Sermons/Discussions

"No Such Thing as Cheap Grace"

Sermon: The 5th Sunday of Lent year A

The Rev. Matt Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

One of the most startling things that you discover when you become a Christian is the concept of grace. The word “grace” means undeserved blessing or gift. When you turn your life over to Jesus Christ, God, the sovereign and infinite creator of the Universe gives you everything he has. He gives you his Son, Jesus Christ. He gives you a direct intimate relationship with Him through His Holy Spirit. He gives you not just the permission, but he gives you the loving invitation to come to him at any time and in any place with any problem or concern, any joy or pain because he loves you and he wants to be with you. On top of that he promises that he’ll be directly involved in all the circumstances and events of your life; that he’ll be there watching over you so that nothing can or will happen to you that doesn‘t pass through him first. So your prayers and requests, worries and fears, are not just heard, they’re answered. He literally gives you a new life with a purpose and mission that will only get better with time even though you live in in a world that’s steadily getting worse. He lets you know under no uncertain terms that he has adopted you as his son or daughter and that as his child you’re free to be as close to him as you want and that that freedom will last forever. You’ll not only live with him here and now, but even better, you won’t stop living with him when you die. And guess what? There’s nothing, not one thing, you did to earn or deserve one bit of it. It’s all God’s free gift.

That is a startling thing, especially to people like me who came to know Christ after living a pretty wild life. When I first started flirting with the idea of Christianity I held myself back from going to church for a while because I thought it might offend God for me to just walk in there as if I belonged, as if I hadn‘t been living the kind of life I had been living. I felt like I had to do something to make up things up to God for what I did before. I mean in the world when you hurt someone or cheat someone or lie to someone you expect to have to make it up to that person before you can be friends or at least before there can be any true peace between you. I’d lived most of my life as an enemy of God, violating his law, racking up this enormous mound of sins against him and hurting everyone around me. Surely there was something I had to do to make up for it? But no. The passage that really brought this home for me was Romans chapter 3:21 “But now a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known…this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and [all who believe] are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ.”

On the basis of that passage I realized that the moment I gave my life to Jesus Christ, I was given all of the blessings and gifts of the kingdom of heaven, for free. We sinners don’t have to make it up to God before he adopts us as his children. We don’t have to clean ourselves up. We don’t have to be morally pure we can come to church. No, as Paul says elsewhere, Jesus “came into the world to save sinners.” That means that Jesus Christ will accept you no matter what you have done or who you are so long as you accept him. There’s no payback. No penalty. No wrath. The grace of God is free to all who want it.

In some people’s minds this raises a huge problem. What’s to stop someone from taking advantage of all this free stuff? I mean it sounds like I can do what I want to do and live how I want to live and so long as I‘ve accepted Jesus into my life, I‘m home free. If you say, all I need is to believe and I receive the eternal grace of God as a free gift, well then halleluiah lets go party. What’s to keep me from just keeping on keeping on, living just the way I‘ve always lived?! God sounds a little like a pushover

That is precisely the question or the problem that Paul addresses in today’s epistle reading. If you’ll open your bibles to Romans chapter 6 verse 15.

All the way through his letter to the Romans Paul has been trying to make the following points. 1. The penalty for sin is death, both physical death and spiritual death. 2. Every human being sins. 3. Therefore, under God‘s law, no human being can be saved because no one can follow the law perfectly. 4. Because God loves us, the Son of God came to do what we cannot do, to live perfectly under the law and to die the perfect death for our sins 5. Because of that, every sinner who believes in him will not have their sins counted against them. 6. Instead their sins are nailed to Jesus’ cross where they die and Jesus’ righteousness is given to the believer as a free gift by faith. Even though we are not righteous we are credited or covered by Jesus righteousness and on that basis we are adopted as God‘s children never to be forsaken--no longer living under the law, but living under grace. So now, we come to the question we raised in verse 15 “Shall we then sin because we are not under the law but under grace” Since we are counted righteous in God’s sight on the basis of Jesus’ righteousness, then what is to stop us from totally taking advantage of this new status? Can’t we just keep living the way we were living before our salvation? What does Paul say?

“By no means!” Absolutely Not. Why? well, “Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one you obey--whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience which leads to righteousness?” He’s making two very important points here. First, everybody is a slave to one of two masters, sin or obedience. There are no other options. If you are not in Christ, you are a slave to sin. If you are in Christ, you are a slave to obedience. Don’t get too hung up on the use of the word slave. The Greek word for slave is “doulos” and it means to be “fully given over.” A slave is someone who has fully given themselves to another person as their master. So Paul is saying then that you’ve either fully committed yourself to sin or you’ve fully committed yourself to righteousness. He is not saying those fully committed to sin never do good things and those fully committed to righteousness never do evil things. He’s saying that you as an individual are either committed to one way of life or another.

The second thing he is saying is that the way you live demonstrates and determines who your master really is. “You are slaves to the one you obey” he says in verse 16. If you’ve really given yourself to Jesus Christ, if you have really surrendered your heart to him then you’re heart’s desire and you’re life’s commitment will be to please him first and in pleasing him. Jesus said “If you love me you will obey my commands.“ Those who love Jesus will live lives characterized by obedience to his commands, not because they are afraid of condemnation, but because they love to do his will. They’ve given themselves so completely to Christ, that what he wants they want. This is not saying they never sin but it is saying that what they want, what brings them joy is living in accordance with the will and law of Christ because they have become his. Likewise, those who have not made this commitment will find obedience to be a burden and a chore. They will want to live in accordance with their master, who is as Paul says, “Sin.”

But can you really love obedience? Think about it this way. When I was a kid I would get in trouble a lot, most of it was just the normal kid stuff, but on rare occasions I would do something that would really cross the line. Sometimes my dad would paddle me, but worst of all were those two or three times he looked me in the eye and said, “Son I’m so disappointed in you.” I love my dad and even though I like to have fun and do things I wasn’t supposed to like every other kid, I never wanted to see that look on my dad’s face. I wanted to please him because he was my dad and I was his son.

In the same way, if you’re a child of your Father in heaven, if you’ve become his doulos, then you will seek to live your life to please him and this means that you’ll give yourself over to a life of obedience; not that you won’t sin, but your heart won’t be ruled by sin and when you sin you‘ll begin to hate it because you have a new master, a new Father, a new home, a new heart ruled by a love for God that makes you not want to do what you used to do.

What’s to stop someone from just saying the right words, asking Jesus into their lives to avoid hell and then just living the way they want to live. Well, if you really have given yourself to him then that commitment of the heart will be made manifest in a changed life. Your desire will be to please him and in pleasing him you’ll find your joy. Someone who just says the right word’s and believes the right facts but feels no desire to change, no joy in obedience, no pain at their own sinfulness, really has not committed themselves at all.

Salvation is a free gift that is accepted by faith. It is by grace that we are saved and not by works and there is nothing we can do to earn our way in. But while the gift is not earned, while your works, good or bad, don’t determine whether or not you’re saved, the character of your life, the way you live, your attitude toward God and toward sin makes manifest, demonstrates whose servant you really are. If you have really given yourself to Jesus Christ, the character, the direction, your way of life will have changed. You will have been given over to obedience.

AMEN