'For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.' Ephesians 2:8-9
Doctrine used to be thought of as the bedrock of the Christian faith, but increasingly it seems like Christians associate doctrine with staleness. Even though Paul said to Timothy ‘watch your life and doctrine closely’.
What people seem to be looking for is the relational sermon not so much the doctrinal one. And I get that. Perhaps too many sermons have been so focused on getting all the doctrine across, that they forgot that we come together to worship a person.
Jesus wanted worship to be relational. He wanted it to be in spirit - with heart. But he also wanted it to be truthful. ‘In spirit and truth’. In other words, our hearts could be for him, but our knowledge be faulty. In that case we wouldn’t be worshippers. You can’t worship God when you have a false idea of who he is.
That would be vain worship because you wouldn’t be worshipping the God of the bible. You’d be worshipping a false God. Sincere worship of a false God is falsehood, nonetheless.
And conversely heartless worship of the true God is also falsehood. So, Jesus made it clear, we’ve got to worship in spirit and truth, not just spirit.
I’m saying all that up front this morning because I want us to consider, for the next half hour, doctrine. The doctrine of the human condition and our salvation. That’s the next heading in our series on our doctrinal statement of faith.
If our doctrinal statement is biblical, then it is true. And if it is true, then the realities it promotes are to be the realities we worship God in.
We don’t have time to read the printed copy you were given when you came in this morning, but you can read it later.
It’s unashamedly doctrinal. It does what a doctrinal statement should do, which is, to systematise what is really there in the bible.
Every one of those little numbers you see there in the statement is a bible reference. You can look up every one of them - like we did when we wrote it 3 years ago - and check that the statement is in accord with the bible.
Now, if you take a look at all the references under this heading, you will find that our text for this morning does not feature there. Which doesn’t sound very comforting.
But I hope you’re going to see that summed up in Ephesians 2:8-9 is the essence of what we believe about the human condition and our salvation.
This text was one of the first verses I ever learnt off by heart. When I was 10 years old, some faithful Christians devoted some of their time to teaching a handful of young people, like me, not only how to memorise scripture, but how important it would be to memorise scripture.
And they weren’t wrong. Many of the texts I know off by heart now are the ones I learnt on those Friday evenings 30 years ago. And I still rely on them.
When you come to a text - particularly one of the Apostle Paul’s – one of the things you should be asking yourself is: what is the highpoint of the text?
Think of it like a mountain. What in the text is supporting the summit and what is the summit?
If you do that you will get very close understanding what Paul intended you to know by what he said.
So, let’s look and see what the summit is here in Ephesians 2:8-9. The word ‘For’ grounds this text in what has just been said before. So, we’d be well positioned, because of the word ‘for’ to go back and look at the preceding verses. That will be useful in a few minutes time.
‘For it is by grace’. The word ‘by’ shows us that what follows it - namely grace - is going to be supporting. ‘Grace’ is not the summit of the mountain; it supports the summit. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved’. Grace is supporting salvation. So, salvation could be the summit. Let’s see.
‘For it is by grace you have been saved through faith’. The word ‘through’ shows us that faith is not the summit either but also supports salvation. Grace and faith are essential for salvation.
‘And this is not from yourselves’. Faith is not the summit, but it’s also not the bottom of the mountain because someone is supplying this faith.
It’s not the person exercising the faith. Who is it? ‘And this is not from yourselves, it is a gift of God’.
It’s God who’s under the faith. And he’s the one giving it to those who exercise it. That’s going to be crucial!
And this salvation is not accomplished ‘by works’. The reason is, ‘so that no one can boast’. No one can say, ‘I worked the salvation for myself’.
So, clearly, the summit of this mountain - the goal of the text - is salvation. Grace is the basis of salvation. Faith is the means of salvation. And at the foot of the mountain, underpinning everything is God. So, we know the focus and the foundation of the text now – salvation and God.
But the text leaves us with some questions too.
Like: salvation implies something or someone to be saved. Who is that?
Like: Salvation also implies that there is something to be saved from. What is that and why does it warrant such strong language?
Like: The ones being saved seem to be the ones exercising the faith, but faith in who or in what?
Those are the kind of questions you have to ask about a text if you want to learn the truth. And you can’t invent the answers, otherwise you’ll never know if you’ve got the truth.
Remember, Jesus wants us to worship him according to the truth. So, let’s try to answer these questions and get at the truth.
Let’s start at the top of the mountain and work down from there.
The word ‘saved’ applies to Paul’s readers. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved’.
But the gift of God is so that ‘no one’ can boast. ‘No one’ sounds broader than just his hearers.
And indeed, Paul does have more than just his readers in mind with respect to this salvation. He has at least himself in mind also. We can see that by looking at the whole passage from verses 1 to 10. Repeatedly, Paul switches between the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘us’.
He thinks of himself as one with them in this salvation. Indeed, it may apply to all kinds of people, both Jews like Paul and Gentiles like the Ephesians and like us.
What is it that they, and he, have been saved from? Well saved implies rescue. And rescue implies threat. But threat can be little or large.
There is a world of difference between a slip on the edge of a pond in the park that sends you plunging into 2 feet of water, and a slip on the edge of a sailboat that sends you overboard into the roaring seas of the Pacific Ocean.
And there is a world of difference in terms of the impact it has on your life, when a kind stranger stretches out a hand to lift you out of the pond water; and the impact it has when air and sea rescue crew risk their lives to pluck you from the raging ocean.
So, we have got to get the nature of the danger right here, if we are to understand the magnitude of the salvation. Small threat, and we will think the rescue is a trivial benefit. Huge threat, and we will think this salvation is life changing. So, there’s a lot at stake in this word ‘saved’.
Let’s see if we can see the threat in the context because it’s not in the text itself. We’re looking for threat in verses 1 to 10. And we find it at the end of verse 3, ‘like the rest’ - he means like everyone else - ‘we were by nature’ - that means by birth - ‘deserving of wrath’.
‘Wrath’ means more than just anger; it means vengeance or punishment resulting from anger. Paul is telling us, in the context of this word ‘saved’, that everyone in the world is by nature deserving of God’s wrath.
That means, God is angry to the point of judgment with all people. It means that every single person in the world right now, except for the salvation that he mentions in verse 8, is under God’s wrath.
And that is the threat that the salvation of verse 8 is responding to. It is a far far greater peril than being overboard in the pacific.
Being overboard in the pacific carries risk to life. Being at the mercy of God’s wrath carries the promise of inescapable everlasting conscious physical, mental, emotional and spiritual torment.
But don’t take my word for it, listen to Jesus: ‘do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul’ - like the ocean.
‘Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Yes, I tell you fear him.’
Or here’s one that’s coming up in Mark’s gospel: ‘If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where “the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched”’.
So, the human condition is very terrifying and perilous. And its perilous of its own making.
According to verses 1-3 of chapter 2, people are ‘transgress and sin’; they ‘follow the ways of the world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air’ - that is Satan; they are ‘disobedient’ to God. And they ‘gratify the cravings of the flesh’ and ‘follow its desires and thoughts’.
You know it’s tempting to categorise sin as ‘the wrong things we do or think or say’. That’s a weak definition of sin. It’s a definition that hovers above the horrors of the truth.
And if we settle for that definition, it will affect everything. It will affect our understanding of God’s wrath. And in turn it will affect our appreciation of God’s salvation. It will minimise our understanding of grace. It will influence our estimation of God’s gift. And it will embolden our pride.
Because all this is coming out of verse 8, which is a mountain of truth, where salvation stands on everything else!
If you love God’s salvation, the richness of that salvation, in your appreciation, will be as vivid and colourful as your appreciation of God’s wrath.
Like the brightness of the first rainbow against the blackness of God’s judgment clouds and the receding flood waters in the days of Noah.
Here’s how bad the human sin problem is then. The main problem is notabout disobedience to God - that’s the fruit of the problem; it’s not the root of it. The root of the problem is that people prefer anything and everything to God. They crave and desire and love to find their satisfaction in anything but God.
Jesus said, ‘This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil’. And ‘Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear their deeds will be exposed’.
They ‘love’ darkness and they ‘hate’ light.
Here’s Paul in Romans 1, ‘Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles’.
Consequently, ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’.
Because they exchanged the glory of God for other things they are found to be short of the glory of God and are guilty of an infinitely criminal exchange.
An exchange that minimises God’s worth and maximises the worth of created things.
Watch how Jeremiah puts it: ‘My people have committed two great sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns; broken cisterns that cannot hold water’.
This is the essence of evil out of which all other sins grow: people have exchanged the ‘spring of living water’ – God - who they call unsatisfying, for a broken cistern with stagnant dregs at the bottom – anything other than God - and they call that putrescence, ‘bliss’!
So, we see that God is an infinitely offended God. That his glory has been sullied by a monstrous exchange. And we see that God’s wrath is kindledagainst people because of his holiness which demands satisfaction.
And billions of people will experience his judgment on them forever because they loved and craved and went after this exchange with all the relish their souls could muster.
That’s the danger we who are alive are in. And it’s why we need to be saved. It’s not a pond of a problem, it’s an ocean sized problem. It’s not a trivial rescue that’s needed, it’s the greatest rescue in the history of the world. And it came at the greatest cost of all!
So, let’s return to the mountain. With salvation at the summit and God at the base supporting it completely. And given everything we’ve just seen, let’s see that this text is an exceedingly hopeful one.
Since we sinful people are in such a damnable condition we are as good as dead.
Verse 1 says it, ‘As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sin’. And verse 5 says the same.
A dead person can do no works. A dead person cannot swim against the current. A dead person cannot get their head above water. A dead person sinks below the surface and is at the mercy of ocean depths.
And so it is with our own depravity. We have no power to work out our own salvation. Verse 9 says, ‘not by works, so that no one can boast’. Boasting is excluded on account of deadness.
And that means that salvation is a gift of God. God chooses to rescue us from our deadly peril.
And it means that he chooses to rescue us because of nothing that he finds worthy in us.
We were dead in trespasses and sins. A dead person has so little going for them that we put them in the ground to rot, or else burn them in the furnace.
God does not choose to rescue us because of anything redeeming that he sees in us. Which means that salvation is all of grace. That is to say that salvation is all of undeserved favour.
If there was a single scrap of merit in us that warranted God rescuing us, we would have grounds for boasting. But since we were dead in transgressions and sins, there is no scrap of merit, and therefore no room for boasting.
This is important because we live in an age that is smitten with self-adulation, self-esteem; pride (we even badge the sinful exchange of homosexual relations with Pride); and boasting in all manner of achievements. As though we had made ourselves with all our gifts. As though we had sustained our own heart beating whilst we undertook our latest achievement.
But the reality of our condition is that we are dead - at the mercy of our sinful preferences and doomed without God’s mercy.
Listen to verse 4, ‘But because of his great love for us, God who is richin mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved’.
Great love. Rich mercy. These are the attributes of the God who rescues ruined sinners like us.
And he does the rescuing in one person. It’s not a team like the coast guard who come to rescue the lost seaman. It’s a single work by a singularly excellent saviour whose name is Jesus.
We were dead and God ‘made us alive in Christ’. When Jesus was raised from dead physically, we were raised with him spiritually. When Jesus ascended on high and took his seat in the heavenly realms, we were seated spiritually with him in that place of perfect harmony with God. As though we had never offended him at all.
The measure of how great this salvation is, is measured by the greatness of the depravity we were caught in. And therefore, the greatness of God’s wrath that was kindled against us.
And if we have been rescued, which I pray, we will all be before it is too late, then the riches of his grace shown to us are, in the words of verse 7 ‘incomparable’.
And the measure of his love for us and kindness to us are expressed in no clearer way than in the cost of cross. It cost Jesus his perfect life to make this rescue.
It was on a cross that the rescue was executed. God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. He gifted his son for our sakes to rescue us.
God the Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity, who enjoyed the fullness of God’s unapproachable light, gave up his life freely, to free usfrom the cords of death and make us alive with him.
‘So, God forgive me for the smallness of my appreciation of all that Jesus has done for me.
It is owing to how little I understand the offence of my sin, that I appreciate Jesus so little.
Open my eyes to see my sin more fully - my offence more completely - so that I might appreciate my Jesus more fittingly’.
If it is not us who can boast in any of this, then who can? The answer is God can. And he does. Flip over to chapter 1. Verse 4 says, ‘For he chose us in him before the creation of the world’ - before we had done anything to be counted worthy - he chose us ‘to be holy and blameless in sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will’.
In other words, before we had done anything good or bad God chose us to belong to himself and he chose us because he wanted to.
Verse 6, here’s the reason why he wanted to choose to rescue some of those dead and doomed people: ‘to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves’.
The end for which the cross exists is the exaltation of God in his incomparably rich grace towards his people.
All these totally unworthy people have been rescued to spend eternity praising the glory of the grace of God, supremely seen and expressed in his own dear Son, Jesus, and his death on the cross for them.
According to chapter 2 verse 8, this salvation is obtained through faith. God’s rescue is conditional. It is conditional on faith. It is conditional on receiving God’s Son as your personal saviour and prizing him above all others.
Faith means this: letting go of all your securities in this world and cleaving and clinging to God’s rescue provision for you.
The root of sin was an unholy exchange - God for created things. And so, the root of salvation is an exchange also - a holy one - Jesus for created things.
So, faith is a letting go of empty comforts and cleaving to Jesus who rescues us from the coming wrath.
This is why Jesus said things like this: ‘Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me’. And, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead’.
It is not faith to continue loving created things more than Jesus. And it is not salvation unless you surrender all to Jesus, because salvation comes by faith and faith is a surrendering of all, to have him.
Faith takes hold of Jesus like lost treasure found in a field. When the man found that treasure, Jesus said, he went a sold everything he had and bought that field.
Chapter 1, verse 7 says, ‘In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God’s grace’. How is it in accordance with grace if salvation is conditional on something we exercise – namely faith?
Because if we have the faith to embrace Jesus as more precious than anything else, then it was not from us, it was a gift from God. The faith was gifted and the ability to exercise it was gifted.
At the bottom of the mountain is God upholding and supplying everything!
So that, it will always and forever be said, ‘it is by grace you have been saved!’