Last week we talked about why we need the Gospel. We established the very serious problem of sin: it destroys us and rends our relationship with God. The Gospel is our only hope of resolving this problem, and today we will look at how the Gospel hope is actualized.
2 Common Errors:
When trying to understand or explain the Gospel, there are two mistakes that people often make. Both can be corrected with a proper understanding of Ephesians 2:8-9.
You're odds of saving yourself are less than lifting this mountain with your hands
1) I am saved from my sin by good works: Almost all religions endorse this view. If you want to be made right with God, you must do good works. If you do enough good works, God will forgive you and restore you into relationship with Him. This means you get to go to Heaven!
Unfortunately, this belief is not Biblical and not true. As Romans 3:23 says, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” If we want to be made right with God, then we must be perfect. 1 sin in an entire lifetime ruins the relationship, and no amount of good works can return you to perfection. Ephesians 2:9 clears this up, your salvation is “not a result of works.”
The good news: pressure relief! We can stop worrying about following every rule and being good, because it won’t help our case! The bad (or maybe good) news: We can do nothing to save ourselves!
2) I am saved by my faith: This mistake may seem picky, but it has important implications. Most of the time, when someone asks how you are saved, we respond “by faith.” This, however, is not true.
We are not saved by faith, we are saved by grace through faith. So what does that mean?
Grace, by definition, is a free and unmerited gift. This means that Jesus saves us. His death and resurrection is a free gift he gave to us, even though we do not deserve it. At the risk of sounding repeatedly repitious, our faith does not save us. Jesus’s gift saves us.
Why Did Jesus Need to Die?
Romans 6:23 says “the wages of sin is death.” Because of my sin and your sin, we deserve death. This may seem harsh, but it reflects the horrible nature of sin. God could not have simply ignored our sin. He is a just God, and will never overlook sin without bringing it to justice. The price for sin had to be paid, either by ourselves or by a worthy substitute.
Jesus, God’s son, is the only person who could fulfill the role of substitute. God, desiring to restore the relationship between himself and man, chose to send His son to die in our place. If Jesus had sinned, he could not have taken our sin upon himself in death because he himself would have deserved death. But he did not sin, and therefore he could die in our place, taking the punishment we deserved upon himself. There is a big word for this, “propitiation,” and it simply means that Jesus was our substitute and died in our place.
If Jesus did not die, our faith would get us nowhere. His gift alone saved us from our sins.
So What’s the Point of Faith?
The death of Christ does not cover the sins of everyone, however. It only covers the sins of those who, through faith, accept the gift of grace he gave. Faith, then, has a pivotal and essential role. It is the means through which we receive the salvation God gave us. We do not receive the gift of God through works, but through faith alone.
Next week, we will take a deeper look at faith and seek to understand what it truly means to believe in God.
