Ephesians 2:1-10Pastor Lori Broschat

Exodus 33:12-23June 5, 2016

Ephesians 2:1-10Pastor Lori Broschat

THE GRACE OF GOD

May God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord give you grace, mercy, and peace.This greeting from Paul to his student Timothy contains the three words I want us to concentrate on this month. June may seem like a great time to sit back and relax after a busy school year or sports season. Even those of us without young children are stretched pretty thin going from one event or another. Of course, summer is not exactly free of activity, which is why these three words can make a difference in our lives.

Grace, mercy and peace are the benefits of being in relationship with God, of knowing the person of Jesus Christ, of allowing the Holy Spirit to do His work within us. Grace, mercy and peace speak to that need inside of us to slow down, to stop struggling, to quit trying so hard to keep up with the world. Taking time for God does not mean all the difficulties in life will be put to a halt, but maybe we will appreciate more fully the blessings of God in our lives.

Artists and storytellers know that perspective makes all the difference in how we come to understand or appreciate something. God wants to help us put life into perspective so that we can see clearly what our priorities need to be. With clear priorities come clearer goals, so my proposal is that following a month of learning the language of God we draw closer to God’s incredible gifts to us, gifts like faith, salvation, forgiveness and love. Once we are morefamiliar with the words God values most we are better positioned to open ourselves to God’s most valuable lessons and teachings.

Simply put, I want to invite you to a summer spent learning. It’s summer school that hopefully won’t leave you bored. Even if you have to miss some classes, please read or listen to the material we will cover. You may have heard it all before, but I venture to say you may find it refreshing and satisfying all the same. That’s the invitation; now I’ll introduce you to one of the most powerful words ever spoken. Thankfully for us God’s actions speak louder than words, so this word has been showing itself among human beings since creation.

Grace. We say it at meals, we name our daughters Grace, we are given a grace period to pay our bills, we see gracefulness as a quality to be admired; but why don’t we want to practice gracefulness ourselves in the true meaning of the word, to be filled with grace, not simply moving well or with ease?

God is graceful and yet He has no need of a body with which to love. His gracefulness is a matter of the response to the human condition. It was there in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were banished, but their punishment was still tempered by grace. They were not deprived of the presence of God, neither was Cain after he killed his brother Abel. God’s mark upon him was a sign of grace.

Why does God enjoy granting grace? If you look down into the pit where Joseph’s brothers threw him you’ll know the answer. Or look at the prison where Joseph was sent and yet remained in the service of God until he was rescued and put in the service of Pharaoh. It’s there. Now we haven’t even moved past the book of Genesis and it’s obvious how much God enjoys handing out grace.

When the people of Israel had sinned against God almost simultaneously with the writing of the Ten Commandments, Moses feared they would lose God’s guidance and protection. He asked to see God’s glory, a request God could not grant in the way Moses wanted, but He did agree to let His goodness pass by Moses who would only see a glimpse of God’s back while God’s hand shielded his face. “Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

The people of the Old Testament experienced grace through the constant presence of God leading them through the wilderness, giving them second, third and fourth chances to be obedient, bringing them back to their homeland after exile, restoring their long-forgotten faith, feeding and protecting them, securing them in relationship with Him. Remember the words of Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

God has plans for you too, manifested by His grace in your life. If you’ve witnessed it, praise the Lord. If you’re convinced you haven’t seen it, think back, and look deeper. It’s there. The most commonly used word for grace in the New Testament is charis. It forms the root for charisma, which means “free gift of grace.” You can hear it in the word Eucharist, which translates to gratitude or thankfulness. You see, not only does God give us grace, but in doing so He gives us the ability to receive it with gratefulness.

God’s grace is a constant, perpetual source of influence in our lives. It is always active, always reactive, and always alert to the changing conditions of our hearts and minds and souls. It monitors, strengthens, and awakens our faith. John Wesley said it was “the power of the Holy Spirit, enabling us to believe and love and serve God.”

John Newton crammed a lot of living into his 82 years. His mother died when he was six, and he joined his father at sea when he was eleven. He served his apprenticeship as a sailor, and rose through the ranks until he became the captain of a slave ship. He abandoned the religious training that he had experienced as a child, and reveled in the dissolute life of a slave trader. He was noted for his profanity and his cruelty.

But one stormy night, when his ship was in danger of sinking and he was in danger of dying, Newton had a real change of heart. It might have been his religious training at his mother's knee surfacing after all those years––or it might have been his love for Mary Catlett, a Christian woman whom he later married––or it might have been his reading of the book, Imitation of Christ, or it might have been all three. In any event, Newton had a real conversion experience.

For awhile, Newton continued on his slave ship, but he began to treat both the slaves and his crew with a good deal more compassion. Finally, convinced that the slave trade was wrong, he left his ship and took a job onshore.He then felt a call to the ministry, and was ordained at age forty and assigned to a church at Olney, England. He continued in ministry through the rest of his long life, even after failing eyesight made it impossible for him to read.

His hymn, Amazing Grace, is in a sense Newton's own story. It was amazing grace that saved him, and it was amazing grace that was the focus of his preaching. But Amazing Grace is the story of every Christian. It is amazing grace that saves us––nothing else––no works of our hands or gifts of our wealth. It was amazing that God would love and save John Newton, but it is amazing that God would love and save any of us.[1]

That’s power beyond ourselves. However, anything that incredibly generous does not come without its requirements. Bear in mind, it’s always a gift, one we can’t earn or deserve, but we are free to reject it. As such, when we will accept grace it is for the improvement of our lives and the lives of others. It comes with a guarantee of God’s continual transformation within us.

Nearly 80 years ago German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was concerned about the way the church was headed as Hitler came to power. He wrote these famous words about what he saw as the loss of integrity within the faith. “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye that causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”[2] For his role in an attempt to rid the world of Hitler’s evil, Bonhoeffer did lose his own life on April 9, 1945, a mere month before the surrender of Germany.

Such a tremendous sacrifice in the service of God is unlike anything we can expect to make in our lives, and yet when we accept grace we also accept responsibility and change. Ephesians 2 sums up the reality of the human condition and how God designed the solution. “But God’s mercy is great, and he loved us very much. Though we were spiritually dead because of the things we did against God, he gave us new life with Christ. You have been saved by God’s grace. And he raised us up with Christ and gave us a seat with him in the heavens.

He did this for those in Christ Jesus so that for all future time he could show the very great riches of his grace by being kind to us in Christ Jesus. I mean that you have been saved by grace through believing. You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God. It was not the result of your own efforts, so you cannot brag about it. God has made us what we are. In Christ Jesus, God made us to do good works, which God planned in advance for us to live our lives doing.”

That is the tremendous promise of God, made visible through Jesus, reversing the damage our sins had done to us, amazingly accomplished before any of us here or anyone on this planet had been born. We were born into the gift of grace, and even though it took us some time to come to know about God’s free gift and how it could be ours, we were still covered by grace.

As God reminded Moses, He will be gracious to whom He will be gracious. It’s His gift to give and it’s ours to accept or reject. One Methodist pastor sums up the work of grace in three ways: Grace is unconditional – God comes to each of us with the message that he loves us as we are, no matter our past. Grace is transformational – God does not leave us as we are but rather transforms our hearts and lives. Grace is invitational – By grace, the Lord Jesus calls and empowers us to join him in the work of the gospel.[3]

Grace is not window dressing meant to make us presentable to the outside world while we secretly carry on with our sinful means of getting what we want out of life. Grace is the unveiling of who we are called to be, the throwing off of the disguise we use to get by in polite society. God sees into the crevices of our souls and our identities and fills them with grace straight from the source of Christ’s unselfish act of sacrifice.

That kind of gift demands a response and yet God is not demanding anything from us. The choice is entirely ours. We can abuse God’s grace, take it willingly only to leave it on a shelf like some item we intend to re-gift. We can do that, but the joke is on us. God’s grace is meant to be re-gifted, meant to be shared and extended and used in innumerable ways that we’ve never expected to be a part of.

Grace looks like a neighbor who mows a lawn for an elderly resident. Grace looks like a family who does foster care. Grace looks like youth who volunteer at a retirement home. Grace looks like the people who come to understand that their community is in need and they put aside their own agendas for a brief time or maybe forever to get involved.

Grace looks like you, it looks like me, and it looks like all of us when we turn to God and in doing so turn to those who may not know the grace of God. That expression, “There but for the grace of God go I,” is wrongly used. God’s grace is not missing from the lives of those who face pain or struggle. It is all the more applied to them but it works best when we combine it with the grace we have received and thereby add to their relief.

Grace is what we receive from God, a gift we don’t deserve and cannot earn. That makes it all the more exciting to share!

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[2]Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship, pg. 44-45

[3]Thompson, Andrew C., The Means of Grace – Traditioned Practice in Today’s World, pg. 10