Throughout human history, the idea of harvesting where you didn't sow or receiving what you didn't earn has always been a point of contention.
And rightfully so, because we are brought up being taught that nobody owes us anything. We have to earn our way in society by contributing in whatever way we can.
We're taught that every door we walk through has got to be opened by our merit. That to become something in this world, you have to work to make yourself that thing.
And all that is true.
But all that is thrown out the window when it comes to God.
Why? (I hear you ask.)
Romans 3:10 says:
“There is none righteous, no, not one.”
The implication is that despite everything humans throughout history have done, none of them ever achieved righteousness.
Unlike our horizontal relationships with people, where you often have to earn your place based on what you do, our vertical relationship with God is different. Nothing we do can earn us righteousness
No amount of fasting, prayer, or living a holy life can make you righteous before God. Righteousness comes through faith in Jesus Christ.
Wild? Right. I know.
What Is Grace?
The idea of freely receiving righteousness from God without working to earn it is one of those things that reorients your entire worldview.
And it's a work of grace. God's unmerited favor.
You didn't earn it by what you did. You receive it simply by believing in Jesus Christ.
As Christ says in John 6:29:
“This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.”
Grace comes from the Greek word charis, which carries the idea of goodwill and favor. Grace is everything God does for man without the help of man.
This is especially difficult to understand because it shatters the ‘reward based on merit’ mindset we've all been brought up with.
With God, He gives us what we don't deserve.
Because if He ever gave us exactly what we deserved, that would be a lot of pain.
Saved by Grace Through Faith
Ephesians 2:8–9 says that we have been saved “by grace...through faith”, and that salvation is “the gift of God, not of works.”
Which means that salvation is a gift. You did nothing to earn it. You receive it by believing in Jesus.
If it could be earned, it wouldn't be grace. Scripture makes it clear that grace and works are mutually exclusive.
Imagine you could earn God's grace. What price could you possibly pay for it?
It cost the Son of God His sinless blood.
Blood that was precious, pure, and untouched by sin.
That's what makes Jesus the only way through which we can be justified before God.
Abraham lied.
Abraham deceived Pharaoh and Abimelech about Sarah being his wife, not once, but TWICE.
And mind you, this was a man whom God had promised to make into a great nation, make his name great, and curse whoever cursed him.
Now technically, Sarah actually was Abraham's sister.
Abraham explains in Genesis 20:12 that she was the daughter of his father, but not the daughter of his mother.
So Abraham wasn't making the entire thing up.
But come on.
He conveniently left out the tiny detail that she was also his wife because he wanted to save his neck.
I mean, what kind of man does that to his wife?
As you can see, the case I'm trying to make is that Abraham was far from perfect, and he sure as hell didn't deserve anything that God promised or gave him.
He did nothing to earn it.
And God even came out to defend Abraham before Pharaoh and Abimelech, who had been led to believe Sarah wasn't his wife.
In Pharaoh's case, God afflicted his house with plagues.
And He personally visited Abimelech in a dream and low-key threatened him with the legendary:
“Indeed you are a dead man...”
In both instances, God's issue with these rulers was that they had taken Abraham's wife. And this is despite Abraham himself creating the mess by hiding the fact that she was his wife.
Surely a just God would be completely done with Abraham, wouldn't He?
No.
God remained faithful to the promises He had made to Abraham.
Why?
Grace.
Also, Abraham and Sarah had no child because Sarah was barren and past the age of fruitfulness.
So God promised them a child.
Sarah, wanting Abraham to have an heir, offered Hagar, her maid, to Abraham, and Hagar bore him Ishmael.
At some point, we get a hint that Abraham starts to believe that Ishmael might be the child God had promised them.
But God corrects Abraham by explicitly stating that the child born through Sarah would be the child of promise.
Yes, Sarah. The barren 90-year-old woman. A ripe grandmother (ready to die) by today's standards.
And when God fulfills His promise by opening Sarah's womb when Abraham was 100 years old, it shows that human effort had no part in bringing about what God Himself had promised.
God's only requirement for Abraham was to believe.
Noah Found Grace
Genesis 6 tells the fascinating story of Noah at a time when wickedness and violence were rampant across the earth.
But Genesis 6:8 says:
“But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.”
And then the very next verse tells us that Noah was a just man who walked with God.
So I'm not saying Noah was some wicked guy who didn't care about God and grace randomly landed on his head.
That's not what the passage says.
What fascinates me is how Scripture introduces the whole story by saying that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
It doesn't say that Noah earned grace. Because then it wouldn't be grace.
Noah would go on to obey God in an extraordinary way.
The man literally built a gigantic ark because God told him a flood was coming.
But grace wasn't his salary for building the ark.
Grace is where the story starts.
Noah was chosen by God to preserve his family and animal life through the flood.
It's amazing how much this teaches us about the way God works and deals with us. God knows us before we know Him. He calls us before we're aware of His call. He reaches toward us before we've done anything capable of putting Him in our debt.
And all we can do is receive His grace.
Even Men After God's Own Heart Also Screw Up
David was chosen by God to replace Saul as king after Saul disobeyed the Lord's command through the prophet Samuel concerning the Amalekites.
From David's election, we see the grace of God at work because the obvious choices, like Eliab, were rejected by God.
God tells Samuel in 1 Samuel 16:7:
“For the LORD does not see as man sees...the LORD looks at the heart.”
David was the youngest son of Jesse, usually out in the fields taking care of his father's sheep and protecting them from bears and lions.
He wasn't the obvious choice for king.
In fact, David wasn't even called in until Samuel asked Jesse if he had any other sons.
God skipped those who looked kingly in favor of a young shepherd out in the fields.
Now that's grace.
Further down the road, David sins against God by not only stealing Uriah's wife, Bathsheba, but also arranging for the death of Uriah on the battlefield.
Probably the worst part was letting a faithful man like Uriah carry the instructions for his own death back to David's commander, Joab, on the battlefield.
I think it's fair to say that David stabbed Uriah in the back.
And later on, when God sent the prophet Nathan to rebuke David for his sin, God's message can be paraphrased in today's lingo as:
“David, I gave you everything you had, and if that wasn't enough, I would have given you more. So why did you despise My command and do this?”
Of course, David repents of his sin and begs for mercy from God.
And God grants him mercy.
He gives him grace.
He didn't deserve it.
Heck, how could he wash his conscience clean of the blood of an innocent man?
But as you can probably tell by now, God gives us what we don't deserve.
David later, in Psalm 32:2, describes the blessedness of the man to whom God will not impute sin.
He calls blessed the person “to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity.”
Paul later quotes David in Romans 4 while explaining the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.
Once a man believes in Jesus, he becomes a new creature, as 2 Corinthians 5:17 says.
Forgiven Past, Present, and Future
And this is where it gets really good.
All our sins were future when Jesus died on the cross.
Think about that for a second.
You weren't alive.
Neither were your parents or grandparents.
Every sin you have ever committed happened after Christ had already gone to the cross.
And yet Hebrews 9:12 tells us that Christ entered the holy place “once for all” by His own blood and obtained “eternal redemption.”
Notice those words: once for all and eternal redemption.
Jesus didn't enter again and again.
He entered once, and what He obtained was eternal.
Then Hebrews 10:10 says that we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ “once for all.”
Then Hebrews 10:14 says:
“For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.”
One offering. Forever.
Hebrews 10:17–18 goes even further: God says He will remember our sins and lawless deeds no more, and that where there is remission, “there is no longer an offering for sin.”
This is why I say that, for us as believers, our past, present, and future sins have been dealt with by the sacrifice of Christ.
Jesus doesn't have to die again every time you sin.
Because if His sacrifice only dealt with the sins you had committed up to the point you believed, what happens tomorrow when you sin again?
Does He come back and die again? Of course not.
He died once.
Under the Old Testament sacrificial system, sacrifices were offered continually because of sin.
Jesus, by His own blood, offered one sacrifice that actually dealt with the problem of sin.
Hebrews 10:4 makes the problem with the old sacrifices plain:
“It is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.”
The blood of animals could never finally take away sin.
They pointed forward to Christ.
But when Christ came, He didn't offer the blood of another animal.
He offered Himself.
In Him, you're accepted by God.
Not by your righteous living, fasting, or prayer, things which are important to observe.
The work of Christ at the cross is the only way we have peace with God.
So... We Can Sin? After All, We're Eternally Forgiven?
When Paul anticipates people asking whether this kind of forgiveness gives them a green light to sin freely, his immediate, emphatic response is:
“Certainly not!”
Romans 6:1–2 says:
“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?”
When someone first hears the message of grace, it's natural to ask:
“So hey... I can sin more since I've been forgiven?”
And Paul shows us that we're dead to sin.
In simple terms, he's saying that we're new creatures.
Our old man, who loved and basked in the pleasures of sin, is dead.
We have been given a new heart, a heart that desires God and longs after Him.
That's why grace isn't an excuse to just happily live in sin forever.
The Holy Spirit who lives in us is also at work within us.
Jesus says in John 16:8 that when the Holy Spirit comes, He will convict the world “of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.”
So grace isn't God simply forgiving us and then leaving us exactly as we were.
We have been made new.
And sin should no longer be something we're comfortable living in.
Paul says in Romans 6:14:
“For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”
Notice that.
Under grace, sin shall not have dominion over you.
Grace doesn't only deal with the punishment of sin.
Grace also gives us the power to walk differently.
Conclusion
Under Moses' law, goats, bulls, and other sacrifices were continually offered because of sin.
But as Hebrews 10:4 tells us, the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sins.
Man could not make himself righteous before God by keeping the law.
We needed something better.
So God sent His Son, born of a woman, who took on flesh and came to die so that through His blood we could be reconciled to God.
The grace of God is seen in everything He has freely given us in Jesus Christ.
We've not worked for or earned these things.
We've just been given them. And all we can do is receive them in faith.
Ephesians 2:8–9 (Message) says:
Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving.
That's grace.
