Grace All the Way

There is a damaging idea floating around that says, "God saved you, now what are you going to do for him?" This is a recipe for failure. If you come to the Christian life believing you can do anything for God in your own strength or repay him on any level, you fall back to the self-dependent spiritual death from which Jesus saved you.

Ephesians 2 frees us from this lie by showing that the Christian life is completely fueled by God's grace. The chapter is filled with the high-octane gospel of grace for both our justification and also our sanctification. It begins with how believers were dead in their sins, then moves to how God loved us and rescued us from this death by his grace, bringing salvation to all in Christ, uniting Jews and Gentiles as one people in whom the Spirit of God dwells. The first half of the chapter focuses on God's rescue operation, which delivered us from our sin and God's wrath, and ends with the verse 10, which centers on how God's deliverance means we are created anew for lives of righteousness. As Peter O'Brien notes, Paul has already described salvation as "a resurrection from the dead, a liberation from slavery, and a rescue from condemnation"; he moves now to the idea of a new creation.

Ephesians 2:4-5 proclaims Gods grace clearly: "God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ---by grace have you been saved." Regeneration takes place when the spiritual dead come alive in Christ. Dead people do not cooperate with grace. Without regeneration, there is no possibility of faith. Paul got this from Jesus, who told Nicodemus: "Unless a man is born again first, he cannot possibly see or enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:3).

The theme of Ephesians 2:8-9 is clear: grace. This theme was already mentioned in Ephesians 2:5, but as Tet-Lim Yee points out, what was then more of an "undercurrent" now becomes the main point. We are saved by grace, not anything we have done. The passage has often been used to support the idea that justification before God is by grace alone, and not anything we do. And for good reason: the verses strike with great emphasis the note of salvation as a complete "gift of God." We have done nothing to bring it about that could lead us to boast. And yet it is nearly impossible not to boast in the radical love of God when we grasp this reality.  Continue at Justin Holcomb