Cheap Grace

 

Cheap Grace

 

 

This is the third time in four or five years that I have preached this series of sermons on spiritual warfare here at Ashwood Meadows. I make no apology for the repetition. Saint Peter tells us in his second letter: “Therefore, I will always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present with you. ¹³ I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder . . . .” (2 Peter 1:12-13)

And every year that I preach this series, even more evidence has accumulated just outside our front door – evidence of the deadly and ghastly spiritual warfare.

If you have listened to me over the last several years, you know I’ve spoken often about how abortion tears little babies apart in their mother’s womb – to the tune of 2300 dead babies every DAY in American abortion clinics. I’ve also spoken against the rampaging sexual immorality spewing from hell itself – whether same-sex unions or unmarried heterosexual fornication that is broadcast into our living rooms by the hour on our television sets.

 

Did you know what happened in Washington state two or three weeks ago? If you have minor-aged grandsons who live in that state and who want to be granddaughters, the State of Washington can send its agents to REMOVE the granddaughters if the parents do not consent to giving their child cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, or surgical mutilation that occurs when male genitalia are removed.

 

This month – April – the director of Boston Children’s Hospital said medical school students should learn transgender surgeries in their residency programs.

 

Let me repeat: that if your grandson wants to be your granddaughter, Washington state social serviced agents can remove your grandson from his home and HIDE him in a so-called safe house so the child can ‘transition’ to a girl.

                                                                                                                  

What we are witnessing in the realm of sexual morality are not insignificant hiccups in the nation’s life. They are monumental disasters for which God has ALWAYS destroyed every single nation in the history of humanity since Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden.

 

Every single nation. And America is well along that path to destruction – perhaps even to the point of no return.

 

Here is what God said of ancient Israel before the Babylonian catastrophe destroyed the nation: ¹⁵ The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent word to them again and again by His messengers, because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place; ¹⁶ but they continually mocked the messengers of God, despised His words and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people, until there was no remedy. ¹⁷ Therefore He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or infirm; He gave them all into his hand. (2 Chronicles 36:15-17)

 

My brothers and sisters, this is a very difficult sermon for me to preach. But it is an absolutely necessary sermon for me to preach and for you to hear. Spiritually dark days are rapidly descending across our land and over the Church. The eternally deadly spiritual battle is raging all around us, devouring our families and consuming our time and resources which, at this stage of our lives here at Ashwood, is growing more limited with each passing month.

 

We have no choice in the matter, if we hope to remain faithful to Christ. We MUST wage this war that Satan and his minions are now waging against us. But we MUST wage it according to the guidance God alone give us. That is why we will spend the next several weeks examining that guidance.

 

A few years ago I read a story about a pastor who received a call from a funeral home director. The man asked the pastor if he would please speak at the graveside of a young man who’d recently died. The director told the pastor, “You’re my last hope. All the other pastors I’ve called have declined."

 

When this minister asked why they’d declined, he was told that the deceased had died of HIV/AIDS.

 

When the pastor arrived at the funeral home, he discovered that the attendees were all men, and he realized many, if not all of them, were gay.

When he finished his words in the pouring rain at the gravesite, the men stayed and asked if he would read various Bible verses which they’d remembered from their childhood. Nearly two hours later, the men thanked him and said it was the first time they could hear Bible verses without a sermon of condemnation accompanying it.

 

I understood his point about story’s point about the pastor’s kindness in reading the men’s favorite childhood passages. But it appeared from the story that that is all the pastor did.

 

And THAT is the problem in a growing number of churches today. Clergy quote the happy verses and ignore the judgment verses. They give people false and damning hope by focusing exclusively on what people want to hear and not what they need to hear.

 

To do that is NOT an expression of Christ's love, who calls all men and women to repentance, to turn from their sins and live holy lives. What we do – what priests and bishops and teachers and other church leaders who do what this pastor did – what they do is help the sinner go happily on his or her way to an eternal hell.  That is certainly one reason the Holy Spirit impelled Paul to write these words to young and timid Timothy:

 

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. (2 Timothy 4)

The Lord Jesus warns us that the path that leads to life is a very narrow one, and consequently, only a few find it. But the road that leads to an eternal hell is a broad one – and lots of people are on that road.

 

Part of the reason so many travel that broad road is that they hear from pulpits and read in so-called Christian books what is known as cheap grace. Cheap grace is based on a cross-less Christianity, a Christianity exclusively focused on God’s love and rarely if ever on His multiple warnings and examples of His justice and His judgement.

At the end of the 19th century, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army warned of cheap grace this way: “The chief dangers which will confront the coming [20^th] century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.”

Decades later, the Holy Spirit again warned the church – in this case the church in Europe – about cheap grace. This time He spoke through Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some of you might know the name of this great man of God, Bonhoeffer was a member of the Confessing Church of Nazi Germany. He and other pastors of the confessing church stood openly – for as long as they could – against the evil that was sweeping Nazi Europe under the guidance of Adolf Hitler and his minions from hell. Bonhoeffer eventually died on the gallows in the Flossenburg concentration camp – one month before the camp was liberated by the Allies.

In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer referred to 'cheap grace this way: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

 

I will add, cheap grace is when people call Jesus their savior, but they do not follow Jesus as their Lord of life and lifestyle. Cheap grace is that grace which costs us little, or nothing. It allows us to go to church, to sing, to read, to kneel, to stand, to receive Holy Communion – but there remains no change of heart, no inner conviction by the Holy Spirit, a demand of conscience toward full and undiluted obedience to the message of the Scriptures.

Cheap grace tells us that as long as we make a profession of faith, we are saved. Yet God directed Paul to write these words, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Romans 6:1-2)

 

Salvation through the grace of God is so much more than simply mouthing the words “Jesus is Lord.” It is so much more than being baptized. It is so much more than praying the Sinner’s Prayer or signing a book or walking an aisle.

 

We are saved by a living and active faith that manifests itself in repentance, obedience, and love for God and our neighbor. Here is what the apostle James tells us in the 2nd chapter of his epistle: What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead . . . A moment later he adds: Even the demons believe—and shudder! Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?”

 

The apostle goes on to illustrate his point by speaking of Abraham’s faith as manifested in his willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on that altar. He then talks about Rahab the harlot in the story of Joshua and Jericho – Rahab who was saved by her works – a manifestation of her faith – when she saved the spies.

 

James then says with sober finality the words we must never deemphasize: (verse 26) “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.”

 

I do not mean at all to cast aside the necessity of faith. By grace are ye saved through FAITH – Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:8. But he also is quick to add in verse 10: For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus FOR good works which God has prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

 

And the Lord Jesus said, “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” And there is good reason the apostle Paul, in his letter to Titus, refers to good works no less than six times in those three short chapters.

 

Remember too, holiness itself is a manifestation of our faith and obedience to God. Living a life of holiness is a work to imitate Jesus Christ – and if anyone doesn’t think THAT is a work – to imitate Christ, then they’ve never tried it. Holiness means putting on Christ, living as Christ – in growing obedience to the Father’s commandments.

 

That’s why the Lord Jesus told us: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words.” (John 14:23-24) 

 

And then these words in 1 John 2:3-4 “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”

 

In fact, this is one of the verses I often quote to people who excuse themselves from being a Christian because of hypocritical church-goers. Yes, I tell them, such hypocrites are liars who may fool themselves, but they do not fool the Great Judge. Furthermore, such hypocrites in the pew and in the pulpit are nothing less than Satan’s Fifth Column in the ranks of the Church.

 

For those of you who do not know about fifth columns, a fifth column is a group of people within a larger group and who undermine the larger group from within. The activities of a fifth column are often secretive, clandestine, and involve in sabotage and disinformation with the ultimate goal of destroying the larger group.

 

Satan’s Fifth Column dates back easily to the first century. St. Paul talked about them in his second letter to the church at Corinth: 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds.

 

God help us – you and me here today – to not fall prey to the fifth columns in our political and educational structures – and even in some of our churches!  Like pastors and priests and other church leaders who tell people what they want to hear and not what they NEED to hear. Who walk arm in arm with those who persist in living in sin and calling it normal, who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and bitter for sweet.

 

As I prepared this message, I thought of an incident I had years ago with a spider’s web. I didn’t see the web until I nearly ran into it. The thing was virtually invisible. If sunlight hadn’t suddenly glistened off its strands, I would have walked right into it. So, there I stood, inches from the biggest, ugliest, hairiest spider I’d ever seen. I was glad I wasn’t a hapless bug flitting through the air, totally clueless about the spider’s trap in front of me.

 

But like a spider’s web, in the world of the supernatural, Satan’s subtleties are often invisible to the natural eye – which is why it’s so incredibly easy to get caught in his web. And most of the time we don’t even realize we’re in his web until he has devoured our health, wealth, homes, and families.

 

Sometimes even our lives.

 

There is no better way, there is no surer way, to avoid Satan’s web than to see the light of God’s word glisten off its strands as a warning: Danger! Don’t go any further.

That’s why the Lord Jesus, I am sure, said this during His Sermon on the Mount: (Matthew 7:24ff) “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock.  Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

Whether or not we obey the prophets and the historic exhortation of the Christian Church – each of which exhort us to become fluent with God’s word – Satan remains patiently waiting in his web. Problem is, we won’t see it unless God’s light glistens off the web.

So, what will we each do with this message? I hope at least five things:

 

1. Pray that the Holy Spirit will give to you a hunger to obey God in every nook and cranny and corner of your life. The grace of God that sent Jesus to pay the penalty our sins deserved was not cheap grace. That grace required of God an immeasurable cost. And our response to His grace must also cost US something – that being ever-growing obedience to His commandments, even and perhaps especially when we don’t want to obey.

 

2.  Be quick to repent and turn from your sins when the Holy Spirit gets your attention about something you have done or not done.

 

3. Determine again to faithfully and prayerfully read God’s word, to be single-minded in your pursuit of Christ and to seek godly and Christ-honoring teachers to answer your questions as you seek Him through His word.

 

4. Hide God’s word in your heart – even if it is a verse here and there. Hide it in your heart so you will know when the fifth columns all around us whisper their subtle lies in an attempt to sabotage your eternal soul.

 

5. And do not neglect the spiritual armor of God provides for our protection.

 

Listen, my brothers and sisters: As I said at the beginning of this message, spiritually dark days have fallen across our land and over the Church. That is why we will spend the next several weeks looking at that spiritual armor spoken of in Ephesians chapter six.

 

The deadly spiritual battle is all around us. It is DEVOURING our families. It is consuming our time and resources which, at this stage of our lives here at Ashwood, is growing more limited with each passing month.

 

We MUST wage this war that Satan and his minions are always waging against us. And we must wage it according to the guidance God alone give us. That is why we will spend the next several weeks examining that guidance.