Sola Gratia

WELCOME
Pastor Chris Paavola:
Well once again, everybody, good morning. Good, good, good to see you. My name is Chris Paola. I’m the senior pastor here. I get the joy of being the senior pastor here at St. Mark and we are in a series called Certain where we are going through these truths of this time period in history known as the Reformation. And it is these truths that made such a difference in the world. They’re called, they’re summarized by these words, Sola, which means alone kind of these only statements of the reformation. But the reason we’re going through this series is because these ideas didn’t just reform the church. They didn’t just reform human history, they reform people’s hearts. And that’s our hope for you today. It says, we go through these ideas together, that these same ideas will begin to reform and reshape your hearts as we walk out of here today.

WE ARE SAVED

Weeks one and two, we were looking at the story of this man named Martin Luther and how this all happened and we were looking at two Solas that in Latin means Sola Fide, which means faith alone. And we looked at Sola Christus in Christ alone. So, it’s this idea that we are saved by faith alone. And it’s not faith in faith. It’s not faith that God is good. It’s not even faith that heaven is real and all dogs go to heaven. It’s faith in Christ and what Jesus has done in our behalf. So that’s kind of the first two solas we looked at.

THROUGH FAITH ALONE
IN CHRIST ALONE
SOLA GRATIA

Today. We’re going to look at a sola that goes right in front of that sentence there Sola Gratia that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. And Christ alone if you look at it. So in Christ alone is the work of Jesus.

WE ARE SAVED
BY GRACE ALONE
THROUGH FAITH ALONE IN CHRIST ALONE

Faith alone is kind of what we bring to this. We have faith and then sola gratia is what God does. It’s God’s the father’s gift to us. And this idea, when I say that it just changed people’s lives and reformed the world, it did, but I’m understating it. And this week I was reading and I found this quote by an author named Robert Capone, and I think this is perfect of why we’re talking about this and why grace matters so much. And he writes that the reformation was a time in history when men went blind staggering drunk because they had discovered in the dusty basement of late Medievalism a whole cellar full of 1500 year old, 200 proof grace bottle after bottle of pure distilled scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single handedly the word of the gospel after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your own bootstraps as all those centuries suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they even started.

And grace has to be drunk straight, no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale, neither goodness nor badness, not the flowers in the bloom of the spring spiritually could be allowed to enter into that case. I love that word picture like this idea that grace so transformed people that they staggered after an encounter with it. And if you remember, and we talked about this, that the Bible up to this point was only written in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, these original languages. And so nobody really could read it for themselves. The priest had to read it and then disseminate that knowledge to the people. And during the reformation, the Bible became accessible in common language and that’s when grace really took off and just began to take hold of people’s hearts. And it’s all throughout scripture, but some of the most common or the most popular verses are the ones we just heard from Ephesians two.

 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God
Ephesians 2

We’ll look at it again, here it is by say it grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not from yourselves, it’s the gift of God. Or in Romans 3 23, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Romans 3

I like this one from second Corinthians eight for that “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake, he became poor so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty, you might become rich.
2 Corinthians 8

And all of this is this picture of grace and it sent people in late modalism of the 15 hundreds during the reprimand, it sent them staggering because it was so counterintuitive. It was so against the grain of what they had been brought up to believe. We hear that and I don’t think we have that same reaction.

GRACE DEFINED
I think we’re like, yeah, okay. It’s nice. And I think part of the reason that’s the case is that we kind of yawn when we read this is that we have a different idea of this word grace, that it’s become watered down over centuries from overuse. We use the word grace all the time. We’re always going to the top shelf for words. And grace is this word that we started using just too much and it watered down the original meaning we talk about somebody is a gracious host or somebody ages gracefully, meaning that they like you guys, you all look younger than you actually are. Or somebody has grace under pressure, meaning that the world’s going crazy around them, chaotic around them, but they’re calm, cool and collected. Or that grace is like if royalty entered, we’d be like, hello your grace. We’d want to flatter them with our words or even that word gratia that we heard like the etymology of it. We use gratia all the time. If you are leaving a tip, it’s sometimes called a gratuity. And some places take the liberty of calculating how much your gratuity should be just in case you are ungrateful.

And think about it though, based on how well that person performs, how well the waiter does is how big your gratuity is. I mean that’s tarnishing our idea of grace. Or if somebody does something really well and performs really well, we congratulate them and gratia is in there and we congratulate them. We give them grace for what they achieved and accomplished. Or then if somebody has a scandal, they fall from grace and they become an ingrate or a disgrace and there is now shame associated with them. If this happens in government and you’re outside of the protection of the government, you’re a persona non grata. You are outside of grace. And we’ve used this word grace so much so gratuitously that it’s lost its meaning. And so what I would like to do is to talk about what the Parthenon used to look alike before it eroded, right?

DEFINING GRACE
I’d like to restore the original glory of this word grace so that it can have its way with us this morning. And when people ask me, what does grace mean?

JUSTICE IS RECEIVING THE BAD YOU DO DESERVE

Well, they don’t really ask me that, but when I try to explain what grace is to people, I usually back up by starting with this word justice. And I did this a couple of years ago, but if you’ve not been here in a couple of years, you haven’t heard this before. So justice is receiving what you do deserve. Okay? So justice can be a good thing or a bad thing. If you bump into somebody else’s car, justice is levied against you. And now you, because we are in a just system, have to pay that person’s fender bender fee or whatever to pay the hat ticket in the body shop. And that’s a bad thing until you are the one who gets t-boned or whatever, and then someone else is paying for the damage they did.

That’s justice. You’re getting or someone is getting what they deserve. And justice is good. We have a justice system. Justice makes society go around, okay?

MERCY IS NOT RECEIVING THE BAD YOU DO DESERVE

Mercy is not receiving the bad you do deserve. So we throw ourselves at the mercy of the courts, forgive me, pardon me, like wipe the slate clean. That’s mercy. It’s not receiving the bad you do deserve. And that’s a really good thing. On a strict technical sense, you are forgiven by God, by mercy. Mercy is why God forgives you.

GRACE IS RECEIVING THE GOOD YOU DON’T DESERVE

Grace is not forgiveness on just a pure raw, in a strict definition of the word Mercy’s. Job, grace is receiving the good you don’t deserve. Grace is a surprise. It’s a gift. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve this thing. It comes out of the blue and we would say, we don’t deserve any of the good gifts that God has given us. You don’t deserve the breath in your lungs that you don’t deserve the roof over your head. You don’t deserve your loved ones, you don’t

Deserve your intellect. You don’t deserve the job that your intellect allowed you to achieve. All of that is a gift from God that he is graciously bestowed

Upon you. That is God’s grace. And we would say it’s God’s grace that he gave his son Jesus. And it’s by God’s grace that Jesus came and lived among us and he died our death in our place, that we might live his life and his place and he gives us life. That’s grace. He gives us the riches of heaven. That’s grace, grace, grace, grace again and again. And with that definition, now we’re like beginning to make headway into letting this thing wreck us and ruin us and make us staggering drunk. But we’ve got to address a couple other things.

GENERALLY GOOD
We look at that and it starts to rub us wrong because of the word at the end there, the word deserve. We are a culture built on deservedness. And for the good things in your life you believe to your core, you deserve them. I worked hard for my home. I worked hard for these relationships. I deserve them in a sense he’d be right. But the thing about deservedness is first of all, it starts with this premise that’s all wrong. We look around and we think we’re generally good people. You look around at the people in your life, you’re like, I’m generally good. I’m I’m average or maybe just a bit above average. I’m generally good. And in this room I would say you are generally good people and we all know bad people, people who are no good and they’re the ones in jail, but we’re not in jail. We’ve paid our taxes. So we’re generally good people and I would agree compared to other people, but we’re not compared to other people when we’re talking about heaven and God, who dwells in unapproachable, light, blinding, brilliant holiness. If he’s the standard, if the perfection of heaven is where we want to be someday and that’s the standard, we’re in trouble because we are a far, far cry from. Well, God is.

And if the standard is each other and we’re generally good compared to other people, then grace is not amazing. It’s generally good grace. But grace is only amazing when you realize you are a wretch like me compared to God. We aren’t wandering, we’re lost, we aren’t nearsighted, we’re blind. And only people who recognize that are able to hear the sweet, sweet sound of amazing grace. And so there’s this deservedness that we’ve got to deal with that’s really hard for us. And it’s first recognizing who God is.

MERITOCRACY
But then we have to also deal with the way our society works. We are a world built on this idea of merit meritocracy. You get out of it what you put into it, only the strong survive, the survival of the fittest dog eat dog world built on accomplishments, bigger, faster, better, stronger. That’s who wins the trophy. That’s who wins the girl, that’s who wins the promotion, the person who wins achievements is everywhere. It’s all around us. And Grace just runs against our sensibilities. It doesn’t make sense. Grace is like the worst singer winning American idol. Grace is Betty White winning American ninja warrior, right? Grace is Quasimodo winning. America’s got talent.

It’s not fair, it’s unjust. And meritocracy is everywhere. My friends now, we rate movies on Rotten Tomatoes, we rate restaurants on Yelp, we rate hotels on TripAdvisor. And we’re like, how good did they do? And then we leave a review and stars. And by the way, just so you know, if you Google churches in Battle Creek and you’re looking for a church, Google will show you the churches with the most Google reviews. So, when we beg you to leave a review for St. Mark, please leave a review, but be gracious, very gracious. If we get a bunch of one-stars, we’re in trouble right now. There’s only 49 of you have ever reviewed Saint Mark. And it matters. It matters.

I used to take Ubers all the time in St. Louis. We were close to downtown in the city there. And so sometimes it’s hard to find parking and it’s just easier to get a ride and get dropped off. So I would use Uber all the time and I would use Uber. And then when you get done, it asks you to review the driver. If you’ve ever taken a cab or an Uber nowadays, you have to review the driver when you’re done. And I’d be like, okay, well let’s see. They used their blinker, they were friendly. That’s a four. If I’ll give ’em a five, I’m feeling good about myself today. And then if they were cutting off traffic and really rude, then leave a one star review, I’ll show them. And so I’d leave these reviews. And it wasn’t until a couple years of using Uber that I learned that it’s not just the riders who review the drivers.

The drivers also review the riders. And I was like, oh, crap. So I’m thinking back and I grabbed my and I looked up my profile and I was reviewed of 4.86 me. Who wouldn’t like me? I’m so friendly all the time. I’m always leaving. Who dared not give me five stars? And so what I started doing after that is I started being really conversational in the car and asking them about them and how did they get into this and what are their goals in life and counseling them in their marriages and then leaving giant tips at the end because I wanted to boost my score. I don’t want to tell you what it was before. That’s a

Screenshot from today. It was lower than that. And I just realized how much merit is in me and how much in me. I still want to deserve something. And this idea of grace is so foreign.

CHAPEL
So out there on Wednesday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Tuesday of this week, what day was chapel? Wednesday. On Wednesday of this week, I was doing chapel with the kids and I love it. We have a school. And so I get to do chapel for 2, 3, 4, 5 year olds. And it’s awesome to take these. You can get too heady sometimes and to remind yourself of the simplicity of the faith. And so I love doing chapel with kids and it would just so happens we were talking about grace and it was the story of Jonah, which I forget every time I tell the story to kids that it’s kind of scary. And I’m telling them how a big fish swallowed Jonah.

And they’re like, but I’m telling the story. And then I was like, but God was giving Jonah a second chance. That’s called grace. Can you guys say grace? They did better than you did at that. So I said, can you say grace?

Response: Grace

Pastor Chris Paavola: And they all said yes. See, there you go. And they’re sitting there and I said, so Grace is like this guys. Grace is like you breaks, you’re playing with somebody and one of your friends breaks your toy, but Grace gives them a second chance and plays with him again the next day and they’re kind of furring their eyebrows a little bit. And I was like, okay. So it’s like this. It is like you’re playing with a friend and they say something mean to you, but the next day you decide to play with them again because you show them grace and grace gives second chances and they like you could see.

And I’m like, okay, it’s like this. It’s like if you’re playing with a friend and they hit you, and the more I’m describing grace, the less they want it in their life. So I was like, okay. And I had this moment where I pivoted because I realized they weren’t getting it and it just sounded terrible. Who wants grace? And I said, okay, okay, okay. But let’s imagine you are the one who breaks the toy. Let’s imagine you are the one who says something mean. Let’s imagine you are the one who hits your friend and then tomorrow they give you another chance. That’s why grace is so amazing. And it’s true, it’s scandalous, it’s not fair, it’s unjust, it doesn’t make sense until you’re the one who needs to receive it. Then it reforms your heart.

And that’s why the apostle Paul calls himself the chief of sinners, Martin Luther who said, no good dwells in me. St. Francis of Assisi said, I’m the worst person on the planet. They weren’t looking at themselves, they were looking at God. And when they looked at God, they realized how much God had given them and it changed their lives. That’s the power of grace. And that’s what people saw in Jesus. Jesus steps on the scene. The apostle John called him full of grace and truth. He’s grace upon grace in flesh. It’s beautiful. And Jesus, as he walked among us, he showed grace again and again and it was intoxicating, it was contagious, it was infectious. He would welcome tax collectors and have dinner with them as he sat with religious leaders.

He would bless Roman centurions who conquered Israel, and he would bless them anyway. He would bless gentile lepers and heal them. And when people encountered his grace, it changed them. Prostitutes would give away their possessions. Wealthy, wealthy, wealthy people would give away all their money because they encountered grace. And Jesus would tell stories about grace because our heavenly Father is gracious to us, grace. We are saved by God’s grace to us. And he would tell stories of like a father who would welcome a wayward son and he would run out to greet him. And even though his son had squandered all of his inheritance, the father would throw a lavish party no questions asked because that’s what grace does. Or he told the story of a wealthy landowner who hired all these people to work in his vineyards. And then he hired somebody in the last hour of the day. And at the end of the day, he gave that person a full day’s wages. And the people who worked all day said, Hey, it’s not fair. And he says, are you angry because I am good. That’s grace.

It’s so rare in our world. All the isms out there are so intolerant of the other side. And even if you look at world religions, one of the things that unites all world religions is this idea of earning back God’s favor. Buddhism has the sevenfold path to achieve a enlightenment. Hinduism has a caste system and karma, Islam has codes of laws to earn God’s favor. Even like in modern times, Mormonism says, you are saved after all you can do, but not Jesus. Jesus says, come receive my father’s inheritance. Scripture tells us we are saved by grace, God’s grace alone through our faith alone in Christ’s work alone. That’s the power of the reformation. I would love for us to be people of grace because honestly, once you encounter grace and you interact with it, how can you be unchanged by it? It ruins you. It completely reforms your heart. How can you encounter something so lavish, so generous, and then respond with stinginess? Really?

And if you just a little experiment, ask some non-Christian friends what they think of Christians to describe them, what words would you use to describe them? You’ll hear words like ungrateful, judgmental, hypocritical, intolerant. I highly doubt you’ll hear the word gracious. And that’s the thing about grace, guys. It’s not enough to feel grace in your heart. Grace can only be shown who would describe you as gracious. And we have a vision statement. One of our six vision statements is to be a church known for exceptional generosity. Why? Because grace can only be expressed. Who in your just right now, name one person in your life who would describe you as gracious? Who would it be? And that’s what grace does to you, is you have to show it. You want to show it. And Grace says, here, let’s play again. Even though you broke my toy yesterday, the world like a merit system would ignore the neighbor who has a yard sign for the person you didn’t vote for. Grace would rake their yard.

I want us to be a people of grace. And when Martin Luther discovered this grace lying fallow in the pages of scripture, it just liberated him. And we’ve kind of told the story, and I need to kind of continue the story a little bit to set up next week.

THE PAPAL BULL
But after Martin Luther nailed the 95 thesis on the door of this church in Wittenberg, Germany, he nailed the 95 these, the 95 complaints against the Catholic church on the door in 1517. And when he did those 95 theses really could be summarized as so La gratia, in Sofie, in Solis Christus. We were saved by grace alone of faith alone and Christ alone that would summarize the 95 these. And what happened next is some people they read this and then some people were like, these are really interesting ideas. And Luther’s not the first one to talk about this.

People who had discovered it before, like a guy named with a last name Huss, Johan Huss, a few years before Luther talked about it and laid complaints against Rome, but he was burned at the stake for daring to defy Rome, right? But what was different about Luther is after he was born at the right place, right time, because after he nailed that up there, some people took his ideas and they started circulating it through the invention of this thing that happened at the same time called the Gutenberg press. It’s the printing machine. So, they were able to take Luther’s letters, Luther’s pamphlets, Luther’s booklets, copy them and then circulate them, make more copies, and then circulate them all throughout Europe. And that’s why Luther caught on. God uses technology all the time. That’s another sermon for another time. So these writings start circulating all through Europe and people are just coming alive with it. And it gets all the way to Rome to this guy named Pope Leo the 10th. He was a not good person.

The Popes had really deviated and become something else. And Pope Leo got ahold of Luther’s writings and assert a bunch of cardinals and they denounced it. And they wrote a response, kind of a rebuttal of 41 things that they disagreed with in Luther’s writings. And then he took his signet ring like they rolled it up. He took his signet ring and wax. He would put his seal on the scroll to seal it. That’s the Latin word for seal or signe is bull. So it was the papal bowl that was then sent back to Luther. And so the papal bowl was sent to Luther, and Luther received it, and inside it said that he was going to be excommunicated from the church. If he did not recant of denounce this heresy that he was promoting and burn all of his books, he would be excommunicated. Excommunication means that you are outside of the grace of God.

And this infuriated Luther, this infuriated him. Who are you to tell me that I’m outside the grace of God when he tells me I’m in his grace by faith in Christ, who are you to be this gatekeeper of grace? And so he took the pap bull and he says, you want to burn my books? You want to burn me? I’m going to burn this in this big public demonstration. He burned the papal bull in front of everybody in 1520 in front of hundreds of people, and word got back to Rome and he was brought up on charges to appear as a trial in front of the emperor, Charles Cardinal Keratan and a bunch of other high ranking Roman officials for excommunication. And that’s what we’re going to talk about next week. It’s a wild story full of twists and turns, intrigue and espionage. It is crazy and we’ll talk about that next week. But today we just need to remember and just focus on grace. And as I’ve been talking about it, I think two things happen in this room. One, we start thinking about God’s grace and recognizing God’s grace to us, and that means something different to each one of us. Have we received it or haven’t received it or having received it? And then also I think we start thinking about who needs grace in our lives? Who could we show grace towards so that we are a people of grace?

So, I think we could talk about it, but it’s far more effective if we pray about it. So let’s pray.

PRAYER
Heavenly Father, we confess this idea of grace is way, way bigger than we imagine, and we confess to you right now that we think we’re generally good people, that we’re deserving of your grace to us. And so God, give us a higher and better and bigger picture of who you are, who Christ is, that we may have a right understanding of who we are and a right understanding of how amazing grace is towards us. And God, as people of grace, we receive this and I want to turn this into a work that we do, but it just, the conversation naturally goes there to our response to this grace.

Give us a bigger and better and clearer picture of grace until it motivates us to action to be people of grace to those who are unloved, unaccepted. Maybe it’s raking leaves of that neighbor. Maybe it’s calling up the estranged loved one. Whatever it is, God, help us to be a people of grace. What does that mean to each one of us? Would you show us right now in this moment, Lord and God, if there’s anyone in this room who’s outside of your grace because they’ve never believed in their heart or confess that that lives Jesus Christ is Lord, I pray that you would give them the gift of faith this day, that they may know your amazing grace. And we pray now the prayer your son taught us to pray, that’s dripping with grace in every lion, as we say together, our father who arts in heaven, Hollywood, be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.