Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Pastor Rick Warren: None of us can earn our way into heaven because eternal life is a free gift when you accept Jesus as the Lord of your life.

Guest (Male): Hey everyone, this is Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Today Rick Warren brings a series called Good News About Grace. You can't truly understand the Christian life until you understand grace. It's at the heart of your faith and your relationship with God. In this series, you'll discover how not only to understand grace, but to experience it and the joy it brings. So let's get started with part one of a message called Saving Grace.

Pastor Rick Warren: I'd like for you to complete these common American phrases for me. If it sounds too good to be true... it is. We make money the old-fashioned way, we... earn it. There's no such thing as a free... lunch. There is no gain without... pain. And this is a very familiar one: God helps those who... help themselves.

Everything about the American way of life teaches us that you get what you earn in life, that there is no free lunch, that you make your bed and then you lay in it. In America, we are very aware of the values of competition and winning. We know what it means to work hard and to use elbow grease. We value effort and sweat. We tell people you get what you deserve in life, and if you want to make something of your life, it's up to you. If it's to be, it's up to me.

This is called the American work ethic. The only problem with the American work ethic is God doesn't operate on the American work ethic. So it makes it difficult many times for us to relate to God because we're in this driven work mentality. The problem is Psalm 145:8. It tells us that God, rather than being in a work ethic mode, is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and rich in love. Circle the phrase "gracious."

The Bible says God is a gracious God. That means he loves to be gracious to you. God loves to bless people who don't deserve it. That's his nature. Aren't you glad for that? I am. I'm glad that God blesses people who don't deserve it. You can't understand the Christian life at all unless you understand grace. It is the heart of our faith. It's the heart of our relationship to God.

When you understand grace, you're going to feel closer to God. The more you understand grace, the more you're going to be drawn to God, the more you're going to love God, the more you're going to be grateful to God because it is the thing that God brings us to himself by that system, the system of grace.

Today we're beginning a new series, and I'm calling it Good News About Grace. What is grace? Well, grace is a multifaceted diamond. There are many aspects to it. There's no single definition that could describe what grace is all about. One definition is grace is God's love in action. Another definition is grace is God giving me what I need, not what I deserve. One of my favorite definitions is grace is the face God wears when he looks at my failures and responds in a gracious way.

You need to understand the difference between grace and mercy. Mercy is when God doesn't give us what we do deserve: punishment. Grace is when God gives us what we don't deserve: blessing. I know that many of you probably think you understand grace. You know we're saved by grace and have known that for many years. But I've discovered that even many Christians, although they know they're saved by grace, sure don't act like it.

In fact, they spend most of their life thinking and acting like we're saved by works. For many of you, even though you know you're saved by grace, you don't get into heaven by doing good, your entire life is built on pleasing God by trying to be perfect. You think God is some unpleasable parent up there in the sky with a clipboard and a pen watching your every move, saying, "Yeah, that was good. No, that was bad. Yeah, that was good."

You think you have to earn God's approval. You think if you do a certain number of good works, then God's going to go, "Good girl, good guy, you got it." And then if you don't do those things, God goes, "Forget it, you're worthless," and that's it. You're saved by grace, but you're actually living by works. When you really understand grace, it's going to bring so much joy to your life. It is the most liberating thing in the world, and you can be a Christian for 20 or 30 years and never really learn to live by grace.

So we're going to do a series on it. My goal is that through this series, you will not just understand grace, but that you will experience it, feel it, and enjoy the grace of God in your life because it does bring so much joy. Today I want us to start with the foundation, which is saving grace. For many of you, this will be review. You understand saving grace, but you cannot build a structure without the foundation, and this is foundational.

I think that it's good periodically that we sit back and we just remind ourselves what a good deal we got when we received the grace of God. Today I want us to look at five aspects of saving grace. How is it you know for sure that you're going to heaven when you die? Five aspects, and I built them around a little acrostic to help you remember grace: G-R-A-C-E.

I told the earlier service it reminded me of a story of a professor who went to Yale University, and he decided he would speak on what is a Yale student. He said, "I'm going to use an acrostic: Y-A-L-E." He spoke on four attributes of a Yale student: they're young, they're adventurous, they're loyal, and they're enthusiastic. But he went an hour and a half on this little four-letter acrostic. It just wore out the crowd, and by the time it was over, he looked down to a student on the front row and he said, "What'd you think of my speech?" The kid said, "Well, I was just thanking God that I didn't go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

I promise you that my grace acrostic isn't going to take that long. So let's get right into it. G: The G in grace stands for God's gift to me. Romans 3:24 says, "All of us need to be made right with God by his grace, which is a free gift through Jesus Christ." Notice it says it's a free gift. Because of this American work ethic that I was just talking about, many people think that they're saved by works, that they're saved by earning their way to heaven by being good enough that God says, "Okay, come on in."

If you were to go down here to El Toro Road and Rockfield and ask 50 or 100 people on the sidewalk as they walk by, "How do you get to heaven?" you'd get a lot of different answers. But basically, they could all be summarized in: you've got to earn your way to heaven. You'd hear things like, "Well, the way you get to heaven is just try to be good and do your best," or "Work real hard at being good and just try to be a good moral person," or "Do more good things in life than you do bad things in life, and if your good pile is higher than your bad pile, well, then God's going to say you're a good guy, come on in."

It's all based on works, not grace. You need to understand that God says here salvation is absolutely free. Circle the phrase "free gift." You don't work for a gift. It's a free gift. God says salvation is absolutely free. You can't earn it, you can't learn it, you can't buy it, you can't work for it. This is the fundamental difference between Christianity and every other religion. Every other faith, every other belief system, I don't care if it's Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc.

You can summarize every religion in one word, and all the other religions, Christianity is the only religion that's built on grace, that says God just gives you salvation. You don't do anything to earn it. Every other religion is based on works, and you can summarize them in one word: the word "do." There are certain things you do in order to gain God's approval. It just varies. Each system is different.

One religion will say, "Well, you do these things," and another one will say, "No, you do these things," and another one will say, "No, you have the eightfold path" as in Buddhism and things like this where you do certain things in order to gain bliss, gain heaven, gain God's approval. It's always something you have to do—rules, regulations, rituals, etc. On the other hand, if you were to summarize Christianity in one word, it's the word "done." It's already been done for you.

It was done on the cross by Jesus Christ. He paid for your salvation. He paid for your sins. It's already been done. I had a guy ask me one time, "Pastor Rick, what can I do to be saved?" I was just playing with him, and I said, "You're too late." That kind of shocked him. I said, "You're too late." He said, "What?" and I said, "Yeah, you're about 2,000 years too late because what needed to be done for your salvation has already been done, and you can't do anything about it. Jesus Christ already did it."

He paid for your salvation on the cross, and now it's a free gift to you. That's why Jesus Christ, when he was hanging on the cross, stretched out his arms, and one of the things he said was, "It is finished." Now he didn't say, "I am finished," because he wasn't. He's still alive today. He resurrected himself. He wasn't saying, "I'm finished." He was saying, "It is finished." What's the "it"? Your salvation. The plan to provide for the grace for every person who needs it. It's finished.

God says, "Here it is, it's a free gift." So there isn't anything you can do to save yourself. You just accept God's free gift of grace. I'm not getting to heaven based on what I do. I'm getting to heaven on the basis of what has already been done for me by Jesus Christ. That's the greatest gift you're ever going to be offered. You're never going to get a better deal than that. If you really understand grace, you will accept it because it is a priceless gift in your life. It's God's gift to me.

The R in grace stands for received by faith. God's gift is received by faith. Ephesians 2:8-9 says this: "For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith"—circle that, "through faith"—"and this is not from yourselves, it's the gift of God, not of works so that no one can boast." They say here that faith is the key that unlocks the door to heaven. It's just a gift, but you have to receive it by faith.

If I have a gift for you and I say, "Here's this gift for you, it's $100, come and get it," well, it'll just sit there unless you come and receive it by faith. You have to have faith that I'm going to give it to you. Because salvation is a gift, you can't brag about it. If you could work your way to heaven, do you realize how miserable it would be in heaven? Everybody would be bragging about how they got there. "Well, I got here because I did this." "Well, I got here because..." "Oh, well, let me tell you what I did."

We'd all be trying to one-up each other with great stories of what great people we were on earth. God says, "Now look, it's a grace gift. Your salvation, I just give you forgiveness free. I give you heaven free. Here it is." So what do you do with the gift? You can't brag about it. You can only accept it and be grateful for it. Romans 4:16 says this: "People receive God's promise by having faith. This is the promise of salvation. This happens so that the promise can be a free gift."

Now what's he saying here? Salvation isn't based on my performance, thank God. It's based on God's promise, not my performance. It's not based on my goodness; it's based on God's grace. I'm getting to heaven not based on my merit, but on God's mercy. That's why he gets all the credit. He gets all the glory because it's nothing that I could do. It's a free gift that is received by faith.

The Bible is full of stories illustrating the principle of grace. There are many of them. One of my favorites is in the Old Testament, in 2 Samuel chapter nine, and it's a story of a young disabled boy named Mephibosheth. How would you like to have that name? They probably called him Phibby for short. Mephibosheth was the son of Jonathan, the grandson of King Saul in the Old Testament.

Do you remember the story of David and Saul? David was going to be the king, Saul was the current king, and Saul was jealous of David. So most of David's life, Saul was trying to kill him. He chased him all over the countryside. David spent most of his time hiding from Saul, avoiding being killed out of jealousy. But David never retaliated. In fact, he became best friends with King Saul's son named Jonathan, and they made a secret covenant that if either of them ever died, they would take care of each other's family.

Later on, both Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle, and David became the king. All of Saul's relatives immediately were in fear thinking, "David, who King Saul has been trying to kill all of his life, is now in control and he's going to kill all of us." So they all tried to escape and hide. One of them they were trying to hide was the son of Jonathan named Mephibosheth. As the nurse was carrying the young boy out, she dropped him in the escape, his legs were broken, and he became a paraplegic.

So here was this young disabled boy living in fear, frightened for his life that the man who was now king would retaliate against him. One day David says, "Is there anybody still alive in Saul's household that I could show kindness to? Grace." They said, "Yes, there is. There's one little kid, he's a disabled little boy, and his name's Mephibosheth. He cannot walk." David said, "Bring him to me."

You can imagine the fear in Mephibosheth's life. Here's the king, inviting him to the court. He's thinking, "I'm going to be killed, I'm executed, it's over, it's done." But to his surprise, when he arrived, David said, "I'm going to take you in, Mephibosheth, and make you a part of my family. I want you to live here in the palace for the rest of your life. I'm going to pay all your bills, I'm going to meet all your needs. You are to sit at my table each night and you're to dine with me, and I'm going to treat you just like you're one of my own sons."

That's grace. The Bible says that God comes to us, and we're broken, we're disabled in areas of our lives, we are crippled in some areas. Our emotions are crippled or other things are happening in our lives, and God comes and says, "You know what? I'm going to bring you into my family, and I want you to sit at my table, and I'm going to treat you like royalty. You're one of my own, simply out of my grace."

Do you remember the story of the prodigal son that Jesus told? There was a man who had two sons, and one of them got a little anxious and was independent-spirited, and he came and said, "Dad, I want you to give me my half of the inheritance." And the dad said, "Okay." So he split the future inheritance, gave half to his one son right then, and the kid took off. He skipped town, went over to Sunset Strip in Jerusalem, and just started party-heartying.

He's having a great time—wine, women, and song, living it up, blowing all the money and everything. One day he runs out of money, and there's no ATMs in Jerusalem. And he hits bottom: morally, spiritually, financially, and in every way possible. In fact, it said he ended up having to work feeding pigs in a pigsty, and he was so hungry he would eat the food that the pigs were eating. Now you know that Jewish people don't eat pork, so that's about as low as you can go—living with a pig and eating a pig's food. So culturally, he couldn't get more degraded.

One day while he's in this mess, the younger son goes, "What am I doing? My father's servants are treated better than this." He says, "You know what? I think I'm going to go home, and I'm going to go back to Dad and say, 'Dad, I've blown it, I made a mistake, I'm sorry, and I don't even deserve to be called your son anymore. But Dad, just make me one of your hired servants, and I will work for you as a servant, not as a son, for the rest of my life because your servants are treated better than I was out in the world.'"

The story goes that as the prodigal son was coming home, the father saw him from a long way off, and it says he ran out to greet the boy. He grabbed him in a big bear hug, and he hugged him and embraced him. He didn't wait for him to get cleaned up, to get that smell of pigs off him or all that kind of stuff. He hugs him and then he says, "Hey, bring out all the royal robes and bring out some jewelry, and let's give him the official family ring, and let's throw a party. My son has come home."

That's grace. The kid deserved condemnation. The kid deserved to be judged, rejected. The kid deserved a lecture from the dad saying, "I told you so." But instead, he's received with love, unconditional love. That is the grace of God, and it is received by faith.

Guest (Male): Hey, thanks so much for joining us here on Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. I've got some exciting news to share with you today. Some generous friends of Daily Hope have offered a $10,000 matching grant, and that means whatever amount you give to help share the hope of Jesus worldwide is going to be matched up to $10,000. Here's Pastor Rick to tell you more.

Pastor Rick Warren: Hi everybody, thanks so much for listening today. You know, my hope is that God uses this broadcast to help deepen your relationship with Jesus. Now, these Daily Hope messages are distributed on radio stations and digital platforms all across the globe, and listeners are writing and letting us know that their lives are being changed. They're telling us that they're walking with Jesus and that guilt and fear's been chased from their lives by God's love.

Relationships are being restored and marriages are being healed, and many people are saying that they've found their life purpose. I want to say thank you to you because we're only able to carry the hope of Jesus to these people all around the world because of gifts from generous listeners like you. I just wanted to say I am so grateful for your prayers and your financial support.

I understand in times like these, many of you are unable to give financial support. Hear it from me: that's okay because I never want anybody to give unless God leads them to give. That's between you and God, not between you and me, but between you and God. And your prayers are a continual and incredible contribution to this Daily Hope ministry.

Now, if you do want to give a financial gift, I've got some really great news to share with you. There's a generous friend of Daily Hope broadcast who is offering to match the amount of your gift. In other words, if you give $20, then that person's going to combine it with a grant to make your gift $40. If you've never given a gift to Daily Hope, I want you to pray about partnering with us so that together we can continue to share the hope of Jesus throughout the whole world. I love you so much.

Guest (Male): Just go to pastorrick.com to have your gift matched up to $10,000. Once again, it's pastorrick.com, or you can text the word hope to 70309. That's the word hope to 70309. And again, all of us here at Daily Hope thank you so much for your support. Your gift helps us share the hope of Christ with people everywhere. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.