Ephesians 2:8-9
The Rev. Adele K. Langworthy, preaching
October 27, 2024
By grace through faith, we’re saved by God’s great love.
Embracing the fullness of our scripture passage this morning and believing that salvation is only possible through God’s grace and not our efforts, a German monk named Martin Luther in 1517 hung on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany 95 theses highlighting ideas for Christianity that differed from the Catholic teachings at the time. His action sparked a reformation within the Christian community and led to the Protestant movement with other reformers – John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli and John Knox – who called the church (God’s people) to a new way of scriptural, faithful living embracing God’s gift of grace. Sola gratia, the Latin phrase meaning “by grace alone”, was one of the key issues of the reformation.
My Old Testament professor at McCormick Seminary, Ted Campbell, often spoke of grace. He writes, “Grace names the un-deserved gift that creates relationships and the sustaining, responding, forebearing attitude-plus-action that nurtures relationships.” It involves interaction between the one giving grace and the one receiving grace, and the wills of both. And what goes into that interaction?
- The motive of the grace giver
- The acceptance, rejection or forgetfulness of the grace receiver
- The patience of the grace giver
- The dynamic of forgiveness
- The life renewing impact of the gift
Our God is the ultimate giver of grace, not because we deserve it, but because God loves us. God wants us to have an opportunity to grow and to love as he loves, to trust in him. God continually does that which is good so that we have the potential to be the best we can be and learn what we must from the messes we find ourselves in by our own doing, as well as what comes our way from the world. And then God waits for us to acknowledge the gift. God gives us space. How patient is our God!! For the gift of grace isn’t like receiving a gift in a box, wrapped just so, that when opened, can be immediately touched, examined, used and enjoyed. It is a dynamic gift filled with transformative power, steadfast love, and an awareness of how un-deserved one is to receive the gift.
Frederick Buechner writes about grace saying, “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.
“There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.
[And] “Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”
Grace was offered to Saul of Tarsus (as recorded in the Book of Acts in the Bible). In receiving grace, Saul’s name was changed to Paul, he was forgiven for all he had done to attack Christians, and he became an important voice and personality in sharing the good news of the gospel, filled with God’s message of grace and transformative love. There are so many powerful, vivid conversion stories that exude God’s amazing grace!
I share with you now a story of grace that resonates with me, and perhaps you, that was published in Christianity Today.
Megan [Hill] has no memory of becoming a Christian. She says, “I didn’t pray a prayer, or walk down an aisle, or have an eureka moment. My Christian testimony of how I came to faith, is downright boring.”
She was raised by godly Presbyterian parents, gave thanks before meals, and recited prayers at bedtime from the children’s catechism. Church attendance shaped the weekly rhythms of her life. By the time she was age three or four she embraced the knowledge that God was her Creator, Jesus was her Savior, the Spirit was her helper, and the Bible was her rule.
Megan writes, “But it took me most of my life to appreciate just how extraordinary was the grace I had received in ordinary circumstances.”
In fifth grade, I began to attend a school where dramatic testimonies were a regular part of morning chapel. Week after week, speakers – a drug addict, a party girl, an atheist – told of God’s rescue. But I am baffled that I never once heard a testimony like my own. And so I began to fear that I hadn’t really been saved … at all. Perhaps I was floating on other people’s convictions, happily living in a Christian environment without actually being a Christian.
Yet I was thankful for the church that had validated my testimony. In December 1989, I approached the elders of the church and asked to become a member. They, who had heard all kinds of stories from all kinds of people, declared my testimony to be a work of God. A few weeks later, I stood in front of the congregation and received the right hand of fellowship from those who had been lost but now were found. My testimony may have been boring, but it was welcomed. And I was also thankful for grace.
It wasn’t until I became a parent, at 27, that I began to see that in all testimonies, it is not the outward circumstances that are amazing. It’s the grace. There is no dull salvation. The Son of God took on flesh to suffer and die, purchasing a people for his glory. As Gloria Furman writes, “The idea that anyone’s testimony of blood-bought salvation could be uninteresting or unspectacular is a defamation of the work of Christ.”
She ends by writing this, For myself, I cannot point to a specific day of spiritual awakening. I can point only to my Lord, who says [in John 6:37], “All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away”. My Jesus, I come. Every day in need of grace. And I find myself not cast out.
Megan and Paul are at opposite ends of the spectrum in their experiences, but God’s grace is present in both their lives, just as it is there for you and me.
Jesus’s blood was shed, his body hung on a cross, he descended into hell and rose three days later—why? Because God loves us and wants us to have the opportunity to live with him forever. We don’t deserve such a lavish gift; yet, it is offered to each of us. For, by God’s gift of grace, each of us has been saved through faith.
We are blessed to receive opportunities over and over again in life to be faithful, to not have it all together, but to grow through experiences and mature through all the stages of our life, to reform our ways and to always be reforming by the grace of God.
Such an amazing grace, given with love by our God, is too good to keep to ourselves! May we receive it with open arms and in turn reach out to share it with others.
- How might we extend grace to someone who has wronged us?
- How might we extend grace to someone who is in need?
- How might we extend grace to ourselves when we are in need of some grace?
Let us begin by affirming what we believe, who we are as the body of Christ, and how we are called to live in a grace-blessed state. By grace alone, we celebrate the gift of salvation; and sharing grace together, we live as the body of Christ in the here and now.
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