IF GOD DOES SOMETHING BY GRACE, HE DOES IT PURELY BY GRACE. This will always be the most difficult truth for man to grasp. Man could not possibly have invented grace. If he could have, it would be present in one or more of the world’s religions, but it is not. It is remarkable by its absence. It had to come from the drawing board of Heaven.

"And if by grace,
then it is no longer of works;
otherwise grace is no longer grace.
But if it is of works,
it is no longer grace;
otherwise work is no longer work."
(Romans 11:6)

Paul is telling the Romans, and God is telling us that grace and works are antithetical as means of approach to God. In other words, we must either approach God on the basis of His grace alone or on the basis of our works alone. This verse controverts Galatianism, the attempt to mix law and grace. Gaiatians 5:1-4 makes plain that to step on to law-ground is to remove oneself from Grace-ground and to lose all benefit from Christ.

The root meaning of grace is "gift." It is the grace of God alone that makes it possible for God to give us eternal life freely--without cost. A gift is always something absolutely free to one party because fully paid for by another. The carnal mind will inevitably seek to temporize this truth. All of the world and most of the church will throw up its hands in horror at the thought that all that God requires in order that the sinner be saved is that the sinner trust what God has done at Calvary. Man will object that there is no merit in simply believing. Exactly! That is just the point! The moment faith is made meritorious it becomes a work and actually precludes grace. Man insists on doing something good to offset what he has done that is bad. But doing what we are supposed to do can never undo what we weren’t supposed to do. That’s why Christ died for us sinners.

Universally, man insists that he isn’t so totally lost that he cannot do something to help make amends. If he must go to Calvary to be saved, thinks man, then at least he can bring his merit, performance, and production with him. So he attempts to bring with him his little red wagon full of goodies. Surely God will recognize all the good things that he has done, he thinks; of course God will not overlook the bad things that he ms refrained from doing. He brings his baptism, his confirmation, his church...certainly God will be impressed by his church! At Calvary, however, all the best things that could ever be said of us were not only ignored but rejected. At Calvary, forsaken by God and man, Christ died for sinners, paying the wages of our sin in their entirety. At Calvary, "He...by Himself purged our sins" (Hebrews 1:3). At Calvary, nothing is said of Mary mediating, martyrs dying, saints praying. There were no Protestant evangelists there with aisles for the sinner to walk...no priests to grant absolution...no candles to light, no sacraments to observe. There was Christ. Christ was there dying for sinners...offering the only sacrifice that the Father could ever accept.

When man stands before his Creator, he stands there fully redeemed by the cross-work of God’s Son or not redeemed at all. One cannot be a little bit pregnant, a little bit dead, or a little bit lost. Nor can one be a little bit saved. Every person who reads these words is either 100% saved or 100% lost. To be 99% saved would be to be 100% lost. Think of the seriousness of this fact. It would be far better never to have lived at all than to live and die unsaved. Our Lord asked what the profit would be if a person gained the whole world and lost his soul. This is the real crossroads of life, the point where we accept or reject his offer of salvation full and free.

Salvation should be the topic of conversation at every casual gathering. Have you ever heard it raised at a party, a wedding reception, a wake? People will talk freely of everything else but the Savior: the weather, sports, health, business... sex. He is a most unwelcome Guest at nearly all of our gatherings, exiled from our conversations, banished even from our thoughts. Even some Christians live a lifetime blushing to speak of Him in public; some even in private...even to relatives and friends.

One of the several reasons why Christians are virtually silent about the One Who paid the highest price for them that will ever be paid for anything or anyone in all of Eternity is ignorance of the nature of salvation. Salvation is totally free to the sinner...no strings attached. This is because it has been fully paid for by God’s Son. It should be no more difficult to inform one’s neighbor that Christ purchased eternal life for him than to tell him that he has won a lottery. God has made it simple-- Christ died for our sins, all of them. Sin is no longer the issue; it can no longer be. Sin has been dealt with fully and finally. The only issue now is faith.

Will we sinners believe what the Father believes about the work of His Son on the cross? This is the issue! And the only one! An African described faith as "the hand of the heart," and so it is. Faith is a non-meritorious activity.

When we have trusted God, we have done the only thing that man can do without doing anything. As a matter of fact, when we trust God we are turning to Him from every other possible object of trust. We are ceasing to "do" anything and counting fully on what He has done for us.

Ephesians 2:8 tells us that we have been saved "by grace through faith." Notice that faith is not the savior here; it is simply the channel of salvation. Grace is the savior--grace alone. Grace is God doing all the hard part in our salvation. Faith is our part, the "easy" part, if casting aside all other hopes can be called easy! Faith is the simple acceptance on the part of the sinner of the cross-work of Christ as his only hope of Heaven. Some will object that this is "cheap grace" and "easy believism." Grace could never be "cheap;" it cost God the Father the life of His Son. Clinging to Christ alone while turning one’s back on one’s good works can never be easy--it is completely foreign to the mind of the flesh. Whenever I hear these objections--"cheap grace," "easy believism," I realize that the one objecting has never truly grasped the awful extent of his lostness and so, cannot appreciate the magnitude of God’s generosity.

Some unidentified Bible teachers from Judea made their way to Galatia shortly after Paul had left. Paul had preached to the Galatians Christ crucified for them and their co-crucifixion with Him. As Paul had preached, God the Father had called them into "the grace of Christ." Now these legalistic teachers were seeking to controvert Paul’s message. They were teaching that Christ’s death on the cross was not enough, that it did not accomplish everything necessary to answer to the lost condition of the Galatians. They were insisting that there was something that the believer must do to insure his ultimate salvation...he must do "the works of the law." They had already succeeded in introducing "Holy Days" to the believers and were now insisting that the Galatians be circumcised. Paul reminded them that where the law is chosen as a means of approach to God, the whole Law comes into play, and not simply some part of the Law that we happen to like. To be circumcised meant to subscribe to the Law in its entirety (Galatians 5:1-4). Galatianism, then and now, cuts the Law up and discards what it will.

Works, as a means of approach to God, rule out grace; grace rules out works. After the sinner is saved, his works as a believer are precious to God (Ephesians 2:8-10). Works that were a stench in the nostrils of God when presented to Him by the sinner as an alternative for, or an addition to the cross, when performed by the believer take on a fragrance in which God delights.

If Christ’s death only "threw the door of Heaven open" but didn’t guarantee a place in Heaven for us, how can we be said to have died with him? If I died to all that I was in Adam, when Christ died, and rose to all that I am in Christ when Christ rose (Romans 6:1-4), then I am through forever with sin and death, and hell and judgment! Jim Kirkwood clothed in the filthy rags of his own "righteousness" (Isaiah 64:6) is history. Jim Kirkwood clothed in the righteousness of God is the only reality now (1 Corinthians 1:30).

When religion ignores "Pauline Grace," the message of Christ risen and glorified, it makes grace into non-grace, and non-grace is anti-grace. Drinking water plus arsenic ceases to be drinking water and becomes poison. God’s grace plus man’s merit ceases to be God’s grace and becomes religious poison. God calls Himself the God of all grace. The only way to let God be God is to let grace be grace!