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GRACE IS THE BASE

I don’t want to pull the plug on one of the more powerful sermon illustrations we’ve benefitted from here at the Voice of Prophecy. Because in recent years, the monumental war story, Saving Private Ryan, has given us some very good vignettes that link to spiritual truths.

But in the Spring 2001 issue of Leadership magazine, a Pastor Tom Allen of Seattle has a different take. It’s a great film, he writes – and many of you, I’m sure, know the story. Captain John Miller has to take a group of men through German machine gun ambushes and Nazi-occupied towns in order to “save Private Ryan,” this kid whose three brothers have already been killed in battle. Right at the end, with men dead and dying all around, Tom Hanks is hit too. As he sags down into the bloody dirt of France and prepares to die, he pulls Private Ryan closer and whispers something in his ear. Just two words: Earn this.

Go home and invent something; be a great scholar; find a cure for cancer; make your mark in life. Do something that makes it worthwhile for eight other men to die for you. Earn this.

As the film closes, 50 years later, an old man named Ryan is over there in France again, walking among the white crosses at St. Laurent Military Graveyard. He comes to the one solitary marker: “Captain John H. Miller, high school teacher, Addley, Pennsylvania.” And he breaks down. His wife, Alice, and kids and grandkids gather around, as he asks them: “Did I earn this? Did I live a good, worthy life?” They assure him that he did, as a red-white-and-blue flag waves gently in the liberated breeze.

It’s a powerful story, and what is Pastor Allen’s quiet protest? Captain John Miller – Tom Hanks – was an Army Ranger. During World War II, their motto was this: Sua sponte. Meaning: “I chose this. I volunteered for this.” And a true Ranger, Pastor Allen suggests, would not have said “Earn this.” He would have said instead: Sua sponte. “This is free. You don’t pay anything for this. I give up my life for you. THAT’S MY JOB.”

And here’s the eloquent conclusion, as recorded word-for-word in Leadership magazine:

“And so when you look at the cross and see Jesus hanging there and hear Him say, ‘I thirst,’ you do not hear ‘earn this.’ You never hear Jesus say, ‘Earn this.’ He doesn’t say, ‘I’ve given everything up for you. Now you need to gut it out for Me.’ What He says is, ‘I thirst.’ He says, Sua sponte. ‘I volunteered for this. You don’t have to pay anything for it.’”

Now, friend, we’ve been in this foxhole for about two-and-a-half weeks now, and I think we’ve said it about as loud as we can: Grace is a free gift. What Jesus did on the Cross is free. Salvation is free. Our homes in heaven are free. All we have to do is ask and receive, because grace comes with a sticker on it that says zero dollars and zero cents. That’s the bar code of eternal life: FREE and forever free.

But here is our very simple Wednesday point: when the Christian needs to have assurance of salvation, when we search the Bibles or our own hearts and souls to know whether or not we are possessing this free gift, grace itself must always be the SOURCE of our assurance.

We’ve been thankfully drawing some eloquent bits and pieces from a recent special Week of Prayer issue of the Adventist Review, mailed out in September of 2003. Pastor J. David Newman, who used to edit Ministry magazine, another great journal in my faith community, has the third article in the publication, entitled “Grace and Obedience.” Right away, that headline might make us wonder if maybe Private Ryan DOES have to go home to Peyton, Iowa and cure the common cold, or score a 1450 on his SATs of commandment-keeping, or win four gold stars in sanctification. Does he have to earn the gift of life provided at such great cost in the bombed-out streets of Ramelle?

Pastor Newman quickly takes us to this powerful truth: obedience is a marvelous thing, an important thing, a necessary thing. A heart committed to Christ will be an obedient, discipling heart. But we can never EARN heaven by our obedience!

“Grace is what saves us,” Newman writes. “Grace comes entirely from God. It is outside us and is given to us freely when we place our trust in Jesus.” Then he adds this vital postscript: “Transformation begins to take place the moment we receive grace. Transformation takes place inside us. We are always to look to GRACE for the assurance of our salvation, yet are always conscious that we are growing in obedience to God.”

There are a number of “assurance” Bible passages we find in God’s Word, and it’s helpful to see what we should have salvation assurance IN. One of our favorites is I John 5:12, 13, and we read that “he who has the Son . . . has life.” What does that mean? It means to have a relationship with the Giver of grace. Verse 13: if you and I believe IN the name of the Son of God – again, the Giver of grace – then we KNOW we have eternal life. And the assurance of our salvation goes back to grace.

Romans 8 is a passage often quoted by born-again Christians to bolster their assurance. That’s the hope-inspiring passage: “Nothing can separate us – not death, life, angels, demons, etc. – from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And of course, the love of God expressed through His Son Jesus – especially on Calvary – is the very foundation of grace.

How about John 5:24:

“Whoever hears My word,” Jesus says, “and believes Him who sent Me HAS eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”

It’s clear here – and we’ve been saying this – that you and I do have to come to the foot of the cross. We have to read the Word and come to believe it. We have to come to the point where we believe Jesus when He says the Father sent Him, and that the gift of grace, the blood of Jesus shed on that cross, is effective in saving us. It takes work sometimes to get to that point. But it is not the work that saves us; it is the grace. Our assurance isn’t in our doing, but in Jesus’ doing.

Let’s think of one of the great Bible examples of a guy who had nothing else to be confident in: the Prodigal Son. Here’s a young man who left his father as a rebel and went to a faraway country. He spent his dad’s fortune in some low, vulgar, family-dishonoring ways. But when this son returns home, destitute and poor and dressed in rags, he finds that his loving Father is still his loving Father. He is still a son! And why does the Dad kill the fatted calf and call the caterer’s and begin printing up invitations for a party?

Well, let’s outline the reasons that AREN’T. Was it because of this kid’s good deeds? No, there were none. Was it because he had a good attitude? No, his attitude was pretty much 180 degrees wrong. Did he obey to at least a certain level? No, that was a zero too. Did he have right doctrines . . . at least a few of them? Apparently he had gotten the entire package wrong; he was so misguided that he had packed up everything and left the doctrinal framework of his youth.

But here at the end of the story, he comes home and is reinstated in the family. Why? Because there was grace and he was hungry and lonely enough to receive it. Grace was the basis of his salvation.

Pastor Adrian Rogers is not only the author of Believe in Miracles, But Trust in Jesus, along with several other Crossway Books bestsellers, and not only the three-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and not only the pastor of 25,000-member Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, and not only the globally-appreciated speaker at evangelistic meetings around the world, and not only the founder and president of the Love Worth Finding Ministry and radio/TV ministry, but he’s just plain a nice guy too! A faithful, obedient Christian. If a man could trust in his resumé to get a ticket past the pearly gates, I’d rather have his than mine; that’s for sure.

But in writing about assurance, Pastor Rogers admits to a few wild days in his past.

“Sometimes even my bad behavior reminded me I was part of the family,” he writes. “My dad knew how to administer corporal punishment. He would say, ‘Adrian, I do this because I love you.’ I think that I must have been his favorite!” But now this: “The point is, God may chastise, but He will never disown His own dear children. Our future is not secure because of OUR behavior but because of our new birth.” And please write this down someplace where it won’t get erased: “I would not trust the best fifteen minutes I ever lived to get me to heaven.”

In the 1787 hymn, How Firm a Foundation, do we find what exactly IS our safe foundation of assurance? We certainly do. Grace – and only grace.

“What more can He say than to you He hath said, To you who for refuge to Jesus hath fled?