Justification by Grace

10/23/11 Justification by Grace Grace UMC

One of the words that has played a dominant role in Christian faith, especially since the time of the Reformation is justification. Though people have used it many times, it is one of those words that some people may not have heard or, if they have, they may have written it off as one of those "church words," those words that pastors and other church leaders get all excited about but don't have any real connection with our daily lives. But justification is an absolutely central part of our Christian faith. Without it, the Reformers said, the whole of Christian faith would come crashing down. It is the article by which the church stands or falls.

But what exactly is it? What does it mean to be justified by grace? Ultimately, the Christian doctrine of justification is the answer to the question that shows up several times in the New Testament, "What must I do to be saved." The Greek word from which we get justification is δικαιοσυνη, which can be translated either "justice" or "righteousness." To be justified is to be made righteous, to be made just. Specifically, the issue is how we, who are unjust and unrighteous, can be delivered from the consequences of that injustice and unrighteousness.

Now, before we can go any farther, we need to deal with a situation that is growing much more common in our world today, though it isn't really anything new. What I am saying, and what the church has said since the very beginning, is two things: First, we find ourselves in a situation where we need saving and that we need to be saved by someone outside of ourselves, since we are not capable of fixing our own problems. The second thing is that this salvation is indeed possible. In fact, it is so possible that it has been offered to us in Jesus Christ without price.

The fact of the matter is that there are people out there who will challenge both of those points. The first group of people tend to be, but are not always, militant atheists. Their position is to deny that human beings, in general, are in need of being saved at all. There is actually a long tradition, that stems from the Enlightenment, that human beings are basically good and not tragically flawed and fallen that, while it is true that human beings seem to be the cause of our problems, it is equally true that human beings are able to solve those problems in one way or another themselves. The problem might be that people are just not educated well enough, that they have simply not been taught the difference between right and wrong, or, given that they have, they might not know how to go about living appropriately in light of it. The basic conviction is that human beings are good enough, or at least, they'd better be, since we are all we have. A recent rallying cry for many people today is, "I don't need God to make me happy," or "I don't need God to make me a good person." According to such a view, which is increasingly common and outspoken, human beings simply do not need to be saved, or that their salvation must come from themselves.

Actually, it would be unfair to imply that such people do not think that people need to be saved. In point of fact, they do, often, think that people need to be saved, they need to be saved from religion and faith itself. In light of the fact that many Christians' lives are not marked by hope, joy and peace in the midst of turmoil, but rather with guilt and shame over not being good enough, it does not take much for someone to conclude that our faith is precisely the problem. So far is this from the Christian point of view that we need God to save us, that it says we need to be saved from God.

Another group of people that would disagree with the Christian message of salvation are those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, justice, goodness, meaning, or anything like that, or if there were, we would have no way of knowing it. We might have a deep longing and desire for truth and meaning, but we cannot obtain it. We might desperately need saving, but there is no such salvation possible. Clearly, this deviates from the Christian position that salvation is not only possible, but near at hand if we will only receive it.

When we say that we are justified by grace, or that we are saved by grace, what exactly do we mean? I think that we might misunderstand what this means unless we spend some time and reflect a bit about how we are not justified. First of all, we are not justified by what we do. This is a theme that has been emphasized by countless writers, especially since Martin Luther. It is something that, if we take a moment and read the New Testament, especially certain letters of Paul, like Romans and Galatians, we will find all over the place. We are told over and over again that, when we are accepted in the eyes of God, it is not because of anything we have done. We are not saved because we have been really good people, nor because we have done more things right than wrong, nor because we are better than certain people we know. You are not loved by God because you come to church every Sunday, or at all. You are not saved because you give a lot of money to charitable causes. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Another thing that does not save us is our intentions. It does not matter if you have intended to do all kinds of good things, but just never managed to get it done. They used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but while that phrase emphasizes that our intentions are no good if they do not ultimately turn into actions, my point is that intending to good and doing everything you can toward that good end is not what saves us. It isn't by having pure intentions that makes us loved by God and we are not saved by them.

Thirdly, and this is something that cuts especially hard on people like me, we are not saved by our opinions or our convictions. This cuts against me because I am very interested in what people believe and why they believe it. Sometimes, I can get so caught up in it that it is almost as if I am more concerned with people thinking the right way and having the right opinions than I am about them being transformed by the power of the Gospel. A well-known Christian pastor wrote a book earlier this year and caught tremendous fire for doing so. There were many other Christian leaders who attacked this man, claiming that he had abandoned proper theology. The implication was that people simply could not be saved unless they had the right understanding of salvation. If someone was misled in the nature of salvation, it would make it impossible for them to be saved. The retort made by other leaders, with which I agree, was, "If we cannot be saved unless our theology is just right, who can be saved?" If God cannot save us in spite of our bad theology, we are all in a lot of trouble.

So you might be wondering, "If we aren't saved by what we do, or by what we intend to do, or by our opinions and convictions, how in the world can we be saved?" The answer is that we are saved by grace alone. In our text, we heard Paul declare that, independent of Christ, we are all, we must hear that all, people who lived according to the passions of our flesh and were, by nature, children of wrath like everyone else. After that serious declaration, what do we read? "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." The question we want to know the answer to is, "What is it about us, either as humanity as a whole, or as us as individuals, that makes God take us from being those who are dead in our sins to being alive in and with Christ?" And the answer is grace.

You may recall a few months ago, back in July, when I had the chance to preach a sermon where we asked the question, "What is Grace?" I suggested that grace is not, in fact, a what at all, but is a who. Grace is, in its fullest and most complete sense, Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ, then God. Grace is certainly unmerited favor, and it is true that we can do nothing to earn grace in any way, shape or form, but what it is, what it really is, is Jesus Christ.

We can see this at work on a smaller scale when we look at the advances of science. Once, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the earth. Copernicus suggested that the earth actually rotates and travels around the sun. The reason why the Copernican view of the universe was ultimately accepted was not because people just liked it better, because they didn't, as it forced us to realize that we are not the center of the universe, nor because the old way of thinking couldn't deal with what they saw, but because, after long scrutiny, it was felt that it was simply closer to what really is the case. The ultimate judge was not just one person or another, but the nature of the universe.

Likewise, Einstein's theories of Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics, not because people liked it better, in fact, when Einstein first published his ideas, only about a half dozen people in the world knew what he was talking about. It was because, as helpful as Newton's way of thinking had been, it was felt that Einstein had gotten down to a deeper understanding of reality. At the end of the day, it was not a debate that solved the issue, but the nature of reality. There were debates about the merits of various theories, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question, "Why Einstein and not Newton," is "Reality itself."
But if we aren't used to this way of thinking, this kind of answer isn't very satisfying, is it? We aren't, in our day and age, used to appealing to ultimate things. We want to talk about reasons, we want to know why things are the way they are and not something else. To simply say, "That's the way it is," seems like it is avoiding the issue, but sometimes, it is the only answer there is and there is no probing behind it.

I think that sometimes we want to know the reasons why is not so we can have conceptual clarity, that we can connect the dots, but so that we can have some control over things. We want to be able to say, "Our scientific findings are what they are for this reason, and they can't be anything else because of this reason," but we can't do it. We can imagine the world being different than it is, but things are the way they are and not some other way.

The same kind of thing is true with our understanding of salvation by grace. We want to say, "Alright, God takes us who were dead in our sins and makes us alive in Christ. Why exactly does he do this?" At the end of the day, the only answer we have is the ultimate fact that God is who he is. Whether we like it or not, this is the only answer we have. When Moses was speaking with God when he saw the burning bush, he says to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?'" God's response is, "I am who I am." I think part of the point is that God does not put himself in a box by saying that he is like certain things or unlike certain things, but simply that he is, that he exists, and that he is who he is and not anything else. God was not able to give an argument, that he could be understood in terms of something else. God does not say, "I am the good one, or the merciful one," though he is both good and merciful. God is who God is and there is no reason beyond the fact that he is.

This is the point. We are saved by grace, we are saved by God. Why are we saved? Because God loves us. Why does God love us? There is no reason beyond the fact that God is who God is. And God demonstrates who he is by coming among us in Jesus Christ. The only God who is is the God who meets us as Jesus Christ, who enters into our world of space and time, who shoulders our burdens, who heals us of our brokenness, who endures our scorn and hatred without vindictively retaliating, and offers us forgiveness long before we ever ask for it.

But the message of grace does not always seem like good news to us, does it? Do we not like to earn what we have? Do we not like to think that we have done something, anything to deserve what we receive? Are we prepared to receive the treasures of the gospel and of all the riches of God, what Paul calls "the immeasurable riches of" God's "grace in kindness" at absolutely no cost? We need to understand that when God offers salvation to us by grace alone, it does not mean that we could have earned it some other way, but he is offering us an easier way. Indeed, God is actually offering us a harder way, one that costs everything. You see, to say that we are saved by grace is to say that absolutely nothing short of God's almighty grace is sufficient to save us. We are people who are in need, unable to be who we ought to be, and in need of a savior. It is not as though God simply makes it so we do not have to give anything in return, it is that we have nothing to give. Our hands are empty and we simply cling to Christ, knowing that, if Christ does not save us, we are surely lost.

Just a few days before Jesus is crucified, he says this to the chief priests and the pharisees. "Have you never read in the scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes...' The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." If we have erected a hope that is independent of Christ, no matter how sound and sturdy it seems, it is and will be crushed by Christ and shown to be insufficient. Nothing that we create with our hands, or with our minds, or even with our lives, is capable of doing what grace can do. When we give ourselves to Jesus and trust entirely in him, our plans for self-righteousness are shattered. And if there comes a time after we have given ourselves to Christ and we somehow get it into our heads that we need grace plus something else, the moment it comes in contact with the cornerstone that is Christ, it too is shattered.

Make no mistake. Salvation by grace alone is not a "get out of hell free" card, it is not taking the easy way out. To be saved by grace is the single most costly, humbling, thing you can do. It is to say, "I have nothing to offer, my hands are empty; Lord, save, or I perish." It is to come before God, not with a list of good things you've done, not with a list of evil things you have avoided, not even with a list of the things you need to be forgiven for, but simply with the empty hands of faith. The life of one who is saved by grace is not necessarily any better than that of one who is not, though it should improve as you grow in grace; nor is it necessarily any worse than one who is not. This is a good rule of thumb to see if you are living a life that is fully consistent with one that has been marked by grace. If, at the end of the day, it were to turn out that there is no God, that Jesus Christ was simply a man and nothing more, your life should make absolutely no sense. Our lives should be so devoted to God, and because of that, to one another, that the things we do should be completely incomprehensible to those who do not believe in God. With that in mind, let us go live in ways that are so devoted to God in every way, that to the unbelieving world, it is simply unbelievable. Let us pray.

AMEN