By His Grace You Are Saved
By Roy Key
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But God, rich in mercy, for the great love he bore us, brought us to life with Christ even when we were dead in our sins; it is by his grace you are saved. And in union with Christ Jesus he raised us up and enthroned us with him in the heavenly realms, so that he might display in the ages to come how immense are the resources of his grace, and how great his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by his grace you are saved, through trusting him; it is not your own doing. It is God's gift, not a reward for work done. There is nothing for anyone to boast of. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to devote ourselves to the good deeds for which God has designed us (Ephesians 2:4-10).
We were dead in sins and He gave us life together with Christ. We were lost in the old life, and he lifted us out of it right into the heavens. We achieved nothing; we were given everything. The love of God is not for sale, and if it were, we have no coin with which to buy. Works, the only works we can call good, God performs through us. We ourselves are His work, if we remember who we are. His creation, not through Adam, but through Christ.
There are four things tonight I shall say about grace. There is much more that should be said, lest grace, like the seamless garment of Jesus, suffer the rending of a whole. We can but do our best with a reality too big to grasp. But we have been grasped by Him! This is our experience in Christ Jesus and my hope for understanding as we together venture fresh explorations into the riches of His grace.
(1) God's grace is His gift in Jesus Christ. (2) By His grace we are accepted. (3) By His grace we are made whole. (4) By His grace we live as servant-sons.
(1) God's grace is His gift in Jesus Christ. And this I affirm at the beginning, the Gift is Himself, nothing less than Himself, offered in transforming Friendship. "Grace" is a shorthand word for the stupendous love story of the Bible. It is God's love in action, accepting, forgiving, uniting, re-creating, empowering. It is God, who will not live in isolated bliss while His lost children wander as aliens in His world. Its signs are fresh-splotched across the arctic wastelands of our pride and all the deserts of our fierce self-will--bloody footprints on the ice and sand.
The lexicons define the term as "free gift," "free favor," "mercy," "acceptance." But words are empty until filled with content, and God has filled this word with the content of Jesus Christ. Not satisfied to make statements about His love, or to issue press releases and celestial communiques--He came!
Active in the call of Abraham, the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slave labor battalions, the making of the covenant and giving of the law, God shows Himself everywhere and always active for those with eyes to see. But we Christians never truly see grace at all until we see it down on its knees with a basin and a towel; until we see it with its hands on stinking, rotting leper's flesh; until we see it wiping spit off its face and stretching out wounded hands in forgiveness; until we see it with prostitutes and tax collectors and preachers and elders and editors and schoolmen, refusing either to leave them or to compromise with them; until we see it nailed down on a cross, bleeding itself out in spurts and spasms, crying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Ten days ago a girl came with her fiance to talk about the Christian faith. They have for two months been enrolled in a class at Saint Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church in Ames. He is a member. They asked about original sin, infant baptism, sacramentalism, including transubstantiation. I turned at once to the fundamental differences in our understanding of grace.
If grace is something that God gives or does, if it is external to God Himself,
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If, on the other hand, sin is the assertion of the will against God, rebellion, then it is not hereditary, nor some moral stain to be removed by magic or the arbitrary pronouncement even of an omnipotent God. The result of rebellion is ruptured relationship. Grace is healing the rupture. It is, first, free forgiveness. It is, second, new creation. All this is made possible by the power of God available through His personal friendship. The holy and loving God is contagious. Faith is the openness of trust that holds the transfigured rebel true to his new covenant vows
It seems easy to refute the Roman doctrine of grace with its magic and arbitrariness. But legalism, Roman or Protestant, is open to the same objection. To hold that sin is some stain washed away either by the water of baptism, the blood of Christ, the power of the Spirit, or anything else that God chooses to appoint to the office, is no less arbitrary.
The action inherent in restoring a personal relationship is that the self, nothing less than the person himself be offered and received. Any arbitrary "conditions" only announce that the offer is not full and free and honest. There must be forgiveness. There must be faith. Not because God arbitrarily says so, but because these are inherent in the restoration of personal friendship. If grace is personal, these are inherently necessary. Whatever else God draws into the situation (circumcision, sacrifice, baptism, or anything else) must be means to the end. They help in the giving and receiving of assurance that what is really taking place is the giving and receiving of selves.
Any placing of these "means of grace" on a par with the gift, or with the receiving of the gift in faith, is wrong. It destroys the personal relation and reduces the grace of God to something magical, quasi-material, arbitrary or legal. And no doctrine which attacks the personal character of grace can be permitted to stand.
(2) By His grace we are accepted. I use the word "accepted" here rather than the more comprehensive word "saved," which includes not only our "acceptance" by God, but our oneness, our strength in the fellowship of His Spirit. "Salvation" is that gloriously rich term that sweeps up all that Paul meant by both justification and sanctification--what he meant by being "in Christ."
I use "acceptance" to convey Paul's meaning of dikaiosune, translated "righteousness" or "justification," a legal term drawn from the imagery of the court to speak to his contemporaries conversant with court proceedings. But in the Roman letter the apostle gives us a thrilling surprise by using the terminology in such a way as to shatter its legal form and release its personal content. It is the breaking of the alabaster box and the spilling of the fragrance everywhere.
Paul piles up paradoxes. His whole theme is "justification by faith," an incredible claim that the Judge ignores the whole question of guilt and counts the guilty innocent when the lawbreaker throws himself on the mercy of the court. "Not guiltyl" cries the Judge. There is no reduced sentence, no tempering of the deserved penalty. "Not guiltyl" is the verdict and it is all wrong. By every canon of justice it is wrong. But listen to Paul:
Now if a man does a piece of work, his wages are not 'counted' as a
favor; they are paid as debt. But if without any works to his credit he simply puts his faith in him
who acquits the guilty, then his faith is indeed 'counted as righteousness.' In the same sense
David speaks of the happiness of the man whom God 'counts' as just, apart from any specific acts
of justice: 'Happy are they,' he says,
'whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are bnried away; happy is the man whose sins the
Lord does not count against him' (Romans 4:4-8).
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Stand still now, and catch the full impact of this hammer stroke of grace. God acquits the guilty! Not the man who has worked, but precisely the man who has not worked is counted righteous. The figure is intentionally shocking. Only so can the legal categories be shattered. Now translate the gospel out of the language of the court, as the apostle does in the quotation from David, "Happy are they whose lawless deeds are forgiven. . ."
The legal doctrine of "justification" is one approach to the personal relationship of "forgiveness." Righteousness is seen to be right relationship. We are "counted" right, but we are also put right. This is the element of truth in the Catholic doctrine of "infused" rather than "imputed" righteousness. For grace is more than a legal decree, yet not a divine deposit. It is a divine friendship, forgiving and radically transforming. The free gift of forgiveness puts us into "right" relation, and that right relation is always "fellowship."
Here is the right relation between God and man and among men. Anything less is less than right. It is fundamentally wrong and will always be fundamentally wrong. For God's creative act joins us to one another, and severed from one another we are ourselves torn in two. God's creative purpose embraces a Family whose members are linked to one another in trusting love.
Paul takes the greatest pains to show that all this is accomplished by grace and not merit, by faith and not works. We will misunderstand and contradict him if we squirm at his insistence that salvation is by grace through faith. We will misunderstand and contradict him, if we dodge the conclusion that it is "by grace alone through faith alone"-- sola gratia sola fide.
Let the issue be clear. "By grace and not merit." "By faith and not works." This is the apostle's argument. Are we ready for it? Not unless we are ready to stop mouthing his words and see what they mean.
By grace he means God's initiative, His love in action. This and this alone is the cause of our acceptance. Nothing we are or have done, or will be or can do. The ground or cause of acceptance does not lie in us, but in Him alone, and in sheer grace.
The means of our acceptance by Him is simply our acceptance of
Him, receiving the free gift of Himself. There is nothing else. We do not create the gift or seize
it or buy it. We accept iti It is offered for nothing but the taking, faith alone. God's grace is His
hand downstretched in free forgiveness and fellowship. Our faith is our hand upreached with
nothing in it, no gun, no coin.
Nothing in my hand I bring;
Simply to Thy cross I cling. No cause but grace, no means but faith. Therefore, Paul said, "The promise was made on the ground of faith, in order that it might be a matter of sheer grace. . ." (Romans 4:16).
For this reason God conditioned His love on nothing but acceptance, that we might receive Him as a free gift. And Paul's argument is clear. Unless the acceptance is the personal one of faith, the gift cannot be grace. We will not really understand God's grace until we know that it is fundamentally unconditional. It is no partial offer. It has no arbitrary essential tied onto it. If God simply chooses to attach to the gift as a condition something not inherent in the giving and receiving, then grace is compromised, acceptance is partial, and salvation is not truly personal. And the apostle will not have it.
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No! but on the principle of faith. For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law (Romans 3:27, 28).
Circumcision nor sacrifice nor confession nor baptism give us anything of which to boast. They must not be a plus added to grace or faith. When we
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(3) In the third place, by His grace we are made whole. "Salvation" carries in it the meaning of "health" and "wholeness." "They that are whole have no need of a physician, but those who are sick" (Matt. 9: 12; Mark 2: 17; Luke 5:31). And, in rebellion against God, one another, and ourselves, our condition is desperate. We have suffered a monstrous cleavage that rips us apart from bottom to top, severed from our true nature, our right relationship, estranged from God and one another, hostile, guilty, afraid, alone!
Our need is not for safety, a place alone, lavishly furnished with every "thing" we can ask or imagine. It matters not if the street is gold and the gate pearl, it is a prison. It is not heaven, but hell, when we are alone. It does not answer our heart-hunger built into us by creation. Our real need is fellowship and without we are lost.
Only God can deliver us from estrangement and hostility, our guilty and fearful loneliness. Information, words, logic, doctrine, are not enough. All this comes to us as "object," not as "subject," leaving us in our solitude and despair. Only the great subject, the Person, can bring us the fellowship which is freedom and life, love and power.
Too long we have considered salvation as pardon, escape from hell, entrance into paradise. But a convict can be pardoned and be more lost than ever. Excluded from fellowship, in the outside world and torn out by the roots from that tortured fellowship in prison, he is utterly alone. Far from being whole, he is victim of a system that keeps him torn apart.
God is not solitariness, but a society, a fellowship! This is part of the doctrine of the triune God and implied in the affirmation, "God is love" (1 John 4:8). To call God "Father" is to acknowledge His creation of His family and the lostness of His children until they are together at home. Our individualism, with its view of atomistic salvation is a demonic plot that Satan fertilizes with glee. But God has come in Jesus Christ to destroy his work (1 John 3:8).
God's acceptance of us is always and only into the wholeness of His family. His gift of Fatherhood is equally the gift of Sonship and Brotherhood. After Paul, in Ephesians 2, .insists that we are saved by grace through faith, he describes us as God's workmanship. His creation through Christ (Verses 1-10). In the second half of the chapter he pictures the nature of this creation. It is a family, a new man or humanity, a commonwealth, a household, a holy temple. Every figure he employs is radiant with unity, with fellowship, with hostility ended, alienation gone, division destroyed, the warfare ended in peace.
It is all God's grace-gift of Himself in Christ, His sacrificial offering of Himself all the way to Calvary, until He becomes the love and peace that binds us into one. In His acceptance of us together, not stopping to enquire of each whether we will please permit Him to accept the other, we are made whole.
We have had the insane notion that as individuals we are complete, that what God is after is rugged individualists. Not so! It is the new family, the new fellowship, created by the cross. For this we are created, and so long as we perpetuate division, we are like patients in a psychiatric ward, fighting off the doctor and every other human who would woo us out of our insanity. "The middle wall of hostility" prevents our healing and perpetuates our madness. It is our "iron curtain" to protect us from the truth that would destroy our illusions, blast our self-righteousness and puncture our pride, flinging us together as common sinners in need of a forgiveness we can neither receive nor give.
But in the Cross the Gift is given and
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(4) Since by His grace we are accepted and by His grace we are made whole, by His grace we come to live as servant-sons. I hyphenate the word servant-son to point to the continued paradox of the grace of God, its mystery that no easy logic can dispel, the reality of Him whose service is perfect freedom.
Once Jesus said to His disciples, "I have not called you servants, for the servant does not share his master's mind. I have called you friends, for all that the Father has made known to me, I have made known to you" (John 15:15). Not servants, but friends! But Paul is like that slave purchased at auction and set free, who, falling at the feet of him who ransomed him, in gratitude cried, "I will be your willing slave forever!"
The servant-hood is the result of our sonship, never the cause. God gives us sonship in Him who voluntarily became "servant of all." Those who catch His Spirit receive His mind and share His nature. Not even servants, but slaves, they call themselves. "We will be your willing slaves forever!"
Here at last is the true relation of grace and faith and work. We are saved by grace through faith for good works, and it is all from first to last the work of God. A favorite quotation of Augustine was lifted from Paul, "What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?" (1 Cor. 4:7). Let someone stand up and answer the apostle. Let him boast of something, anything--his perfect obedience to the plan of salvation, his vigilance in excluding from fellowship the imperfect brother, his brain, his sex, his color, his education or bank book, something, anything! "What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?"
Tonight I have emphasized two expressions of grace. First, grace is transcendent, God's forgiving mercy over us. Second, grace is immanent. His transforming, empowering Presence. Forgiveness and Power, personal through and through. That for which we hunger with every fiber of body and soul is nothing less than God, available to us in Jesus Christ and the fellowship of His body, the Church.
Without question, what one makes of grace depends upon his personal
experience of it. We have made little of the doctrines of election and predestination, because we
have made little of grace itself. Too often it has been the instructions to tell man how to work
out his own salvation, a divine "do-it-yourself" kit. When the story of God's love is alive, told
with grateful joy, with the hearer swept up into the drama, with the contemporaneous action of
God delivering him now from exile and bondage, he makes no claim of merit. Gladly he
sings:
Jesus paid it all!
All to Him I owe.When the love story is neglected or told as an ancient tale of an age long dead, with legendary characters playing roles unreal, grace is no longer the personal encounter of an undeserved transforming love. When it is presented as the ingenious working out of a plan, an arbitrary arrangement men need not or cannot understand but must blindly obey or be damned, Grace is turned into an "object"--a legal pardon, a home in heaven) a magic removal of sin-stain.
Even if the concept of forgiveness remains, it grows weak. Remember Jesus at the house of Simon the Pharisee, and the parable of the two debtors? "Which loved him most?" was Jesus' question. Simon's answer was, "I suppose he whom he forgave most." "You are right," was Jesus' quick reply. Then came the sword-thrust of truth. "Simon, do you see this woman?" But Simon does not really see her or Jesus or God. Standing there in the presence of incarnate Grace, he is blind.
"Who loves him most?" Our Lord's question is a live one for us. "Who loves
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It is in this spirit of worship that Paul presents the concepts of election and predestination. He is no John Calvin setting forth a philosophical world view. He is a redeemed sinner hurrying to say, "I do not understand it, this mystery of God's love, for He chose me, chief of sinners. Not because I was good or brilliant, but because He laved me. The mystery of His choice is not in me, but in Him, in His eternal councils. But I am His. I praise His name and I will be His willing slave forever!"
There is so much I have not time to develop: the meaning of forgiveness with the cross as its cost; the means of grace as symbols and assurance of the divine love; the fellowship of grace as the carrier of the divine Presence; the reality of "falling from grace" which is not a falling first into gross sin but under the law; and the transfiguring experience of "growing in grace" where God's work for us becomes His work in us and "we all with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:18).
As a child I was surprised one Sunday morning to see the song leader of
our little congregation singing with tears running down his face. I held him in high esteem. He
was my favorite uncle. "What can be the matter?" I wondered. My eyes fell on the page before
me, and for the first time I was startled to realize how little attention I paid to the words of
songs. The simple enjoyment of the music was forgotten as these lines burned their way into my
heart.
O to grace how great a debtor,
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee:
Never let me wander from Thee,
Never leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.Grace was a word I could never forget. I saw the signs of its reality in the face of one whom I trusted. Now I understand the tears distilled from the exquisite mingling of joy and pain, and I can wish for you nothing more in the dying of one year and the birth of a new one than to pray with all of my heart, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen!"
(Editor's Note: The above is an address delivered at the Forum on Fellowship, held at Hartford, Illinois, December 27, 28, 1965. Roy Key is a minister of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) at Ames, Iowa, and can be addressed at 610 Barr Drive, in that city).