For by Grace – Ephesians 2:8a
In Ephesians 2:8, Paul explains the salvation he has been describing throughout Ephesians 2:1–7: “For by grace you have been saved.” God made dead sinners alive, raised them with Christ, seated them with Christ, and will display the immeasurable riches of His grace forever. How did all of that happen? By grace. Salvation does not rest on anything foreseen, found, or produced in us. It is not because we were good, religious, sincere, moral, or seeking God. Apart from Christ, we were dead in trespasses and sins, sons of disobedience, and children of wrath like the rest of mankind. Therefore, the only explanation that fits is God’s free and undeserved favor toward guilty sinners. Grace is not God helping those who help themselves. It is God saving those who do not deserve it.
This truth must be guarded because when grace is mixed with human merit, religious performance, moral effort, or man-centered decisionism, the gospel is blurred or lost. Paul does not say that grace merely made salvation possible; he says, “you have been saved.” Salvation is a completed work with continuing results, done to us by God, not achieved by us. Grace humbles the immoral person, the moral person, and even the doctrinal person who may understand grace but still boast in knowing it. No one comes to God with leverage. We come empty-handed, and God saves. Therefore, the church must keep preaching, teaching, singing, praying, counseling, and evangelizing with this truth: salvation is by grace alone. If we lose grace, we lose the gospel. But where grace is preserved, sinners are humbled, Christ is exalted, and God receives all the glory.
FULL SERMON TEXT:
Go ahead and turn in your copy of God’s Word to the letter of Paul to the Ephesians.
We will continue, as is our practice, right where we left off last week, making our way verse by verse through this wonderful letter of Paul. We are currently in chapter 2, and this morning we will look at the first half of verse 8.
You will recall, as you open up your copy of God’s Word there and see where we’re at, or you see it on the screen here, you’ll recall that back in verse 5, we had this similar phrase, “by grace you have been saved.”
And now we return in verse 8 to this phrase, and we will expand on it.
We took our time just to notice it in verse 5 because we recognize there that Paul, so overwhelmed and so much desiring that we would see the grace of God, burst out there beginning in verse 5, out of order in his writing.
And now we come to where this is meant to be. Not that it’s not meant to be in verse 5, but by God’s grace, He put it in both sections.
Well, we barely talked on it back then is what I mean, and now we’re going to dig in.
And remember, repetition matters in Scripture because repetition is how we learn.
God does not give us something twice if we don’t need to hear it twice, even in four verses. Sometimes He gives it to us twice in the same verse.
But here we see the second phrase in this section that we are working our way through, verses 1–10 of chapter 2.
Paul’s not wasting his words here. The Holy Spirit is pressing His truth into the life of the church.
We need to hear these things again.
So far in this section, in Ephesians 2:1–7, He has shown us the entire movement of salvation, where we were dead in our trespasses and sins.
But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us, made us alive together with Christ, and raised us with Christ, and seated us with Christ, and will display the immeasurable riches of His grace in Christ in the coming ages forever and ever.
We see salvation from beginning to end.
And now we come to verse 8, and verse 8 is explaining this salvation.
He says, “For by grace you have been saved.”
Now, if I was better at timing these things, and you know, I don’t time these. I just preach whatever’s next, and as the Lord leads and cuts one in half or whatever, we take our time through.
But if I would have timed it, we would have done this in October because it’s Reformation month, because that’s the time in our Christian history that we remember the break from the Catholic Church and the return to sola Scriptura and sola gratia, meaning by Scripture alone. Salvation, according to Scripture alone, is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.
That wonderful return in the church to that core doctrine of salvation.
But I didn’t schedule it that way. We are on it today.
This is one of those great truths that was restored in the Reformation period: grace alone.
Our understanding of salvation is grace alone.
We don’t use sola gratia, we don’t say grace alone because it’s catchy and it makes for a good T-shirt, although our brother Pastor Jason wears those really awesome shirts that sometimes say sola gratia or things like that. He’s out there, so I can talk about him.
But it’s not just a slogan. It’s a guardrail for the church.
When we take grace and we blend it together with anything else—human merit, religious performances, or anything else in man as the reason that God saves—the gospel is no longer clear.
Martin Luther, that famous reformer who nailed those theses on the door at Wittenberg, in the 62nd one of his 95 Theses, says this: “The true treasure of the church is the holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.”
Church, that is our treasure.
The gospel is our treasure.
And the reason he had to say this 500 years ago is because they had lost it.
We, as the church now, even 500 years later, must continue to guard that treasure, or it may be lost.
You see, churches do not automatically stay healthy.
We don’t tend to drift towards more healthy. That’s not how our sin-fallen world that we exist in works.
Churches don’t automatically stay healthy.
Families don’t automatically stay faithful.
You can lose people in a generation or two if you’re not faithful to share the gospel, to preach the gospel of the grace of God to your children and to their children and so on.
We are prone to wander.
As the old hymn says, we tend to drift.
And not only do we tend to, we are likely to because we’ve already seen it in our history.
We don’t have to just say that to try to scare people into not drifting. We’ve seen it happen, which is why the Reformation at all happened.
The Catholic Church for 1,200 years had slowly drifted until grace was no longer grace. It had become a man-centered religion, works-based grace.
The gospel was lost.
History has shown us that we can drift and drift badly.
So this doctrine of the grace of God must be preserved, church, must be preached, and it must be loved.
So this morning, we’re going to look at the first half of verse 8.
So if you will, stand with me for the reading of God’s Word. We’re going to read the entire section of verses 1–10, as we’ve been doing all along so far, so we get the full context and so that these words will etch themselves in our mind and be kept indelibly in our hearts.
Father, this morning, as we are reminded once again of your grace, as we understand that our salvation is not of our own doing, it’s not of ourselves, it is by your grace alone, Lord, help us to understand this.
Help us to see the importance of this wonderful, true, core doctrine of the faith.
Lord, let us not see this as just another thing we’re coming to as we make our way through the Bible, but to see it for what it is.
That if we lose this understanding of salvation by grace alone, by your grace alone, then Lord, we don’t just lose grace, we lose the gospel. We lose everything, and we become like many other groups that call themselves churches who have lost any semblance of truth.
Lord, let that not be true of us.
And Lord, I pray, even with that coming out of my mouth, I pray even now that those groups of people who have been led astray by a false gospel would hear the gospel, Lord, that you would send us, send some, send wherever they may be, Lord, some Christian in their path to teach them, to preach to them, to share with them the true gospel of grace.
So Lord, this morning through your Word, teach us the truth of your Word. Reprove us for where we have gotten it wrong, where we have understood incorrectly, or where we have practiced incorrectly.
Lord, correct us so that we may understand the truth rightly.
And for those of us who understand these things, Lord, help us to use your Word this morning to train us in righteousness.
Lord, do these things by your Word alone, through your Spirit that is within us. Open our eyes and our hearts to understand and receive these things and carry them out, and to do so not for our own glory, but for the glory of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.
Amen.
You may be seated.
The main idea of this morning’s lesson is that salvation rests entirely on God’s grace, not on anything foreseen or found or produced in us.
Verse 8 begins with the word “for.”
“For by grace.”
Paul begins with this word in order to tell us that this verse is not, once again, disconnected from what came before.
I believe we understand that because we are reading this all together. We’ve been pounding that point in, that this is all one big, long paragraph. It all goes together.
It’s not a bunch of separated proverbs where you’re moving from one thing to a completely different thing.
No, this is all building to a point.
And so Paul is explaining now. That’s what this “for” means.
He’s explaining the salvation that he has just described in verses 1 through 7.
God made us alive with Christ. He raised us with Christ. He seated us with Christ. He’s going to display His grace in Christ towards us forever and ever and ever.
And how did all of that happen?
Well, we got a taste of that in verse 5 because he couldn’t help but get ahead of himself. But we hear it now where it’s meant to be in terms of the order for us.
“For by grace you have been saved.”
How did all that happen?
By grace.
This is the explanation of everything that has taken place so far.
This is the explanation of the whole paragraph that we are working our way through.
Paul has already removed from us, as he’s made his way through this paragraph, any kind of man-centered explanation for salvation.
That’s already been removed.
“But I’m a pretty good person.”
No, you’re not. Not according to verses 1 through 3.
“But I do good things.”
No, you don’t. Not according to verses 1 through 3.
“But I’m not as bad as—”
Yeah, you are.
Just like the rest of mankind.
You see, we’ve already removed that.
There cannot be a man-centered explanation for our salvation.
There’s no way that we came up with it, that we worked our way there, or that we earned it in any kind of way.
He’s not described us here as people who are impressive spiritually. We just need a little help, or we just needed a little encouragement, or we were seeking for God but we just needed the right direction.
No, none of that is true.
He said we were dead in our sins. We were sons of disobedience. We were children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
It was a helpless, hopeless situation in ourselves.
So when Paul says here, “for by grace,” he’s giving us the only explanation for salvation that fits what you just read in verses 1–7.
And this is not only, by the way, the logic of the logical flow of this particular paragraph in this one particular spot in the Scriptures.
This is the testimony of the entirety of Scripture.
What all of Scripture has shown us is, man, you can’t do it by yourself.
You can’t do it.
You can’t earn it.
You can’t get there.
From the very first one that He made, who messed it up in the garden, to the Israelites whom He even chose out and said, “I’m going to work through you guys, and I’m going to give you everything you need. I’m going to give you the law, and I’m going to give you the sacrifice. I’m going to give you all that stuff.”
And guess what?
They fell short of that.
And even as Christ came and died on the cross, even for those who would believe it, it’s still not like, okay, well, Christ made a way so that you can now come on yourself. You seekers now have a place to go to.
No, no, no, no.
You still can’t do it on your own.
Christ had to come and do it for you.
He had to live the life that you failed to live.
It is by grace alone.
That’s the testimony of the entirety of Scripture.
Romans 3:24 says, “Sinners are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
Titus 3:5 says, “He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy.”
2 Timothy 1:9 says, “God saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but because of His own purpose and grace.”
So Paul’s not introducing here something strange to the Scriptures, like, “Whoa, that’s new. Where’d that come from?”
He’s putting it in one spot succinctly for us so that our blockheads could get it.
Listen, you can read the whole Scripture from Genesis 1 all the way through Revelation 22, and you’ll get to this same conclusion. But for those of us too lazy to read Genesis 1 through Revelation 22, here it is right here.
Paul is stating the consistent witness of God’s Word from beginning to end.
Salvation is from God.
It is according to His grace.
It is through Christ alone.
It is not of us.
The 1689 London Baptist Confession says, “This effectual call,” that is, this call to salvation, this saving us, “is of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature, co-working His special grace; the creature being wholly passive therein, being dead in sins and trespasses until being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit.”
That’s what Ephesians 2 is teaching us.
God did not, before the foundation of the earth, look down the corridor of time and go, “You know what? That person’s going to be pretty good. I’m going to choose him.”
He didn’t look down and foresee, “You know, I’m going to find a woman there who’s really wise. That one’s going to be mine.”
He didn’t look down the corridor in time and find some little kid who’s trying really hard to please Jesus. “Oh, because he’s so cute and he’s trying so hard, I’m going to choose him.”
“Oh, now you’re talking about our kids.”
I’m talking about all of us.
Every one of us.
God did not look down the corridor in time and say because of man and how he’s acting and how he’s believing and what he has done that I think is worthy of saving, that I’m going to save him.
No.
What did He find when He looked down the corridor of time according to Ephesians 2:1–3?
People who were dead in their trespasses and sins.
Sons of disobedience following the prince of this world, following the flesh and the passions that are at war within them, and children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
He looked down the corridor of time. He saw that, and then He saved us.
I don’t claim to be God. Never will.
But if I was in that position, I would have looked down going, “Nope, I don’t want any of those. Not a one.”
That’s not God.
God is rich in mercy, love, and grace.
Though His wrath demands justice, He looked down at unworthy sinners, and He decided to save.
And so that is why we preach and teach and counsel and evangelize what the Scriptures alone show us, what the Scriptures consistently from beginning to end show us salvation is, that it’s not of ourselves.
It’s not of our tradition.
It’s not of our own experience.
It’s not trying to understand our life from human reasoning.
It is not about being more religious than the person next to us.
We must see grace as God has defined it in His Word.
Because if we try to understand grace based on any other authority other than Scripture, very quickly grace gets redefined as something that can be earned, something less than what it is.
And once again, I’m not just stating that as, “Hey, be afraid that this might happen.”
I’m stating this as a fact because it already has in our history, and we don’t want to go back there again.
Once you redefine grace, the gospel is in danger.
Paul does not begin with man.
He begins with God.
“For by grace.”
Paul says that salvation is by grace.
Here is the definition of grace.
Grace is God’s free and undeserved favor toward guilty sinners.
It is not God helping those who help themselves.
It’s not God helping those who almost made it and they just need a little leg up.
It’s not God rewarding those who tried really, really hard.
It’s God saving the ones that do not deserve it.
So that’s why grace and human works cannot both be the basis for salvation.
Romans 11:6 says, “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works. Otherwise grace would no longer be grace.”
Man, if people who try to mix those things together would just read the Bible.
“Well, it’s grace and works. You’ve got to do something to earn the grace.”
“If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works. Otherwise grace would no longer be grace.”
I didn’t even interpret anything for you.
I just read what it said.
It’s not complicated, but it must be believed.
Romans 4:4–5 makes the same point.
“Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.”
And then Paul says, “To the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”
And we’ll dig more into faith alone next week.
But that’s stunning, isn’t it?
God, listen to me, justifies, meaning He makes right before Him. He clears his guilt and gives us the righteousness of Christ. He makes us righteous.
God justifies the ungodly.
It doesn’t say God justifies the ones who were living good.
Scripture tells us that He came for those who are sick. The ones who are healthy don’t need a doctor.
And what that means is the ones who think they don’t need a doctor.
He didn’t come for them.
He came for the ungodly. He came for the sick. He came for those in need of salvation.
Charles Spurgeon once said, speaking about God in salvation, “Other divine attributes are manifest in salvation. The wisdom of God devised the plan. The power of God executes in us the work of salvation. The immutability of God preserves and carries it on. In fact, all the attributes of God are magnified in the salvation of a sinner. But at the same time, the text is most accurate here since grace is the fountainhead of salvation and is the most conspicuous throughout.”
It’s grace.
God’s grace, according to Spurgeon here using his terms, is the fountain. It is the source from which salvation flows.
So if the cause of salvation then is somehow found within man, again, whether it’s our will, or us being sincere about it, or our effort, or trying really hard, or anything else, then man, listen, will always try to take credit.
But Paul again shuts that door in our face.
Salvation begins in the gracious purpose of God.
And if that’s the case, the glory belongs to Him.
And that is why grace alone is not just about Reformation. It’s not just about those theological guys, those theology guys who like to have phrases to recite.
No.
It is a biblical necessity.
When grace somehow becomes partly dependent on us, the gospel is being altered.
And that’s not Paul’s gospel.
That’s not the Bible’s gospel.
That’s not God’s gospel.
Paul says, “For by grace you have been saved.”
Paul does not say here, then, after all that we have gone through in those first seven verses, “for by grace salvation has been made possible for you.”
And unfortunately, I think that’s where a lot of those denominations, those other religions, those false groups, that’s how they’ve interpreted this.
But he doesn’t say that.
He doesn’t say by grace salvation’s been made possible.
He says, “By grace you have been saved.”
That matters.
That verb—I bring up grammar all the time because words matter. How they are written down and how they’ve been preserved for us matters.
Here’s one of those very clear ones of why it matters.
The verb here, “you have been saved,” is a perfect passive plural form.
All of that means that he’s talking about a completed saving work that has continuing results.
It’s perfect in that it has taken place already and has continuing results.
It is passive, meaning it is done to you.
And it is plural because he’s speaking to who?
The church.
There’s not one person that’s been saved who is a part of God’s church that didn’t get there by grace.
It’s all y’all is the plural here.
“By grace, y’all been saved,” if you want to put it in our context.
But it is completed.
It has taken place.
You’re not in some suspended reality between now and when you die where you’re like, “Oh, I mean, I’ve died for you, but I’m going to wait to see if you do good in your life or not.”
No.
You’ve been saved.
His grace is enough.
He has saved you.
You have been saved.
Believer in Christ, salvation has actually come to you.
And this salvation includes everything that Paul’s been describing so far.
He has rescued us from spiritual death.
He has rescued us from the guilt.
He has rescued us from His own wrath.
He has rescued us from bondage to the world, to our flesh, to the devil.
He has brought us into life.
He has promised resurrection.
And He has made us one with Himself.
This is not little.
This is big.
This is a grand deliverance that God has done.
Dead sinners don’t earn resurrection.
Children of wrath, as I’ve mentioned this multiple times in our way through, don’t earn adoption.
Rebels don’t get to pardon themselves.
Slaves don’t purchase their own freedom.
John 1:12 and 13 helps us here. He says, “But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”
And if you read that wrong, you go, “Oh, so you had to believe and He gave you the right after you believed.”
No, no, no.
Listen, the rest of 13 gives the context.
“Who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
Now, don’t misunderstand me. We will talk about the importance, the critical nature of faith next week as we get to the next words in this phrase.
But don’t miss the point here.
God is the One who saves.
This is what Paul is preaching here.
Salvation does not come, as John 1:12–13 says, by natural descent.
You don’t just get saved because, well, you were born into it.
No, salvation again in verse 13 there, John chapter 1, is not a human decision, not of the will of man.
Not of the will of the flesh, meaning you can’t work hard enough in your flesh.
Salvation is not of those things.
It is of God.
John Bunyan, in his book on law and grace, says this: “Now some people be so ignorant as to think that God will give them Christ and so all the merits of His if they be but valiant and do something to please God that they may obtain Him at His hands. But let me tell them, they may lose a thousand souls quickly if they had so many by going this way to work, and yet never be the better. For the Lord does not give His Christ to any upon such conditions, but He does give Him freely, that is, without having respect to anything that is in you.”
It’s not in us.
This is why when we talk about Scripture alone, grace alone, Christ alone, we need these things.
We need to remember these core truths because they all belong together.
We’re talking about grace alone here.
But listen, if you pull any of these out, the others begin to fall off.
If you remove Scripture alone as the authority to tell us what salvation comes through and how salvation takes place, then that means that we get to define what the gospel is.
We get to define who and how we get saved.
If you lose grace alone, if you remove that piece of it, then you can begin to add in some good works.
“Well, if I work hard enough, I’ll be accepted.”
Of course, if you remove Christ alone, then you start filling in the place of a Savior with something else.
You’re turning to something to save you.
And if it’s not Jesus, it’s a false gospel.
If you remove faith, then you begin to add works for our ground for justification.
And if God’s glory alone is not the reason for salvation, then we begin to boast, which we’ll talk about in verse 9.
So we must guard this truth because we must guard the gospel.
The gospel has been given to us as a treasure.
The gospel has been given to us to defend.
“For by grace you have been saved.”
Grace humbles every single form of man-centered religion.
Grace leaves no room for man-centered religion.
It humbles those who are openly immoral, meaning it humbles those who are openly in sin that everybody can look at and go, “Yeah, that person’s definitely a sinner.”
It definitely humbles that person.
And usually we think of grace as being for that person.
It humbles that person because you can’t just explain away your sin. You see it.
But listen, this should also make the moral person humble.
The person that thinks they’re a pretty decent person, they’re a good person.
Why should this humble them?
Because even a respectable sinner is still a sinner.
Listen, nothing we can do can earn us salvation.
But I also want to make a point here that this understanding of God’s grace even humbles the doctrinal person.
And what I mean by that is like what 1 Corinthians 13 refers to.
If you speak with tongues of men and angels, you have all this knowledge, but you do not have love, you are a clanging cymbal.
Even if you know the right doctrine, even if you understand these things, even if you can recite back to me what grace is and that we are saved by grace, you can even explain it to me, that doesn’t save you.
You are saved by grace.
You’re not saved by understanding how it works.
God saved you.
“For by grace are you saved.”
It is possible to believe in grace and still act proud that you understand grace.
How ugly is that?
If your understanding of grace, if your doctrine of grace makes you arrogant, you may have learned the right vocabulary, but you missed the whole point.
Brother David Miller would say something like this to you: Those of us who preach grace ought to have some of it.
1 Corinthians 1:27–31 says, “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
“And because of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’”
The gospel takes boasting away from us, away from our good works, away from even our right doctrine, away from the kind of religion we grew up in.
It saves us.
It takes boasting away from our living more morally than other people.
The gospel takes away our boasting and places it where it belongs, in the Lord.
Nobody comes to God with leverage.
Not one of us comes to God like we come to a used car dealer with some buying power, some bargaining chips.
Not one of us.
In fact, Jesus had some choice words for those kinds of people in Matthew chapter 7.
And some of the most humbling words in the Scriptures, Matthew 7:21–23 says, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.
“On that day many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and cast out demons in Your name, and do many mighty works in Your name?’
“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness.’”
We come to God empty-handed.
And then He saves us.
No man is saved except by God’s grace.
That’s Paul’s point.
It is not because of you.
It is in God.
Stop trying to make yourself the explanation for your salvation.
And if you are in Christ Jesus, you are not the hero in your story.
God is.
So, we must guard grace.
We shouldn’t hear these sermons and lessons on grace, these verses on grace, as if it’s only meant for unbelievers.
The church needs to hear this verse.
We need to hear that “by grace you have been saved.”
Why?
Because we never stop wanting the credit.
Even after we’re saved, we’re tempted to think that God’s favor rests on our being more teachable, more moral, or whatever.
No.
You were saved by grace.
It’s a done deal.
And this is an ever-present danger in the church.
It will continue on generation to generation until the Lord returns.
Churches drift away when they stop saying these things clearly.
We drift towards legalism, man-made standards, different measures of spirituality.
We can tend to drift towards sacramentalism, trying to work our way religiously so that we can build up our own confidence in ourself.
We’ll drift towards moralism, where Christianity is reduced to just trying to be a decent person.
Sometimes we drift into a form of decisionism. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but I’m going to use it, where salvation is reduced to a past action of the will, but no new birth and no fruit.
Meaning, “Well, I made a decision when I was six at VBS.”
All right. What’s your life been like since then?
“Oh, I don’t know, but I punched my ticket.”
That’s what I’m talking about.
Ephesians 2:8 then gives us an anchor.
It gives us a foundation.
And it gives us something real to build off of.
“For by grace you have been saved.”
We must preserve this doctrine.
We must continue to teach this doctrine.
Listen, families, parents, moms and dads, you need to teach this to your children.
They need to understand it.
We need to continue to sing about God’s grace, but knowing what it means as we sing it.
We need to pray it.
We need to preach it.
We need to guard the gospel.
We need to guard the grace of God, not as if we are going to make God’s grace powerful, but we need to make sure that God’s powerful grace continues to be made available generation to generation to generation.
That is our work.
Continue to preach God’s Word, not our own.
We must guard the gospel as Scripture tells us.
We must preserve sound doctrine by proclaiming it clearly.
Don’t assume that a church cannot drift because we’ve got good people in it.
We must preach and teach the gospel of God’s grace.
Grace alone must be preached clearly from the pulpit.
It must be taught clearly in the home.
We must continue to share it willingly in our evangelism.
When grace alone is blurred, people can’t see Christ the way He was meant to be seen.
We end up maximizing ourselves.
We do the opposite of what John says.
We say He must decrease and we must increase.
What a terrible thing that is.
“For by grace you have been saved.”
Paul begins verse 8 with this phrase as the great explanation of God’s salvation.
Salvation begins with God. It rests on God, and it ends in God’s glory.
God’s grace is for sinners who have nothing to bring.
And Christian, don’t be embarrassed by this phrase, grace alone.
Don’t treat it like just one of those doctrines that those Reformed guys talk about.
This is the gospel.
You lose grace, you lose the gospel.
But where we preserve grace alone, then sinners will truly be humbled, Christ will truly be exalted, and God in saving sinners will receive all the glory.
“For by grace you have been saved.”
Amen.
We can be reminded of it ourselves in our own lives, but so that we can have it ready on our lips for those who need to hear it around us who are lost.
So that we will have it ready for our children to hear it, to speak it to them, to remind them of it in our own homes.
That we might continue to preach it and teach it and counsel it and evangelize with your gospel of grace to the generations that come that follow behind us.
Lord, we are grateful for those that have come before us who have been faithful to preach your gospel so that we might have it.
Help us to carry it on faithfully until your return.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Would you stand with me?