Given by Sherry Black on June 1, 2008.

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C.S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh that’s easy. It’s grace.”

After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist 8-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.1

God’s amazing grace, God’s favor towards us, undeserved and unearned, is the one most unique thing about Christianity. It leaks around the edges of the entire Old Testament, and gushes out full blast in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel parables communicate to us about grace, and the epistles teach us about grace. In today’s Old Testament lesson, we find hints of grace in God’s covenant with Israel. When God’s words were foremost in the lives, in their hearts and souls, encompassing their lives, God looked with favor upon Israel, his chosen people. The grace and favor shown towards them is that God chose them to be his people; all he asked in return was that they lived in accord with the covenant he made with them. God’s covenant proceeded from God’s freely given love, and was therefore grace. Grace is blessing. Grace is finding favor in the sight of God.

Unfortunately, because of the sinful nature of humanity, Israel failed to live up to God’s ideals—over and over again. Because of his holiness, God required a holy people. When God looked with favor upon obedient Israel, they were blessed, when he turned away from their disobedience they were confounded and destroyed and their security lost.

But by his grace, by his loving-kindness and his mercy, God provided a way for humanity to be acceptable to him. And the way was Christ. And the right response to God’s grace in Jesus is to believe in him and to do the will of the Father, as our gospel tells us. Under God’s plan, we cannot earn his favor, we cannot work our way into heaven. We must call on Jesus, believe in him, and seek to do God’s will.

Today’s Epistle reading from Romans is the heart and soul of grace. Martin Luther called this section “the chief point, and the very central place of the Epistle, and of the whole Bible.” That may be an exaggeration, but clearly this is an important couple of verses containing key theological ideas.

In the section preceding our text, Paul writes in order to show why God’s intervention in Christ was necessary, and the problem was sin. Man’s nature is corrupted by evil—as I’m fond of saying all of our blood is original sin positive, and this disease leads to death. Without Christ, without God’s intervention, man is in bondage to the law of sin and death. Man’s need is for salvation because he is condemned in God’s sight. The question is how to get right with God. How can man get rid of sin and be acceptable in God’s sight? God made one way, and one alone. A new kind of righteousness has been revealed, the righteousness of God’s very self, originating in God, prepared by God, revealed in the gospel, and offered to us. This righteousness gives us a new status, a place to stand before God. And it is accessible to us not by works or deeds, but by faith alone. The law didn’t bring righteousness to the Israelites; it can’t bring salvation to us either. Our pride likes to think that we can do something in order to get right with God, but nothing works. God requires righteousness, but he also provides it. The witness of the law and the prophets is to reveal sin and to point toward the righteousness of God in light of the coming of Jesus.

This righteousness is received by faith. It is a free gift with only one condition: Jesus Christ. Faith in Jesus is the prerequisite for salvation. Righteousness a free gift of grace to everyone who believes in Jesus. There is no other distinction: no race or gender or social standing or economic condition or moral respectability or cultural advantage will result in salvation, because all of humanity is original sin positive, all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. Humanity fell short of God’s purposes, and rebelled against God’s great goodness and his sovereignty. The human experiment so far was a failure, and all are guilty before God.

In Christ, God has provided the remedy, the cure for the disease of sin. The divine therapy is justification, grace, and redemption. To be justified is to be declared righteous in God’s sight, to be counted as righteous and deserving of favor. The guilty one is guilty no longer. The price for our sins has been paid. Grace, the unmerited favor of God, is his free love, his free pardon. Justification is grace, gratuitous and free, without merit or deserving.

Redemption points to the ransom provided in Christ—Jesus paid the price to liberate us, to deliver us, from the bondage of sin. God did for us what we could not do for ourselves; he gave us right standing in spite of our guilty, freely, generously. This is grace. C.H. Dodd explained that we have new status: ‘from condemnation to acquittal, from bondage to freedom, from guilt to innocence.’ We are set free because of Jesus’ sacrifice, Jesus who voluntarily atoned or made payment for our sins through his blood, through his death on the cross. This is made effective for us by our faith and by our faith alone. Faith is all that is required, we can do no more than believe. The only way sinful man can be justified, made acceptable to God, is by faith.

To summarize, in ourselves, apart from Christ, we are helpless slaves of sin, held captive by a power we can never overcome. And who is God? Among other things, he is holy and just. Because he is holy, he cannot tolerate sin. Sin simply cannot exist in his presence. It is foreign to the essence of his being. . . . Because he is just, he must punish sin. God can do anything, we sometimes think. But he cannot act in a way that violates his own nature. . . Here then is the dilemma God himself faces. His love reaches out to us, sinful rebels that we are, but his holiness and justice prevent him from simply sweeping sin under the carpet.2

And the one and only answer is “Jesus Christ, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood.” God’s grace, his overflowing and unmerited favor towards those who believe, is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We should jump for joy when we think of God’s grace, of what he has done for us.

In his book, What’s so Amazing about Grace, Philip Yancey provides a number of illustrations about the grace of the Father, modern day parables as it were. Here’s one:

A vagrant lives near the Fulton Fish Market on the lower east side of Manhattan. The slimy smell of fish carcasses and entrails nearly overpowers him, and he hates the trucks that noisily arrive before sunrise. But midtown gets crowded, and the cops harass him there. Down by the wharves nobody bothers with a grizzled man who keeps to himself and sleeps behind a Dumpster.

Early one morning when the workers are slinging eel and halibut off the trucks, yelling to each other in Italian, the vagrant rouses himself and pokes through the Dumpsters behind the tourist restaurants. An early start guarantees good pickings: last night's uneaten garlic bread and french fries, nibbled pizza, a wedge of cheesecake. He eats what he can stomach and stuffs the rest in a brown paper sack. The bottles and cans he stashes in plastic bags in his rusty shopping cart.

The morning sun, pale through harbor fog, finally makes it over the buildings by the wharf. When he sees the ticket from last week's lottery lying in a pile of wilted lettuce, he almost lets it go. But by force of habit he picks it up and jams it in his pocket. In the old days, when luck was better, he used to buy one ticket a week, never more. It's past noon when he remembers the ticket stub and holds it up to the newspaper box to compare the numbers. Three numbers match, the fourth, the fifth—all seven! It can't be true. Things like that don't happen to him. Bums don't win the New York Lottery.

But it is true. Later that day he is blinking in the bright lights as television crews present the newest media darling, the unshaven, baggy-pants vagrant who will receive $243,000 per year for the next 20 years. A chic-looking woman wearing a leather miniskirt shoves a microphone in his face and asks, "How do you feel?" He stares back dazed and catches a whiff of her perfume. It has been a long time, a very long time, since anyone has asked him that question. He feels like a man who has been to the edge of starvation and back, and is beginning to fathom that he'll never feel hunger again.3

Grace is receiving the greatest inheritance possible. It is being set free from death row. It is finding true love. It is hitting the jackpot. It is finding the winning lottery ticket. It is amazing. Amen.

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1 Yancey, Philip. What’s so Amazing about Grace, p. 45.

2 Moo, Douglas. The NIV Application Commentary: Romans, p. 135-6.

3 Yancey, 46.