Part 3 of our devotional series through Ephesians.
“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)…” – Ephesians 2:4-5
Have you ever tried to do something good to make up for something you did that was bad? Those of us who have grown up in some sort of religious system have come to adopt this methodology in order to please God. That’s where mere “religion” falls short. “Religion” is man’s attempt to earn God’s favor by completing a set of dos and don’ts. We think that because the wages of our sin is death, then obviously the wages of our good works must be eternal life through salvation, right? WRONG!
You see, the one underlying truth throughout all of Scripture is the fact that God decided to love us regardless of whether we have responded to His love or not. That’s where His grace comes in. God loves us so much that He rewards us according to the work His Son completed on the cross and not according to our own works. How could God lavish such extravagant benefits on one, who up until now had only acknowledged Him with enmity? There is nothing harder to comprehend than the grace of God. It is human nature to want to bring something to the table. We are trained from a very young age to be independent, to carry our own weight if you will. That’s why God’s grace confounds the great minds of this world, while a simple child is somehow able to grasp it. It would have been enough for God to have only shown us mercy by not punishing us according to our sins. Instead He chose to lavish His grace upon us. Neither of which we deserve, which is why we run into trouble.
Because we don’t deserve God’s grace, we take it upon ourselves to try to earn it, or pay God back for it. God’s grace will never be the byproduct of man’s labor. The minute we begin to get our hands in the mix is when we begin to say to Him that His grace is insufficient and therefore, “grace is no longer grace (Romans 11:6).” If God needed us to make grace work, then it wouldn’t be able to stand on its own and therefore it would not be sufficient to save us while we were His enemies. Because we are enemies of God before we are saved, then we obviously do not play a factor in His grace. God prepared a way for His enemies to become His children. He orchestrated and executed this Master plan from before the foundation of the world so that no one could ever claim that they had something to do with it. The only thing we have to do is accept the free gift of His grace.
There’s another side of grace that Christians seem to misunderstand. Paul addresses it in the book of Romans. People begin to use the grace of God as a license to sin rather than a springboard to holiness. Paul says, “God forbid!” Before God’s grace we were dead in our sin, but now BY God’s grace we are dead TO sin. If God’s grace is able to free us from the power of sin, why would we continue in it? These are truly convicting words even as I type them. It is all by grace because God knows the heart of man. We are proud, insolent people who shook our fists at God in rebellion. This is what makes His grace so unfathomable! We were His enemies, yet He delivered His Son to die for us, by His grace. We were destined for hell because of our sinful nature, yet He made a way for us to saved, by His grace. If only we could grasp the concept of God’s grace, then we would stop our negotiating, stop our sinning, and start living according to the amazing grace by which we have been saved.
“For by grace you have been saved though faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” – Ephesians 2:8-9