Sermon Tone Analysis

Where GRACE and FAITH collide

The greatest experiment of your life

A hundred metres beneath the border between France and Switzerland, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research has built a Large Hadron Collider.

At a cost of 6 billion dollars this enables scientists to crash opposing beams of protons and ions into one another at a velocity approaching the speed of light.

Heralded as “the greatest experiment on earth”, the purpose of these screamingly fast collisions is to literally break into the secret world of sub-atomic particles and, among other things, seize and interrogate the elusive “Higgs boson”, the so-called “God particle”!

Shall I tell them, or will you?

God isn’t in fact a particle, or indeed any kind of article, at all.

God is the one of whom the Bible declares: Hebrews 1:10 (NIV84) “. . .

“In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.

But whether or not you’re excited by the idea of sub-atomic physics, I want to explore with you very briefly this morning a collision between two infinitely more powerful forces than sub-atomic particles.

And we can read about them in a familiar passage from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians - Ephesians 2:8–9 (NIV84) — For it is by GRACE you have been saved, through FAITH—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works, so that no one can boast.

Notice in particular the phrases “by GRACE” and “through FAITH”.

These are two of the most powerful forces ever to have been unleashed on planet earth and right now, even as we are meeting together this morning, these are the forces that are exerting an incomparable influence on our life and destiny.

So, here’s my proposition this morning: We need to be crystal clear about what GRACE is and what FAITH is because together they are the key to us being empowered to fulfil God’s purpose for our lives and so bring Him glory.

They are, if you like, the door to the “greatest experiment of our lives.”

Whether you appreciate it or not, if you are already a Christian, as I think most of us are here this morning, then you will already have experienced the effects of at least one major collision of grace and faith in your life.

If you are not yet a Christian, let me urge you not to risk leaving church today without first having a word with Pastor Nick or Pastor Alan, or a member of the prayer ministry team to find out how you can take the most exciting step and see your life and future transformed.

For me, that first encounter with a grace and faith collision, took place many years ago now.

I was 17.

At age 11, miffed by God’s consistent failure to come up with the goods in what I thought were very reasonable and not very demanding requests, I told Him that from now on I would NOT be believing in Him.

And, since that threat didn’t seem to twist God’s arm and make Him change His mind as I’d secretly hoped, I found myself entering into a period where I stubbornly rejected the whole concept of God.

Maybe that was a part of the reason why my early teenage years were pretty miserable.

Anyhow, at 17 and in the Sixth Form, I suddenly found that my Economics teacher, was now also my RE teacher.

Garth Ratcliffe, that was his name, for a rather diffident young man like myself at the time, was really quite frightening.

He was young, very intelligent, had a wicked sense of humour and a penchant for practical jokes.

The result was that you never quite knew what to expect from him and that tended to make me nervous and very keen to “keep up” in class for fear of being singled out for some of his incisive wit.

In those days, I should say, pupils were not in any way protected by any of the current notions of pupil rights or the need to be politically correct.

If the teacher rounded on you with a verbal tirade, deserved or otherwise, and it put you in an unwelcome spotlight in front of your peers – you just had to take it on the chin.

And usually of course, you couldn’t count at all on any sympathy from your classmates – quite the reverse!

For lots of reasons though, Garth was a very attractive role model for impressionable Sixth Formers.

So, to find that Garth was now also to be my RE teacher was quite a shock – especially as it quickly became clear that he was a fully paid up Christian, a notion not really any more attractive then to many young people than it is today.

I did though find myself pondering a lot about whether or not Garth was right.

Had I been rash in turning my back on God?

However, again and again I found myself struggling to find the “rational” proof for the existence of God that I felt I needed.

But when Garth announced in the summer term that he was organising a trip to Earls Court in London to hear the famous evangelist Billy Graham, I was interested.

But I didn’t want to appear that interested, so instead of signing up for a place on the coach he was organising, I decided to make my own visit.

To cut the story short, as I listened to Billy Graham, something that he said lit up in neon lights in my mind, or was it in my heart?

The message was that I had to take a step of FAITH.

I would never be able to totally PROVE in an intellectual sense that God was real, but if I would trust Him as true, I would then discover from personal experience that He really is true.

So that’s what I did.

Along with hundreds of others, I “got up out of my seat” and went forward to be counselled and to receive Christ as my Saviour.

I did not realise it at the time, but in fact, the moment that I made the faith step of taking God at His word, and, even before I reached the Counselling Room and was prayed for, the FAITH God gave me for that moment was released and collided immediately with the amazing and powerful provision of salvation by God’s GRACE.

With the speed of a lightning bolt, in an instant, my sins were erased, I was completely forgiven and I was born again by the Spirit of God – a new creation in Christ.

Now, before we look more closely at the forces grace and faith, I need first to establish a foundational point.

It’s this.

My experience at Earls Court, all those years ago, would commonly be called “salvation”.

And, of course, in a sense it is.

But the Bible actually indicates that our “salvation” operates in three elements or phases.

It is, if you like, a journey involving three stages – a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The beginning is what theologians call “justification”.

It is this that happened to me that night at the Earls Court arena.

Justification is an instant event that occurs when we choose to put our trust, our faith, in the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born on earth as a sinless human being, lived a sinless life and then paid the death penalty for the sins of all mankind, yours and mine included.

This is the GRACE part of our Ephesians 2 verse.

This is the gift that God wants everyone in the world to have.

It is a gift that is entirely FREE, but also entirely UNDESERVED.

And that is what makes it BY GRACE – we do not deserve it; we cannot earn or merit it in any way either now or in the future, but because Christ effectively exchanged His sinless life for our sinful one by taking our place and paying the penalty for our sins, we can be forgiven; we can be “saved”, to use the Bible term.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he describes the justification event like this: Romans 10:9 (NIV84) “ . . .

if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Jesus has effectively opened the door to forgiveness and salvation for us all by his sacrificial death on the cross and His victory over death, demonstrated conclusively by His resurrection.

All we need to do is walk through that open door and we do that by simply BELIEVING, putting our TRUST, our FAITH, in Him and what He has done.

That is where the second part of our Ephesians 2 verse comes in.

Jesus has provided the “BY GRACE” bit – we just need to accept it “THROUGH FAITH”.

That’s what I did at Earls Court and that’s what you did, whether you realised it or not, when you became a Christian, if you are one.

But notice something else, from our text verse: Ephesians 2:8 (NIV84) — 8 For it is by GRACE you have been saved, through FAITH—and this NOT FROM YOURSELVES, it is the gift of God.

Now that is amazing.

It tells us that not only did God provide our salvation by GRACE, though we in no way deserved it, but He also gives us the FAITH we need to be able to grab hold of it.

Fantastic!

I want you hold on to that thought for a bit – and we’ll come back to it in a moment.

So, if you are Christian, you are now living in the wake of a whole tsunami of blessings that all happened because of that first collision of grace and faith in your life.

In an instant of time:

• You were declared “not guilty” – that’s what “justification” means, you are legally, judicially, acquitted of all charges, and declared innocent and righteous in the sight of a Holy God;

• Your sins are forgiven and you’re right back where God always wanted you to be - in close touch with your loving Heavenly Father;

• You have walked free from death row because the penalty for everything bad you ever did or ever will do has been fully paid for by the death of Jesus on the cross;

• You have been filled with the very LIFE of God - what the Bible refers to as “Eternal” life and have received the “down payment”, the deposit, of a brand new spirit guaranteeing all the good things that God has for you both now and in your eternal future; and,

• While you are yet to cash it in, you have been given guaranteed entrance into Christ’s Millennial Kingdom and into the blessings of Heaven that follow it;

Come on now, even for the most reserved among us, that has to be worth an “Amen!”

But if the beginning of the journey of salvation is our justification, the END of the journey, if something that lasts forever can really have an end, is what theologians call “glorification”.

Now there isn’t time to get into that in any detail this morning but basically this is when we are in heaven and removed from the presence of sin and when we receive a brilliant new body, like Jesus’s post-resurrection body.

As it says in Philippians 3:20–21 (NIV84) — But our citizenship is in heaven.

And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

But that is our future and you don’t need to be much of a “life-map reader” to realise that those of us who are Christians here this morning are not at this moment either at the beginning or at the end of our salvation journey, we are somewhere in the middle.

And the middle of the salvation journey is called sanctification.

But, unlike justification, and glorification it does not happen, at least experientially, it does not happen, instantly.

Sanctification is a process and it is a process that Christians begin at justification and fulfil at glorification.

Sanctification simply means to be “separated” or “set apart” for God.

It means to be given up to God and holy and righteous in all we do, say and even think.

You’ll be glad to hear it is not our work, it is the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians and its purpose is to make us like Jesus.

It is a process that you and I as Christians need to co-operate with and be grateful for, because it is absolutely central to God’s purposes, and to our calling, for every moment of the time we are here on earth – and beyond.

Listen to Paul’s words to the Thessalonian Christians: 2 Thessalonians 2:13 (NIV84) — But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.

Now, I want to suggest this morning that there are TWO key things we all need to keep in focus in terms of our sanctification:

1.

Firstly, the way we benefit from God’s provision for sanctification is precisely the same as the way we receive justification.

It is not by works.

It is not by personal effort, strenuous self-discipline, or the meticulous application of spiritual rules and regulations.

It requires just what our justification required –the collision of GRACE and FAITH in our life, though with sanctification it is not one but many such collisions that are needed.

2. Secondly, sanctification is NOT a hopeless impossibility, though sometimes it feels like it.

In fact God has ALWAYS had our sanctification in mind.

Staggeringly, He even had it in mind before He set about creation.

It tells us that in Ephesians 1:4 (NIV84) — 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

“Holy and blameless” - that’s sanctification!

And the Bible also tells us that God has given us all that we need to live that set apart and holy life.