What Is Grace?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | Well, what is grace?
00:00:07.000 | It seems like such a simple question, but the answer has a lot of different angles to it.
00:00:11.000 | It is a recent email from a podcast listener named Heather.
00:00:14.000 | "Hello Pastor John, I'm shy to ask this question because I'm embarrassed to admit
00:00:18.000 | that I struggle to understand one of the most commonly used words in the church today.
00:00:22.000 | That word is grace.
00:00:24.000 | I often hear it defined as unmerited favor or getting what you don't deserve,
00:00:28.000 | and I do understand it this way in the context of Ephesians 2.8.
00:00:31.000 | For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.
00:00:36.000 | But I don't understand it in the context of texts like 2 Corinthians 12.9.
00:00:40.000 | My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.
00:00:44.000 | Or in 1 Corinthians 15.10.
00:00:47.000 | But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace towards me was not in vain.
00:00:51.000 | On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them,
00:00:54.000 | though it was not I, but the grace of God that is within me."
00:00:58.000 | I don't understand grace in these two verses.
00:01:01.000 | Can you explain it to me?
00:01:03.000 | Well, one of the reasons I love this question, and I know I say that a lot.
00:01:08.000 | Yeah, we get some good questions.
00:01:10.000 | Exactly, I love what we do here.
00:01:12.000 | I love all these questions, but actually some of them are too hard to love.
00:01:17.000 | But this one is a softball to me.
00:01:21.000 | Because those verses that she is troubled by are some of my favorites.
00:01:26.000 | Yeah, yeah.
00:01:27.000 | But here's one of the reasons I love this question,
00:01:30.000 | and it's because it gives me a chance to say to Heather and to everybody,
00:01:34.000 | "You know, we're all really in this together,
00:01:38.000 | and I don't have any special advantage over you in answering these questions,
00:01:43.000 | except maybe that I've had a little more practice."
00:01:46.000 | In other words, what I do when I hear a question like this
00:01:50.000 | is something Heather could do or anybody could do.
00:01:53.000 | I open my Bible, and I get out my concordance,
00:01:56.000 | and I look up all the words for grace.
00:01:58.000 | I mean, all the words "grace" in the Bible.
00:02:01.000 | There's 131 of them, 131 uses of "grace" in the ESV English translation.
00:02:07.000 | And 124 of those are in the New Testament,
00:02:10.000 | and 86 of them are in the Apostle Paul,
00:02:13.000 | which means two-thirds of all the uses of the word "grace" in the Bible
00:02:17.000 | are in one author.
00:02:19.000 | Paul. No wonder he's called the Apostle of Grace.
00:02:23.000 | So I say that to encourage Heather,
00:02:26.000 | not that she shouldn't have written in, I'm glad to have the question,
00:02:30.000 | but rather to encourage her and everyone that there's nothing magical
00:02:36.000 | about to hold an office in the church, like pastor,
00:02:39.000 | or nothing magical to have a degree in scholarship in the academy.
00:02:43.000 | We all go about answering questions pretty much the same way.
00:02:49.000 | Look at all the Bible has to say,
00:02:52.000 | and then do your best to see how it all fits together,
00:02:57.000 | all the while being humble and submitting your mind
00:03:01.000 | to what the Bible teaches.
00:03:04.000 | So you are always bracketing your preconceptions
00:03:08.000 | and trying to build your conceptions out of all the pieces of the Bible.
00:03:12.000 | It's like a puzzle that you're trying to put the picture together,
00:03:15.000 | put all the pieces, and you know because it's God's Word,
00:03:18.000 | these pieces are going to fit.
00:03:19.000 | If they don't fit in this life, they're going to fit in the next,
00:03:21.000 | but we work on it as much as we can.
00:03:23.000 | So to answer her question, let's just limit ourselves to Paul,
00:03:28.000 | that she quoted, and to the two kinds of grace use that she saw.
00:03:34.000 | On the one hand, grace is called,
00:03:36.000 | and I think it's an absolutely wonderful word or phrase,
00:03:39.000 | undeserved favor.
00:03:41.000 | We are justified, this is Romans 3:24,
00:03:44.000 | we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption
00:03:51.000 | that is in Christ Jesus.
00:03:52.000 | So grace is what inclines God to give gifts that are free
00:03:59.000 | and undeserved by sinners.
00:04:02.000 | Or Romans 5:15, "If many died through one man's trespass,
00:04:08.000 | much more have the grace of God and the free gift by grace
00:04:15.000 | of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many."
00:04:20.000 | So grace is that quality in God that produces free gifts
00:04:27.000 | for guilty sinners in salvation.
00:04:31.000 | Or Romans 11:5, "At the present time,
00:04:34.000 | there is a remnant chosen by grace,
00:04:38.000 | but if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works,
00:04:42.000 | otherwise grace would no longer be grace."
00:04:47.000 | That's Romans 11, 5 and 6.
00:04:49.000 | So you can't work to earn grace, it is free and undeserved.
00:04:57.000 | Now that's what most of us have in our minds when we say
00:05:01.000 | God is a God of grace.
00:05:04.000 | And that's true, it's wonderful.
00:05:07.000 | Our eternal lives depend on it.
00:05:10.000 | None of us would be saved if grace were not undeserved favor
00:05:16.000 | and were not a quality in the mind of God,
00:05:20.000 | in the heart of God, in the nature of God.
00:05:23.000 | But then Heather rightly notices another group of passages,
00:05:28.000 | these also in Paul, where he comes at grace a little differently.
00:05:35.000 | He says in 2 Corinthians 9, 8, "God is able to make all grace
00:05:39.000 | abound to you so that having all sufficiency in all things
00:05:44.000 | at all times, you may abound in every good work."
00:05:48.000 | That seems to picture grace as a power or an influence for obedience.
00:05:54.000 | Here it is again in 2 Corinthians 12, 9.
00:05:58.000 | Jesus says to Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you.
00:06:02.000 | My power is made perfect in weakness."
00:06:06.000 | Or again in verse 10 of 1 Corinthians 15, "By grace I am what I am,
00:06:13.000 | and His grace toward me was not in vain.
00:06:15.000 | On the contrary, I worked." That was the effect of grace.
00:06:18.000 | "I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I,
00:06:21.000 | but the grace of God that was with me."
00:06:24.000 | So in all three of those texts, and they're not the only ones,
00:06:29.000 | grace is not only a disposition or quality or inclination
00:06:35.000 | in the nature of God, but is an influence or a force
00:06:40.000 | or a power or an acting of God that works in us
00:06:46.000 | to change our capacities for work and suffering and obedience.
00:06:52.000 | So what I do when I see things like this in the Bible
00:06:56.000 | is to adjust my categories in my head.
00:07:01.000 | And I don't say, "Oh, that can't be because I've got this category in my head."
00:07:05.000 | No, no, no. You fix the categories in your head.
00:07:08.000 | If once I only thought of grace as a character trait
00:07:13.000 | or a disposition or an inclination in the nature of God,
00:07:17.000 | which moved Him to treat sinners better than they deserve,
00:07:20.000 | if that was my only conception once upon a time,
00:07:23.000 | now, having seen all the texts, I broaden my understanding of grace
00:07:29.000 | as the Bible uses the term.
00:07:31.000 | And now I say, "Well, it appears that the word 'grace' in Paul's use
00:07:39.000 | not only refers to God's character trait or disposition or inclination
00:07:46.000 | to treat people better than we deserve,
00:07:49.000 | but the word 'grace' also refers to the action or the power
00:07:55.000 | or the influence or the force of this disposition,
00:08:01.000 | which produces real practical outcomes in people's lives,
00:08:06.000 | like being sufficient for good deeds or enduring a thorn in the flesh
00:08:11.000 | or working harder than everybody else, Paul says about his own apostolic work.
00:08:17.000 | Now, that does not mean you have to give up that simple definition
00:08:23.000 | of undeserved favor. That's true. That's a good definition.
00:08:28.000 | It just means that the word also embraces the encouraging truth,
00:08:34.000 | at least I love the truth. That's why these verses are so precious to me.
00:08:38.000 | The encouraging truth that this favor overflows in powerful,
00:08:46.000 | practical helpfulness from God in your daily life where you most need it.
00:08:53.000 | That help is also called grace because it's free and it's undeserved.
00:08:59.000 | So let me end with a precious verse that we all know and love
00:09:03.000 | and maybe have never thought about it in this term of grace.
00:09:07.000 | Hebrews 4.16, "Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace."
00:09:15.000 | So that's a throne with the quality and the character and the inclination
00:09:21.000 | to treat people better than they deserve. That's the kind of throne we're coming to.
00:09:26.000 | But then it says, "That we may receive mercy and find grace to help,
00:09:34.000 | grace to help in time of need," or more literal translation,
00:09:39.000 | "find mercy and grace for a well-timed help."
00:09:45.000 | It is incredibly encouraging that God's grace is both the inclination of the divine heart
00:09:54.000 | to treat us better than we deserve and is the extension of that inclination in practical help.
00:10:05.000 | Wonderful. Thank you for the survey of grace in the Bible.
00:10:08.000 | And thank you for the wonderful question, Heather.
00:10:10.000 | And thanks for listening in today.
00:10:11.000 | If you haven't done so, get our new episodes as we release them
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00:10:18.000 | or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel.
00:10:20.000 | To find all 1,500 of our past episodes or to submit a question of your own,
00:10:24.000 | go online to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:10:29.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Monday.
00:10:33.000 | [Silence]
00:10:42.000 | you