Can We Merit Grace?

Morning. Everybody hear me OK? I don't know what it is about stepping up these two steps here, but I'm very calm down there. But these two steps make a real difference. You get nervous up here. Today we're going to talk about grace and the verses that I'd like to cover. You can see on the overhead and hopefully by the time we work through them, you'll see how they all fit together.

First one is John 1 17. For the law came by Moses. But grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. And then moving up to Romans 5, Therefore, as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned. In 520, moreover, the law entered that sin might abound. but where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. And in 521, which begins the transition, that as sin has reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ. So we learn from this that death came in and death and sin became a reigning principle. And then the law came in alongside that for the specific purpose that sin might be more sinful, for no other purpose than that. But grace has now come in to superabound over sin so that it would be able to deal with the sin issue. So sin has been the reigning principle unto death, but now God's purpose is that grace might be the reigning principle unto eternal life.

Since the resurrection of Christ, there have been two of these reigning principles in the world today. Either law, sin and death, you could say it's one principle. And the other principle is grace and faith. Every human being is under one of these two principles. I must tell you that hitting this clicker is going to be a challenge in terms of Hey, interesting, it worked. The old creation consisting of all unsaved in the world, they're totally under this principle of law, of sin, of condemnation, of death. Only believers in the new creation in Christ live under this principle of grace. And it's important to understand that there aren't any other principles outside of these two.

Now, what is a principle? A principle can be defined as the way something operates or functions. The old creation consisting of unsaved is totally under that system. The system functions that way. You can't operate outside of it. It has dominion and control over all of us.

Romans 3.9 states that, what then? Are we better off than they? No. in no way for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles that they're all under sin. So it isn't that you just sin, you're under it.

It's the principle that controls your behavior. You don't have freedom. Well, I love the concept of free will because free will is there's I have the freedom to do what? Well, I have the freedom under this system to choose between one sin and another. That's how free I am. I'm under this principle.

So, the guiding verse I want us to spend time with this morning is Romans 6.14.

It's a pronouncement by Paul in the Lord that sin is not to have or shall not have dominion over you and here's the reason why. Because you're not under law, you're under grace. The Word clearly states that all believers are not under the principle of law. We live under the principle of grace only. Now, we're not very familiar with grace, I think, early on, but we are very familiar with the principle of law and the dominion of death.

We all were born and we grew up in it. We all lived under a system. that said, look, if you obey me or you do this, I'm going to reward you. If you don't do it, there's going to be a punishment. There's going to be a condemnation for your behavior. If you are able to do something, then I will reward you.

We live under that mentality. Even we raise our kids on that principle. Every human being outside of Christ functions under this principle. whether they know it or not. That's how they function. But God the Father and God the Son determined that they were going to send the Son to die on a cross and pay the penalty for the sins of the world. They also determined that they were going to do something to free human beings from being under this principle of sin and death.

And that their purpose was, in Romans 5.21 that we looked at, that grace would become the reigning principle, that death no longer would be the reigning principle.

Now, the word clearly states, if you look in a couple of places, in Hebrews 7, 11, and 12, there's a discussion there about the priesthood of Christ and the priesthood of the Levites. And with Christ came, the priesthood was changed or was made There was, because of that, the necessity of a change in the law. That word change there means that there was something put in its place. The old priesthood was connected with the old legal system. The new system. The priesthood, according to Melchizedek, there's something that's going to be put in place of the law system and that system is grace.

In 1 Corinthians 3, 7-11, it says that the law has been done away with, katergeho, that Greek word means to abolish or to make something inoperative. And Romans 7, 6 says that we have been discharged from the law, which means that we have been separated from it. when the discussion about where believers, the system they live under, there's plenty of verses that say, look, you're not under law, you're under grace. So, well, if I am, then how did God do it? How did he remove me from being under this law principle to being under the grace principle?

Well, everybody or most everybody in this body of believers should be familiar with what are known as the identification truths. The identification truths are that when I came into this planet, I was identified or I was united to Adam, Adam the first, and he is a condemned man, condemned under sin, and I am stuck with him. I have a sin nature and I don't have any remedy to get out of that on my own. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, when I believed on the person and work of the Lord Jesus, what the Holy Spirit did was he took me and he baptized me into Christ.

He put me in Christ at the point that Christ died. That's really important because death means that I was separated. And when he died, I died. When he was buried, I was buried. When he was resurrected, so was I. When he was raised to newness of life, so was I. The results are now that because you and I have been united to Christ, we are positionally new creatures in him, having been separated from all that we were in Adam. You can draw some conclusions from this. One is that the resurrected, ascended and seated, the Lord Jesus abides in a new operating principle, which is called grace.

John 1.17 said, grace and truth came by the Lord Jesus. So he functions and operates In this principle of grace, I being united to him positionally, I now abide in the same principle. I abide in grace. Romans 6, 14, I'm not under law, but I'm under grace. In the body of Christ, grace is the only principle in which God operates. He doesn't operate under any other principle but grace.

So, how informed are we? about what grace is and how it operates. We have been teaching a grace study for about three or four months now, and before that, all the guys on Tuesday have been studying grace for another six or eight months. What I've discovered is that our ignorance of grace is monumental. We don't know what grace is and how it operates. We don't have any experience regards grace that we would have learned by living in Adam because it's not the principle.

We live under the principle of sin, law, and death. When we became a believer, that was our first exposure, really, to the grace of God. That's the first time we've ever encountered it. But because we came from the background of the law-based system, It wasn't long before our mentality said, look, I'm saved by grace, but what can I do now for God? We don't really pick up on the grace system and how it works because we're only familiar with the old system. We don't know. We're ignorant. It's not a blameable thing. It's just we don't know anything about it.

So is trying to live under grace a big problem for us? Sure, because either we understand what it is to live under grace Or we don't. And if we don't, we cannot operate under grace because we miss the entire system. If we don't know what it is, we don't know how to operate under it.

So law and grace do not and cannot function at the same time. There's no way that they can, because they're both different principles. A believer is going to function under one or the other at any given time. You can't live 40% grace and 60% law, or 99-1. You're either under one or under the other.

I know that we all are under the principle of grace positionally, but what I'm talking about is the condition that we live in, our everyday experience. So I would say that grace has to be learned from scratch. There's nothing from the law, sin death principle, that would show me or would educate me or give me the slightest inkling of what grace is. So I've got to learn it, every step of it, every inch of it. God showed grace in the Old Testament to the Old Testament folks. but they were not under the principle. They had experience with grace, but they didn't live under that principle.

So since living under grace is really a foreign thing to us, it's foreign to my mind. I must be taught. And if I'm not taught, I think by definition, I'm just going to be a legalist because that's what I understand. It's a tendency of the human mind that we can merit something from God, no matter how we slice it up. We think that way. Either a believer understands what it is to be under grace or he doesn't. And if he doesn't, he can't operate under grace, like I said, because he misses the whole system.

So we need to come up with a definition. Now, the first source that I looked up was that wonderful spiritual source, Wikipedia. That's interesting what they say. They define it as divine grace refers to God's gift to humankind, which includes life, creation and salvation. More narrowly, but commonly, grace describes the means by which humans are saved from original sin and granted salvation. The latter concept of grace is the central importance of the theology of Christianity. Well, what's interesting about that definition is that it still leaves the man under a lost system in which God came in and all he did was save him, but he's still under the system.

If Romans 6.14 says I'm under grace, then the best definition I have found is Chester Macaulay's, which is grace is the unlimited and unmerited blessings from God based on the totally adequate work of Christ.

And we'll expound on that as we go. Lewis Ferry Chaffer said that grace may include, it may be concluded that the word grace represents uncompromised, unrestricted, uncompensated loving favor of God towards sinners. It is an unearned blessing. It's a gratuity. God is absolutely unrestrained and unshackled in expressing His infinite love by His infinite grace. So, what does that tell us? That grace has to be unmerited, it has to be uncompensated for, and it has to be unearned. It's a little scary. Grace is unlimited, it's unrestricted, and it's totally unrestrained.

Grace consists of the blessings or favor from God, and the cause of God being gracious is only the work of Christ. That's the only reason He's gracious. The death of Christ and the eternal covenant between the Father and Son was not a graceful transaction. It cost God everything He had. But because of that transaction, God is able to act graciously because of that work.

So Ephesians 2.8 says, For by grace you have been saved through faith. It's not of yourself. It's a gift of God. So God did it all. He did it all. Now, I don't think we have a lot of misunderstanding about grace when it comes to salvation. we're pretty clear on the fact that we got saved on a grace basis.

I think the problem comes when, how do I live a life under grace? And how do I function every single day under this principle of grace? Well, there's some confusion because grace is, as we said, grace is unmerited favor in the one who gets it. If you have grace, you got it and you didn't merit it.

It's totally unlimited. Grace in Paul's epistles is the one thing that he says he's always offering more of. He starts every epistle with grace and he ends it with them. He never run out or stopped needing grace. And another thing about grace is it just doesn't meet your need. your sinful need or any need.

It always is way more than what you need. Always over the top. There is no such thing as a little special grace for this or a little special grace for that. How could there be? If grace is coming at me full on all the time, I don't need a little more or a little less.

I have all of this functioning all the time towards me. So what's the key about grace? How do I get my hands on it? How do I use it How do I avail myself of it? It's really kind of simple. The key to abounding grace is to stop thinking that you've got to pay God for anything and just take it and say thank you. If you look at the Greek word for grace and the Greek word for thank you, they're both the same word, charis. The way you take grace, the way you live under grace is you just take it and you look at God and you say thank you. That's all you can do. And it abounds. Now, question.

How does God demonstrate his grace and give a man blessing to someone who only deserves judgment? Well, the way he did it was obviously, the principle is that he does it because of the adequate work of Christ. The death of Christ totally satisfies God's righteousness and allows him to deal with us freely, or mankind really, freely and make grace available to all men. We actually insult God if we don't apprehend grace and He doesn't need our help. He just wants us to take it and say thank you. Now, back to my sound resource in Wikipedia. They made an interesting observation. They said that the New Testament exhibits attention between two aspects of grace.

The idea that grace is from God and sufficient to cover any sin, and the idea that grace does not free man from his responsibility to behave rightly. And that really is kind of the tension that exists when you enter into a discussion between people about grace and human behavior. Could we make this statement? Living under grace is the most foreign thing to the human mind.

And if I'm not taught, I'm a legalist. Yeah, I think you can make that statement. Let's look at the false assumptions. The first one is that law is the only way to control conduct. Now, in society, I think that's right. You know, if you have a 55 mile an hour speed limit, only God knows how fast we'd go up and down a bus. And even Harry Ironside said that the laws are the divine method to keep men alive. I like that. But the false assumption here is that the law is the only way to motivate conduct.

And we think that way. The second false assumption is that freedom from the law means freedom to sin. Now, most believers that I get into a conversation with about grace, this is the big fear. that if I'm going to live under grace, what it really means is that I'm free to do what I want and I can sin. And the third false assumption is, is that grace has no power to motivate and control conduct. False assumption. Now, why would you come to that false assumption? Based on ignorance. You don't know what it is. If you don't understand grace, you don't know how it functions. Okay? Now, so how do you find out How do you find out about and gain an understanding of grace?

Well, the first thing is that you have to understand that grace is only found in one place, and that's in the Word of God. And so the study of the Word of God is the only place where I can comprehend what grace is. Through the Word of God and by the Spirit of God, we are able to behold the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and truth came by him. Grace is comprehended in the word by the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. So what's grace designed to accomplish? It's designed to prevent sin from reigning.

That's what Romans 5.21 says. Grace is also designed for human beings to give them the ability to do the will of God because nobody under the law can do that.

Grace is also designed to bless you, because that's the commodity that it is. It's blessing. And the last part of it, which is why God does everything, it's designed to glorify his character. Back to the principles. Grace is a system under which we live. Grace is comprehended in Christ Jesus via the Word. And grace is the way God operates. If you keep those three things in mind, you'll begin to recognize that God has put me into an entirely new environment called grace.

I just went over that. Let's talk a little bit about what liberty is. Does liberty mean that I can do what I want? Liberty means that I have freedom from tyranny. Now, a growing believer begins to understand that sin and death are tyrannical systems. The law of sin and death principle is tyrannical. And what liberty means is that I'm free from that.

In scripture, liberty just means a change of masters. Isn't that interesting? I move from being under the master of sin and death to being under the master of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. It doesn't mean I can do as I please. Submission to somebody in scripture is called freedom or liberty.

And the example I want to use is 1 Peter 2.13. And verses 14 and 15 sort of fill in 13. But watch how this goes together. Be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the king or the supreme. And he goes through some more. And then he says in verse 16, as free. What the word of God says is that being subject is freedom.

That's a hard concept, I think, in the beginning, to think, gee whiz, submission to somebody is called freedom? It is. If you're in Christ, we were never designed to be free agents. I would like to tell some of those professional sports people that they were never designed to be free agents, but we aren't. We were designed to be under the mastery of somebody.

We learned this morning's class in grace, we learned that one of the first principles that determines my conduct as a believer is, does it master me or not? There's a foregone conclusion in a human being's life that we are mastered. We're either mastered by sin and death or we're going to be mastered by God alone. The teachings of grace include several things.

One, the life we're called to live, you and I as believers, is, as Lewis Barry Chafer described it, it's superhuman. And it's set forth in scripture as the character and conduct of one that is becoming of who that somebody already is. If you're saved by grace and been placed into Christ, you're safe in the grace of God. But now that you have the life of Christ, that is the life that we're to live.

Well, if you're honest with yourself, you realize it's beyond my capacity to live. So I learned from the Word of God that even though the life is there and God expects me to live it, that it can only be accomplished in my heart and in me and achieved solely by the enabling power of the Spirit. That is wonderful news. I have the two things that I need.

I've been placed in Christ, I'm living under grace, and the thing I need is the Spirit of God to carry it off in me. Grace makes conformity to the will of God a voluntary thing, not a law thing. It's voluntary. Christian conduct and service must arise from within and be expressed as a free choice. We love to talk about free will. If I live under a sin principle, like I said, how free are you? I'm free to pick that sin or this sin. I'm not free to pick life. I'm not free to live under the auspices of the Spirit of God.

But as a believer, I do. I have all kinds of liberty. And the Spirit of God will move me to make a free choice to live and function under grace. And this is the only response that's acceptable to God since it alone is in harmony with the facts of a relationship with God under grace. I'm not forced to do it by some external impingement on my character. It comes out of my heart I want to do it. I want to live under God.

And I live it by faith. By faith in Christ, a believer is instantly made complete in Him and the possessor of every spiritual blessing. And the Spirit has been given to me as a believer, and I've been made acceptable in the Beloved. So the Christian life must be keyed on these new facts that I'm learning. these new facts that I'm learning, that I'm under a new relationship, I'm under grace, and as I comprehend it, there becomes no grounds under which I can live legally. I can't, because I live under grace.

So, why does the Christian life, or this life under grace, why is the operating principle, the appropriating principle, faith? Why would it be faith? Hal Malloy did tremendous studies on faith. Well, as you have begun in the Lord Jesus, so walk ye in him. You walk by faith and you live under grace. So what's life under grace with faith can be summarized as follows. Faith is intelligent believing. We know. We study the Word of God. We engage in what grace is about and what living under grace is about. So we're intelligent about it. We're not ignorant about it. We don't live by emotions. We live intelligently. And faith demands content. There must be an object for our faith.

When I believe in the person and work of Christ, And I am saved because of that. Is the value in my salvation in the fact that I believed? Or is the value in what I believed? The total value is in what I believe, not the fact that I'm believing. What faith does is it appropriates the value of what I believe.

I hope that makes sense. I cannot believe without something to believe. I have to have an object. And that object or what to believe must be preceded by teaching. There must be information. And teaching or content has to be true. And it has to be vital. And it has to be valid.

And my faith in the personal work of the Lord Jesus Christ, it depends on Him. My faith just allows me in the door. And not only that, the content of what I believe sustains my faith. And here's the key about grace. Faith is the one thing you can do that's non-meritorious. And I think that's a big key. We as believers, why do we call ourselves believers? Well, we're people of faith. We function on the basis that everything we do in terms of faith is a non-meritorious act. I know that we hear a lot about, well, my contribution is my faith.

Under grace, you make no contribution. Under grace, by faith, you take the grace that God supplies. You don't get credit. You can't go to God and say, I really believe you owe me. The whole value is in what I believe, and I live under this grace system, so I just take it. Seems too simple to me at first. If it's a non-meritorious act, then there's nothing I can add to what God has already done.

Romans 4 or 5 says, But to him that works not, but believes on him that justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness. Faith is considered in this verse as the means of appropriation. Faith is the only means of appropriation that harmonizes with grace.

Romans 4.16, it's a very interesting verse. It says, for this cause, it is of faith, salvation is of faith, that it may be according to grace. So our faith, our functioning in faith is a function of grace. And it's the only act that eliminates pride.

Romans 3.27 says, where then is glorying or boasting? It's excluded. By what manner of law? Of works? No, but by the principle of faith.

Faith is the one thing or the thing that you can do that's not prideful. Faith is that which brings the greatest of all blessings. Romans 5, 1 and 2 says, being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have our access by faith into this grace wherein we permanently stand and we rejoice in the hope and the glory of God. My faith, your faith, allows me to have access into the grace Grace is unlimited. It's unmerited. I can't earn it. It's over-the-top unlimited. My faith allows me to step in to that environment where grace comes at me full-on all the time.

I was thinking this morning, how many of you have seen like the shuttle blast off? And it comes out of the bottom, that energy comes out of the bottom of those rockets. And I thought, well, imagine what it'd be like if you wouldn't die, if you could stand in the middle of that energy as it went right over you and the rocket went up. And I thought, you know, that must be what grace is like.

You stand underneath this incredible superabundance of energy that surrounds you and overwhelms you and is totally unlimited. It's beyond anything you can comprehend. And God says, just take it. Just believe me. and stay there. Don't move. Stay right there. I hope that's a decent analogy.

So everything else in the Christian life is a result of God's grace. Everything that goes on, everything that happens, every trial, every suffering, everything in a believer's life is a result of grace. Everything. If you can come up with one thing that God If there's one incident that has happened in your life since you've been a believer that's not under grace, then the whole book of the Bible, you might as well throw it away and go buy a Marvel comic book, because it's not of God. Everything, because he says so. All things work together and all things are under grace.

So the big question, I think, is can grace teach and motivate us to behave like we're supposed to? Titus 2, chapter 2, verses 11 and 12 says that for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to the intent that having denied ungodliness and worldly lusts, we've already done that. When you became a believer, you denied ungodliness and worldly lusts. You don't have to be taught that anymore. That's over with.

But what the grace teaches us is to live soberly, and righteously and godly in this present world. That's what grace is here to teach us. Grace instructs us to live soberly, which means to live with a sound mind. Better put, to live with the mind of Christ. Grace instructs us to live right or righteously in accordance with the word of God. Grace instructs us to live in a godly manner, consistent with the life that we have and are in Christ.

So, I would say to you that grace is the greatest motivator there is. The greatest motivator there is. If we walk with the Lord in His Word and look for the principle of grace, We will find that God's grace is overwhelmingly motivating, way much more than any legal restriction could be. That grace wins over your heart, energizes the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in that life is this overwhelming desire to be pleasing to your Father. You don't have to be impinged to do that. The grace will draw it out of you. So in closing, we could say that turning from sin is a result of grace. And living in Christ is also the result of grace.

Let's pray. Dear Father, how we thank you for your grace. How we thank you for the very life that we have in your dear son, the Lord Jesus, which is only and entirely on a grace basis. And Father, we ask today that we might continue to grow in the grace that we're in and in the knowledge of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray in his name. Amen.