“What is true faith? True faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in Scripture; it is also a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.”
“But I grew up in a tax paying family.” I want you to imagine that line of defense in a tax evasion case; “but I grew up in a tax paying family.” This man hasn’t paid taxes for years and yet he tells the judge, ‘Your honor, my parents faithfully paid taxes. I grew up surrounded by taxpayers. I remember my dad showing me his check to the IRS every year; he would say, “look at this son. This goes to support this great nation. This builds the roads. This pays the brave men and women who keep us safe. Look at this check, my son. It is a privilege to support this great land.” Your honor, I come from a long line of taxpayers. You have no right to question my loyalty to this great land or its laws.’
Now none of that would mean anything to the judge. That man can talk all he wants about growing up in a taxpaying home. He can talk all he wants about his parents’ regular tax payments. The judge will be dumbfounded and simply ask, ‘what does all this have to do with you? Your parents’ tax-paying cannot save you. You must pay taxes.’
I fear that hypothetical situation isn’t all that hypothetical when it comes to faith. I fear that there will be plenty of people saying, ‘but I grew up in a Christian family. My parents regularly took me to church. They were faithful people. I believe in doing good just as much as the next man. You have no right to question my faith.’ God will say what that judge said, ‘what does all of this with you? Your parents’ faith cannot save you. You must be born again.’
Perhaps you have never owned faith for yourself. If you grew up in a Christian family, I’m speaking particularly to you here. You might be thinking, ‘what are you serious? I’m here at the evening worship service.’ There are plenty of people who keep religious forms for any number of reasons and many for their whole lives, who have never been born again. They have never owned the faith for themselves; I don’t want you to be one of them. You must own the grace of God for yourself. That is the claim of this sermon: you must own the grace of God for yourself.
We will see this in three points. First: owning the gifts of grace. Second: the gifts of grace. Third: the grace of the gifts.
First: owning the gifts of grace. Last week we considered three descriptions of coming to faith. We saw that coming to faith is like a boy overcoming a girl’s hostility by way of love. God must overcome our innate hostility to Him by way of love. We saw that coming to faith is like the creation of something out of nothing. The building blocks of faith are not native to the human heart but must be put within us by the Holy Spirit. We saw that coming to faith is like a scientist changing her mind based on the evidence. There is evidence that must be considered in coming to faith and that evidence is the gospel.
Today we add another description: coming to faith is like receiving a gift. This language of gift comes from the Catechism, “faith is a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.”
Now this is an excellent time of the year to talk about receiving gifts because I imagine that most of us are about to enjoy this experience. I imagine that we are all quite skilled at receiving gifts. We are all quite skilled at it because it isn’t all that hard. You receive the gift; you open it; it is yours. Now coming to faith is that easy. You simply receive. Jesus’ friend John describes coming to faith as an act of reception; “to all who did receive [Jesus], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” When Jesus gave the Holy Spirit to the disciples, he only told them to receive; ‘he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”’ Jesus told us all that, “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
You come to faith by receiving the grace that has been offered. If you are a child, my guess is that you’ve got more than enough practice over the years with opening presents to know exactly how to come to faith. You receive the gift of grace. You open it. It is yours.
It is we who complicate it. We complicate coming to faith by our attempts to earn salvation. Paul confronted the Galatians on this matter. He asked, “I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard?” The Galatians were trying to earn their salvation and Paul told them that they were making it too complicated. They need only receive.
The human heart balks at simply receiving because the human heart is proud. Given the choice, most men and women would rather earn their salvation by accomplishing the twelve labors of Hercules than simply receive it as a gift. We want to contribute something to our salvation, and it is humbling to realize that we can contribute nothing. It is so humbling that some individuals will never simply receive.
CS Lewis portrayed this pride well in his parable of the afterlife. In this scene, we see two men, one in heaven and the other simply visiting heaven from hell. The one who is visiting from hell thinks that he has the right to be in heaven. He tells the other, ‘“I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.” “Then do,” the other man replies. “[Do] at once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought…” “I don’t want charity,” said the first man. “I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago, and you can tell them I said so.” The other shook his head. “You can never do it like that,” he said.’ Salvation is by grace. It is bleeding charity and if you won’t accept charity, you won’t accept salvation.
To be saved, you must receive salvation for yourself. As the Catechism says, “God has freely granted, not only to others but to me too, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation.” It is you who needs the bleeding charity. It is you who needs forgiveness of sins. It is you who needs eternal righteousness. It is you who needs to be saved. Christ came to save sinners and you are a sinner. If you cannot own up to that, you haven’t begun to be a Christian and you are still in your sins. It makes no difference that your parents are Christians. It makes no difference that your grandfather has been an elder. It is you who must be born again.
You must own this gift of grace for yourself. The Ethiopian in Acts 8 did. Luke tells us that, Philip ‘told him the good news about Jesus. As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the [Ethiopian] said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?”’ That man owned grace for himself and he knew it. “What is to stand in the way of me being baptized?” You can own grace for yourself and know it.
Perhaps you don’t really believe that. Charles Spurgeon didn’t for a time. He wrote, ‘I could not believe that it was possible that my sins could be forgiven. I do not know why, but I seemed to be the odd person in the world. When the catalogue was made out, it appeared to me that, for some reason, I must have been left out. If God had saved me, and not the world, I should have wondered indeed; but if He had saved all the world except me, that would have seemed to me to be but right. And now, being saved by grace, I cannot help saying, “I am indeed a brand plucked out of the fire!”’
You can own this grace for yourself and you must. The Bible is full of examples of people who did not own God’s grace for themselves. Take the Exodus generation for example. They were part of the people of God the way that you might be part of a church, but they never owned the faith for themselves. Of them the author Hebrews writes, “the message they heard was of no value to them, because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed.” Those men and women passed through the Red Sea; they hear God speak at Sinai; they drank water from the rock and ate manna from the hand of God, and yet they never owned faith for themselves. It did them no good in the end to be part of Israel. As Paul put it, “not all those who are descended from Israel are truly Israel.” The same is true for the church, “not all who grew up in the church or who come to church are really the church.” There are plenty of people today living like those Israelites. They hear the word, they see the works, but it will prove of no value to them. They consider themselves Christians just as so many in the wilderness considered themselves the people of God, and yet they have never owned grace for themselves. The burden of this sermon is to save you from their number because that number is not saved. You must have faith.
If you have faith, you will receive the gifts of God. It is your sins that are forgiven. It is you who have become righteous. It is you who are saved. It is you who receive the gifts. We now turn to these gifts of grace. That is our second point: the gifts of grace. The Catechism lists three gifts of grace that are received by faith, “forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation.” These are not the only three that could be listed, but they are certainly worth our attention. They are worth our attention in the way a cherished present is worth a child’s attention on Christmas day. A child will not only open a cherished present on Christmas Day. He will play with it. She will try it on. She will turn it over in her hands. He will make it his own because it is his own. The same is true for the Christian with these gifts of grace.
The first of these gifts is the forgiveness of sins. Now we are talking about your sins here. The blood of Christ doesn’t merely forgive sins in general; it forgives specific sins and you are a sinner who sins specific sins. These sins can be forgiven. If you have faith in Christ, this gift of forgiveness of which Hebrews 9:14 speaks is yours, “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” Try that on. Turn that over in your hands. Make that your own if it is your own.
There are a good number of people both inside and outside the church who do not believe that their sins can be forgiven. Those who remain in the church tend to hope that their churchgoing will somehow bring forgiveness. Those who remain outside the church tend to despair that their sins could ever be forgiven. Either way, their sins haunt them. Sin is a reality and it remains operant until it is forgiven. That is a fact.
People talk about Christian guilt or Catholic guilt or Lutheran guilt and there are certainly crass and gross understandings of guilt in the church, but guilt isn’t a Christian thing. Guilt is a human thing. People are guilty and on various levels they know it. They are guilty and afraid that they cannot be forgiven. They are afraid to settle this matter with God, but God says, “Come now, let us settle the matter. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”
Forgiveness of sins is possible, but it is possible only by the blood of Christ. You will find no forgiveness outside of Calvary. The cross is God’s means, and only means, of forgiveness. “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.”
Now some people balk at the fact that the cross is the only means of forgiveness. They consider this exclusive form of forgiveness to be rather stingy on God’s part. If you find yourself among their number, I urge you to consider whether you would prefer a dozen ineffectual solutions to one certain solution. Imagine that you are at the dentist with an abscessed tooth. The pain is tremendous. The dentist tells you that there are thirteen options to deal with your tooth. Twelve of them will prove ineffectual and one will certainly work. You wouldn’t consider her offer of thirteen options generous. You would consider it foolish. You only want to know about the one option that will certainly work. God would not be generous to offer to forgive sins in thirteen ways if twelve of them were as inefficient as everything other than the blood of Christ will always be. “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
The second gift of grace the Catechism mentions is eternal righteousness. By nature, man is not righteous, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” This is why man is constantly trying to justify himself. The Christian is the only man who has stopped trying to justify himself because he is the only man who has been made righteous. He isn’t righteous because he has never sinned; he is righteous because he has been justified by grace; “for 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.”
Man’s problem is that, by virtue of who he is as a sinner, he is not righteous but yet he must become righteous. The only way he can become righteous is by way of faith in Christ crucified. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Now if you have faith in Christ crucified, the righteousness that you need is yours. The gift is yours. Try it on. You are one of those pictured in Revelation as wearing a white robe which you have washed in the blood of the lamb. Wear that robe. It is yours whether you feel worthy of it or not.
You have this righteousness, which means you can be assured of your vindication at the final judgment. The born-again man need not fear the final judgment. He can be like Peter knowing that he “will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Now this assurance might sound boastful to some of you for reasons of denominational background, temperament, or any number of variables. If you find assurance boastful, ask yourself if it would be boastful for your grandchild to play with the toy that you will give him for Christmas as if it were his. Ask yourself it would be boastful for your friend to use the gift card you will give her to Starbucks as if it belonged to her. You wouldn’t find that boastful; rather you would be frustrated if your loved ones did not treat your gifts as if they were theirs. God is not pleased when His gifts go unowned. If you have faith in Christ, this gift of righteousness is yours. Own it.
So we’ve opened the gifts of forgiveness and righteousness. There is one more sitting under the tree and that is the gift of salvation. “God has freely granted, not only to others but to me too, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation.”
Now salvation is a package gift. It is like opening up a doll house at Christmas and finding dolls already inside. Salvation is a gift with other gifts inside. Theologians refer to these gifts within the gift as the order of salvation. Our own tradition sees salvation as made up of predestination, calling, regeneration, faith, repentance, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification. When you open salvation, all of those are waiting within salvation. Open each of them. Study each of them: predestination, calling, regeneration, faith, repentance, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification.
Now all of this can be yours. You can’t earn any of it. You can only receive it. We see that in our final point: the grace of the gifts.
You don’t buy your own gifts. Gifts are, by definition, given to you. You cannot earn God’s gift of forgiveness. You cannot earn God’s gift of righteousness. You cannot earn God’s gift of salvation. You can only receive such gifts. As the Catechism states, “These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.”
Now no man boasts that he was counted worthy to receive a gift. He might boast that he was counted worthy to receive a promotion. He might boast that he was counted worthy to receive a bonus, but no man boasts that the was counted worthy to receive a gift. Try to imagine a man boasting that he was counted worthy to be forgiven. ‘I must be pretty special to have my sins forgiven.’ Anyone with any spiritual sense knows that forgiveness has nothing to do with the merits of the forgiven; it has to do with the mercy of the forgiver. It is a gift. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.”
As to the second gift of eternal righteousness, it isn’t that hard to imagine a man claiming to be righteous on his own. We met such a man earlier, “I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago, and you can tell [the management here is heaven] I said so.”
From a certain angle, Paul described himself as such, “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But,” he continued, “whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.” Paul recognized that righteousness could only be a gift. It isn’t hard to imagine a man who claimed to be righteous on his own, but a man who claims to righteous on his own is most certainly not righteous. Righteousness can only be received. Perhaps you need to consider if you have received it.
As to the third gift, the gift of salvation, Jonathan Edwards was right to say, “you contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.” Boasting that you are saved has nothing to do with Christianity. “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith,” wrote Paul, “and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Forgiveness is a gift. Righteousness is a gift. Salvation is a gift. Your willingness to receive these gifts is itself a gift. When Peter wrote to Christians, he called, them those who “have received a faith as precious as ours.” You receive even faith as a gift. Even your willingness to receive is a gift. He obviously wants to give gifts. He obviously wants you to open them.
Now if you haven’t done so, please consider why. Perhaps you are waiting for something. Stop. You are behaving like a child who has been offered a gift and waits for some sort of signal to receive it. Or perhaps you are refusing to receive the gift because your pride is standing in the way. You don’t want to receive grace as a gift. My friend, that is the only way you can receive it.
You must receive it. It will do you no good to have grown up in a Christian family if you haven’t received Christ. It will do you no saving good to learn about Christ if you haven’t received Christ. You can’t catch the faith. You need to own it for yourself, and it is as easy as receiving a gift. You will have plenty of opportunities to practice receiving gifts in the coming weeks, but none of those gifts will do for you what the gift of grace can do. It can forgive your sins. It can make you righteous. It can save you. Receive grace from the wounded hands of Christ. Try this grace on. Make it your own. Amen.