Running To Win

Dave McCallister: From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. We're in a series on how you can be sure that you will spend eternity with God. Pastor Lutzer, is grace as amazing as the song says it is?

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Oh Dave, grace is much more amazing. When we stop to think of it as we understand the bitterness of sin, we begin to understand even better the wonder of God's grace. As a matter of fact, I have to say that this message is one of the most important I have ever preached.

At the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you some contact info because we have a very special resource for you. I trust that you'll take advantage of it because it can be of help to you, but not only you, but other members of your family. I'll explain later. For now, let us listen.

All of us, of course, sing frequently, "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see." And yet when you ask Christians to explain the gospel, they explain it in such a way that it makes you think that grace is nice, grace is helpful, and perhaps even grace is necessary.

But many times, we do not understand why it is truly amazing. The extent of your understanding of grace is dependent upon your understanding of what life is like without grace. John Callaway, who hosts Chicago Tonight here in the city, was interviewed in the Tribune a couple of weeks ago. At the end of that interview, he was asked regarding religion and this is what he said:

"I'm struggling and I'm not winning that struggle. I'm living in a classic state of sin in that I am separated from God. And my only saving grace is that I know it and I think I'll do something about it if I live long enough." Think about that. "I think I'll do something about it." The impression is given that if I ever really got serious about this business of sin and my separation from God, maybe I'll do something about it.

The Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 3, after he listed all of the faults of humanity, says that in the courtroom of God we are all guilty, that every mouth may be stopped and that the world might be declared guilty before God. We're going to find out in a moment that there's nothing that we can do about it. As a matter of fact, our very attempt to do something about it only messes it up and makes it worse.

So we're going to paint two pictures. The first picture is found in Ephesians chapter 2, and the second picture is there too. Ephesians chapter 2, where the Apostle Paul is talking about life without grace, what we were like before God broke into our lives, and it is not a pretty picture.

"And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit who is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among whom we too formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as the rest."

Paul says basically life without grace is a cemetery. We are dead in trespasses and sins, but the reason we don't realize how bad off we are is because physically we are alive. We are alive physically, spiritually dead. And that's why he talks about us walking. We are not the grateful dead, but we are the walking dead.

And he says we walked according to the course of this world. We have been deceived by the world and we are unconscious of the influence of Satan in our lives according to the prince of the power of this age. Is it any wonder that there are so many people today who are messed up? Is it any wonder that we live in a day and age when people don't know what to do about the violence and all the other problems? As long as we are walking according to the course of this age, which is giving a host of wrong answers to man's fundamental problem and telling us to seek answers where there are none.

A friend of mine says that in a restaurant that he frequently goes to, there is this that hangs on the wall: "I have taken the pill, I have hoisted my skirts to my thighs, dropped them to my ankles, rebelled at the university, skied in Aspen, lived with two men, married one, earned my keep, kept my identity, and frankly, I'm lost." That's our generation. We do what we want to do and yet we are lost.

And the picture does not get any better. The Apostle Paul says that we are by nature the children of wrath. The thing that we do most naturally and the thing that we do best is sin, and that's our predicament. Now in all of the hoopla that surrounded the John Wayne Gacy extravaganza and his eventual execution, many people wanted to make him out to be some kind of a monster.

They wanted us to believe that somehow he was not a member of the human race. It is almost as if he came from somewhere other than being a son of Adam as all of us are. I want you to know today that John Wayne Gacy was a member of the human race. The thing I think that was surprising to so many of us is that he looked so normal. In fact, I know somebody who looks a whole lot like he does.

And we forget that. We forget that John Wayne Gacy was a man who simply allowed his sexual perversions to carry him wherever they led. Someone has accurately said that sin always takes you farther than you want to go, it keeps you longer than you want to stay, and it costs you more than you intended to pay. But John Wayne Gacy was one of us.

Solzhenitsyn, who understood the human heart much better than a lot of other people, said, wouldn't it be neat if there would be in this world good people and bad people and we'd find the bad people and put them off somewhere and then all the other good people would live together in happiness? He says the line between goodness and badness does not go through the human race, but it goes through the center of every single human heart. Just ask Christ.

Colson tells the story of someone who had been persecuted and had escaped Nazi Germany. And when a Nazi was being tried and was brought into the courtroom, this person who had lived in a concentration camp fainted. They said later when he was revived, is it because you could not stand the sight of this murderer? And he said, "No, it is not because of that that I fainted. I fainted because when I looked at him, he looked so ordinary. He did not look like a monster."

That's the predicament that we are in. What is the answer? Five characteristics of grace today. Number one: Grace sets aside all human effort. Verse 4, what a contrast. Here is this awful cemetery of death. Like someone says, I was dying inside by the inch all the time. Terrible cemetery. "But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)."

What God said is this: if I'm going to save the human race, I can't expect them to cooperate because everything that they do is tainted. Every motive has been tainted. You read Romans chapter 3. The words that come out of our mouths, the thoughts that form in our minds, the desires of the heart, all of them have been affected by sin. And so God says if I'm going to save the human race, I'm going to take all human goodness and put it on the shelf and mark it unusable and I'm going to have to do this all by myself.

And so God intervenes with a power of resurrection. The Apostle Paul says in the book of Romans, if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise work is no more work and grace is no more grace. God says I'm going to do something that will set aside human merit forever because it is unusable. And so He acted alone. First of all, grace sets aside all human effort.

Secondly: Grace is unaffected by the degree of our sin. Let's suppose you have two corpses. Is one deader than the other? You have two people who are dead in their trespasses and in their sin. Is one really deader than another? No, they are equally dead. You know, we like to compare ourselves to somebody like John Wayne Gacy, don't we?

Isn't there a feeling of comfortableness and a feeling of almost restrained pride at the fact that we would never think of doing such terrible things? To think that the killing of 33 boys is so revolting to us that we can't even imagine the horror, and we say to ourselves we are so much better. Well, thank God that we are better. It is much better to be someone who is kind and loving and thoughtful than someone who is a criminal to do those terrible deeds.

But please don't ever forget this, that there is no common ground between human goodness and divine holiness. Looked at from one standpoint, one great sinner is just as far from God as all the lesser ones who traipse around thinking that they are so much better than other people. Always remember that. You say, well, surely good people are closer to God. Well, maybe a bit closer.

Look at the difference between the height of Moody Church and the Sears Tower. There's quite a difference. You say, well, the Sears Tower is sure a lot taller than Moody Church. Yes, it is. But you know, if we stopped comparing the buildings that way and said, now which building is closest to Orion, which is one of the constellations a couple of hundred or thousand light years away? Which one is closer? Well, the top of the Sears Tower is closer than the top of Moody Church.

But the differences are negligible. They don't count because God has declared all are under sin. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And Paul says in the book of Romans that every mouth will be stopped and the whole world guilty before God. To change the illustration, let's suppose that you are going to open a door to a castle and the only way you can open the door is with a very special gold coin that has been especially minted to get in.

You can have a whole line of people who say, well, I've got dollar bills and I've got these pennies. And somebody says, I've got more pennies than you have. I'm better than you are. And you have all of these arguments regarding who is the best and who has the most. Folks, irrelevant. Hush. Only the people with the gold coin of grace can enter. Everything else is irrelevant. Grace is unaffected by the degree of our sin. God can save a John Wayne Gacy just as easily as He can save a churchgoer. That's why grace is so amazing.

There's a third characteristic, and that is it takes us all the way to heaven. Now notice what the Apostle Paul says: by grace you have been saved, and verse 6, "and God raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." It's a verse that I can only read today but I have to skip. I talked about the ladder that some people want to climb to heaven and the futility of the whole thing.

Well, when God raised us up from the dead, from the cemetery, He not only helped us halfway to heaven, the Bible says He took us the whole way and we are seated there already. Now if you think that that creates legal problems for a holy God, and it does—legal problems that He had to solve—I want you to come back next week because that's what we're going to be talking about and the absolute implications of what grace does and why God can do such wondrous things for sinners.

So we must hurry on. It is a gift that takes us all the way to heaven. Number four: let me emphasize it is a gift of God. Let's continue to read. Verse 7 says that in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Jesus Christ. And then those famous verses: "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God."

And it is a reference to God's saving grace and even the faith that we appropriated with is a gift of God, "not as a result of works," as I told you a moment ago, God took human works and set it aside and said unusable, "lest any man should boast." You can't boast when you receive a free gift that is so incredibly undeserved. It is a free gift.

Back on the farm where I grew up, we used to listen to the radio and we used to listen to certain evangelists that came on and they always wanted an appeal at the end. I remember one man who used to say, "Now my dear friend, if you will send me $5, I will send you absolutely free this new book." I used to sit there at the age of 10 and say, "this doesn't compute."

What do you mean, "send you $5," which in those days by the way, when I was 10 years old, was an awful lot of money. What do you mean, "send you $5?" If it's absolutely free, you not only should send the book, but you ought to pay for the postage that is used to write and ask you for it. Because that's what God does. He pays the whole freight the whole way.

That's like salvation. It is a free gift. Do you know what that means? You will never ever repay it. Ever. If you could repay it even in the smallest amount, God would have to regard it and God would have to acknowledge the payment. But the Bible says it is of grace and it is not of works lest no man should boast so that nobody ever stands before God and says, well God you did this for me, but after all, I did pay you a bit back.

Listen to this very carefully. God owns so much. Do you ever think that God would have to buy anything? Does God ever have to go shopping and say, well you know I'm running out of supplies? Much less use a credit card to have to do it. No. But the Bible does say God purchased one thing. It says that He purchased His church with His own blood. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, that was redemption. God purchased us. And it is insulting to think that we could ever pay Him back.

And my dear friend, that's why for all of eternity we are going to stand in wonder about God's grace, thanking Him for saving us, taking no credit for our salvation, but giving Him the glory entirely. I have in my hands a resource that I think will be of great blessing to you. It's a book written by my dear wife Rebecca entitled Life-Changing Bible Verses Every Woman Should Know.

This is a series of short chapters on issues that have to do with women, yes, but really all of us. For example, regarding anger and hurt, encouragement, confidence, emotional healing, forgiveness, overcoming anxiety and worry. At the end of each of these short chapters, there are some questions so that the book can be used individually of course, but it can also be used for group Bible study.

Mother's Day is not too far off. It would make a wonderful gift for all the women who are mothers in your life. Remember this, it is time that we began to honor our mothers of course, but at the same time ask ourselves this question: how can we manage life together? For a gift of any amount, this book is going to be yours. Here is what you do: go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. All of us need encouragement as we run toward the finish line, and once again from my heart to yours, thank you so much for helping us because we desire to get the gospel of Jesus Christ around the world.

Dave McCallister: It's time again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question you may have about the Bible or the Christian life. One thing we don't seem to see in the Bible is any reference to the great dinosaurs that roamed the earth a long time ago. Tracy listens to Running to Win and has this question: "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, which I totally believe in, where do the prehistoric ages fit into the scheme of things?"

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Well Tracy, you've asked a huge question. But let me simply say this, I do not believe that the earth is nearly as old as most scientists would say that it is. You see, I believe that when God created the earth, He created it with the appearance of age. When He created Adam and Eve, they probably looked about 25 years old even though they had only been created perhaps hours ago.

In the very same way, the earth was created with man being able to live in it. God took the so-called process of evolution and speeded it up and in a moment or two, He created the earth full blown. Perhaps there were stars that were 100,000 light years away already shining on the earth ready for mankind. In other words, I believe in what is known as a Young Earth.

Now I believe that dinosaurs lived before the flood and they were extinguished by the flood and they have never returned. I believe therefore that anything that is prehistoric, as you called it, can be explained within the framework of the first and second chapters of Genesis. It's a long story, but thanks for asking and isn't it wonderful to believe in a God who actually does create and I know that you do.

Dave McCallister: Thank you Tracy, thank you Dr. Lutzer. If you'd like to have your question answered, you can. Just go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614.

Christians get their strength from God given to them because of abundant grace, His unmerited favor towards them through Christ. And the grace that none of us deserves is our focus as our current series proceeds. Next time on Running to Win, Pastor Lutzer concludes his message on why is grace amazing by listing more of the characteristics of the grace we all need. Running to Win is all about helping you understand God's roadmap for your race of life. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McCallister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.