Thank you for joining us today in our Wonderful Day in the Lord broadcast. If you were with us last time, we were looking at another one of our rich treasures that God has given us as believers: His Word. We would not know anything about God or life or eternity or so many things if it wasn’t for the precious Word of God that has been given to us.
I am going to look at another gift today. Another richness that we have in Christ: grace.
We talk a lot about grace today. The most popular Christian song in the world right now is “Amazing Grace.” It is not always popular for the right reasons. A lot of unbelievers sing it. It has a beautiful terminology and tune, but a lot of people sing it because what they want is grace, even amid their sins, even if they don’t want to turn to Christ, they would love to have grace. Sometimes it is abused, but we find that the Scriptures are simply filled with grace and that without grace you and I are hopelessly and eternally lost in our sins. There is nothing we can do to earn salvation, or to merit the gifts of God. Those are given to us as free gifts from Him. So, grace is a precious, precious gift that God has given to us. There is probably no Scripture better known regarding grace than Ephesians 2:8-9.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works so that no one may boast.” This encapsulates the message of the gospel as far as the reception is concerned. He has spoken earlier about what the gospel message is: that Jesus Christ has died for our sins, He resurrected in power and ascended into heaven and that He calls us to Himself to receive His gift of salvation by faith alone. That is what Paul is talking about now, the reception of the good news, the reception of the gospel. So, it has been given to us, it says here, by grace. It is received by us totally by faith. We don’t do anything to earn it, we reach out and take it because it is a gift from God. That is why He follows up that word grace with the word gift. It is a very similar terminology. It is the same basic idea, but the redundancy is helpful because the grace that saves us comes from a gift that comes from God Himself. He follows that up by clearly saying that it is not of works so that no one may boast. I’m glad he threw that in there because it makes it crystal clear that there is nothing that we do to earn the grace of God or that we can earn the free gift of salvation. It is given to us totally by grace . . .
