more next week.


Over the net couple of weeks we will look at the things we receive by grace and grace alone from God in Christ Alone. These are the great treasures of God that become ours in Christ, the Bible describes these as ours in our union with Christ. Because of this union we receive great treasures, of renewal, salvation, justification, sanctification and even glorification. And many of these rich Christian terms we will look into in the next weeks.

Why is this doctrine of Grace Alone still so important for us today?
What are the dangers for us today?

Every inclination of the human heart is proud, every human gets up in the morning and thinks, that they are ok. Or at least I’m not like them over there! – why wouldn’t God be good to me?
Well because you are dead! That’s why. Sin is riddle through your body in its’ natural state.

And I know that as Christians you will wake up every day of your life, and be tempted to think, that something about you, or what you have done is good, why wouldn’t God love me – deep down I suspect we all have times where we think we deserve God’s love. I suspect you only need to scratch the surface of your heart just a little and you’ll find something that you think is good, something that demands God must love me!!

And that is the constant threat and the danger of a conditional understanding of grace. We want to add just something, even just a little thing, to our salvation that we call our own, to give us some dignity in this. But the real problem you’ll find is how much would be enough to add?

Do you really think God will see your weekly attendance at church as more valuable than the life of his son? That would be a hard sell wouldn’t it?

It is grace alone found in Christ alone that saves us. I when I say saves, I don’t just mean forgives us, but it is definitely that, but it is also saved to be resurrected into the new life where we will experience all of God grace in full.

Q. But the Bible does talk about good works by Christians doesn’t it? it does, and so shall we next week.

It is by grace alone – as one theologian put it, the only thing a man supplies to his own salvation is sin! The thing that meant we needed to be saved in the first place!
We are confident we have been saved, because salvation is the work of God alone, through grace alone, found in Christ alone.

Grace is the antidote to sin. Good works cannot deal with Sin. They can’t deal with sin’s penalty, and the certainly can’t deal with sin’s power within our bodies. Only God’s grace is an antidote for Sin.
Like the hymn, as Christians we boast of the grace of God, that:
Nothing in my hand I bring, but simply to your cross I cling.