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Address:First Baptist Church, Ashland
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Ashland, VA 23005
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Sermon for Sunday, November 18, 2007
“Stewardship, Thanksgiving and Grace”
Ephesians 2:1-9; 2 Peter 3:14-18
This is one of those Sundays that lends itself to several different areas of thought. There are a lot of different sermons I want to preach this morning (and you don’t want to hear them all today). I mean it is getting close to Thanksgiving and we’ve been talking about stewardship and that is important so what do you do? Maybe put them all under one heading and hope to get out before our neighbor churches beat us to the restaurants.
The major thought today will be about grace and that grace can encompass all of what I have already mentioned to you.
I sometimes think that we make the Christian faith appear to be one great vocabulary lesson. There are all these words that are typically geared toward the Christian faith, big words, words that we feel like if you just knew the right definition, if you can explain it right, we will give you gold star and that makes you a Christian.
What words? Words like sanctification, justification, salvation, redemption and atonement and we think, “I’m really suppose to know those words but what do they really mean?” Sometimes we may not be able to express it, but if we hear it, we think, “oh yeah, that’s the right answer.” If I were to say, “What is grace?” and even try to make it easy and give you a multiple choice:
- Grace is a lady in our church.
- What we sometimes call the blessing before we eat.
- Unmerited favor
You can get the words right and get the right definition but it can still be pretty uninspiring. Unmerited favor. What in the world does that mean? Sounds pretty clinical, technical, sterile doesn’t it? It certainly doesn’t give me any religious fervor or excitement. It sounds cold.
If we are going to understand what grace is today, we need to get beyond a sterile definition like “unmerited favor.” If we understand anything about our faith, we need to understand what grace is.
But in order to understand it, let’s back up and explain another word first. Let’s talk about the word, “GUILT.” That word is not nearly as popular as grace, most of us think we can come with a pretty good definition of guilt without a whole lot of effort. That’s when you feel bad because you did something wrong. That’s what we think guilt is. Guilt, however, is a much broader and much deeper experience than simply feeling bad because you did some thing wrong. What I want to do is to take a little slice out of guilt. It won’t be all that guilt is but just a little slice to help us toward grace.
Guilt is that nagging suspicion, that ongoing worry and sometimes just outright fear that the bad we have done is going to cost us some love. When we are guilty, we are worried that the wrong thing that we have done in some way is going to make someone love us a little less. It is going to cost us some love and we worry about it.
As children your parents told you not to throw the ball in the backyard because the backyard wasn’t big enough. You did and it broke a window.
You cheated on a test and when you got caught and came face to face with what you have done, the expression on someone’s face in your family, the way you were corrected, whatever, it communicated to you that you were in danger of losing someone’s love. Maybe they didn’t mean it that way or maybe they actually did.
When someone is really good at using guilt, the message that can be often implied is: “I just might love you a little less if you disappoint me and don’t do what I ask you to do.” Guilt and love are connected at some level. Most of us are pretty aware of the fact that a lot of times what we feel when we feel guilty is the anxiety, worry, apprehension that whatever we did is going to cost us some love.
And our biggest fear is that this can also be true with God. In some way, God who knows all that we do, the God from whose presence we cannot flee, the God who knows who we are and what we have done, and if I was God, I wouldn’t like me very much for my heart or for what I did.
We have this nagging feeling that whatever it is we have done has cost us some love with God, that God surely cannot love me like He used to, God cannot forgive me or hear my prayers because of what I have done.
Now — let’s look at the word that we started with because it is the word we need to hear. Remember the word — grace. Grace is the fact that God loves us anyway. Grace is always in spite of;
- grace is always no matter what;
- grace is understanding that no matter what it is we have done, it has not cost us any of God’s love.
The Bible is filled with places where that message is trying to get to people. What is that Paul says, “While we were yet sinners,” while we were still doing the wrong thing, what we were still captive to sin, Christ died for us.
John, in his first letter written to the early church said, “We love God because he first loved us” because He first loved us in our sin. In that passage read from Ephesians, “Let me tell you how you are saved. Let me tell you how you are put back into a relationship with God. It is only because of God’s grace. No matter what you have done, no matter what life has been like before, God’s grace is that God keeps on loving you and if we will turn, the relationship never has to be broken.”
The thing is that most of us cannot believe that. We know how we act when someone disappoints, hurts or does the wrong thing in our eyes. We know how easy it is to fight with that wanting to withdraw love thing. We have a very hard time believing that God can love us anyway and then we hear the Word…you are saved by grace and that through faith.”
At some point you just have to take the big leap and believe that not matter who you are, no matter what you have done, no matter how you have disappointed yourself and know that God has seen it all, God loves you anyway. The only way to get to there is by faith because it doesn’t make sense that God should love me.
That’s grace. When John Newton wrote that great hymn, he wrote it the only way he knew how to describe grace, “that’s amazing. It is just not grace, it is amazing grace — amazing grace that despite the things I have done, despite the depth of darkness within my heart, God loves me anyway.” That can only be described as amazing.
Do you know about John Newton? He was a slave trader. He became a captain of a slave ship. He was converted while working in slave trade. But even after he became a Christian he didn’t quit working as the captain of the slave ship. After a couple of years he felt led into the ministry. He goes into the ministry and at some point writes the words to “Amazing Grace” but it is at least seven years after he writes the hymn that he comes to understand that what he did as slave trader was evil and wrong.
A lot of times, the story is told that all of this takes place at the same time, but it doesn’t. He becomes a Christian, and he continues operating in the slave system that was so wrong, then he becomes a minister and writes the hymn. Later after that, he realizes, ‘I cannot believe what I did.”
This tells me something. This tells me something about the way grace works. Grace. It is what brings us home to God. In the first verse, John Newton captures two important stories in scripture. He tells the story of the Prodigal Son. “This, my son, who was lost is found again.” He captures the story of the man born blind in John 9. They are saying to him, “Jesus is a sinner, how can you say he healed you?
He said, “I don’t know if he was a sinner. I just know this; I was blind and now I see.”
Grace is that experience that brings us home to God so that we can experience His love. Grace is what takes us to that place so that when we have been there ten thousand years it seems like we have just begun.
But all those verses in between speak about grace in this life — grace and how it sees us through, grace and how it pulls us closer to God.
If we look at John Newton’s life, it is not just salvation, it is not simply eternity, but it is this man who grows in between and draws closer and closer to God, to be the useful servant he was meant to be.
That is amazing. I believe that I am saved, but I know that I am no where near what God wants me to be as a Christian. I still have a long walk in front of me. That is why I believe that Peter was closing his second letter out the way that he did…”grow in the grace…” He knew his readers had more road to travel, more growing to do in God’s grace.
It is that amazing grace that brings you and me to Christ and it is that amazing grace that Christ will continue to walk with me, shaping me, moving me and hopefully some day that I might be more like him. That is amazing.
This is the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We all have so much to give thanks for…family, country, freedom, faith, the list can go on and on. I am thankful for His grace that loves me in spite of me.
Many of us have made stewardship commitments this morning. I give of my financial resources to God through this church for several reasons…
- I want to give back to God just a little of what He has given to me.
- I also give because I love this church and will love it when I am no longer your pastor.
- I am excited about the ministries you are willing to attempt for this community which can bring Christ to others. It takes money to make that happen and I want to pledge a tithe of our money to that cause. I do it because of His grace and love for His world.
— Robert Thompson
Pastor
First Baptist Church, Ashland
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