- [Juan Sanchez] The biblical concept of grace alone is as necessary today as it
has always been.
As human beings, we have a proclivity toward seeking to earn favor with God.
That was not just an issue with reformation but that's
an issue with humanity.
This is an issue that the religions of the world pick up on.
The idea that, if we just do certain things, then God would have favor on us.
Or, if we follow a certain path or believe certain things, then God will have
favor on us.
But the reality is that salvation has always been by God's grace alone
through faith alone in Christ alone.
And the fact that it's a gift of God is a message that resounds with a humanity that
is seeking, striving, trying to reach for God.
And it is a message of good news, that God has done everything for us that
we need for salvation.
And He offers it to us as a gift.
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- [Trevin Wax] One of the controversies around the time of the reformation,
especially in the few hundred years leading up to the reformation,
was this practice of selling indulgences.
Which an indulgence is basically a piece of paper that is an expression
of spiritual merit, that, if you collected indulgences or bought
purchased indulgences from the church, then you were, in a sense,
purchasing grace or merit for you or for your deceased loved ones.
There was also the understanding, the doctrine of purgatory, which is that,
even Christians, people who had professed faith in Christ, might go through a time
of purging and purification in which they're suffering in something similar
to hell, that you're running to help move them along so [inaudible 00:02:06] be
purified after death to be able to finally arrive in Heaven faster.
And and we've got to put this in the context of a time period in which
death was everywhere.
So you had people terrified of normal childhood illnesses, sickness, disease.
And so, you've got this kind of context and you've got...I hesitate to even use
the term evangelist of indulgences, but one of the most popular ones
during the time, Johann Tetzel, actually had gotten the rhetoric down and
the oratory down so well that he was able to bring in all sorts of money to the
church at the time.
He even had a phrase, "When a coin in the coffer rings,
a soul from purgatory springs."
You know, basically, "You pay this money and you can help your
loved ones out of purgatory and into Heaven."
So, the reformers saw this whole system and they saw it doing a cheapening and a
distorting in two ways.
First, repentance, which we have talked about before, this was a cheapening of the
real meaning of a repentant life.
But it was also a cheapening and a distorted vision of grace.
And so, from this context, in this context comes this core truth
of the reformation, sola gratia, grace alone.
So, how would you define grace alone for us?
- [Albert Mohler] You know, my guess is this is, of all the solas,
what most evangelicals actually know how to define.
This is the one that they use language that defines it exactly as the reformers
would define it, they just might not be thinking about it.
When we define grace as God's unmerited favor, we are saying exactly what the
reformers were trying to say.
And it's because you have, on the one hand, grace as God's gift,
salvation and all that comes to us in Christ as God's gift,
motivated by His love towards us, His mercy.
And on the other hand, you have merit, which is the claim that, somehow,
we deserve, if not the whole...the Catholic Church didn't teach that anyone
could entirely earn salvation, they believed that Christ would add to the
merits of the Christian in order to fulfill all that was
necessary for justification.
But the reformers said, "What is this merit?"
And rather than seeing a cup that wasn't full enough, they saw a cup that
was absolutely empty.
And furthermore, they were horribly offended by the fact that the church
claimed to be a treasury of merit.
So the church at the time, the Roman Catholic Church was claiming
that there was a treasury of merit, an infinite treasury because God's grace
was infinite, that was given to the church and the church hierarchy,
individual priests of the local parish level, and ultimately the pope,
had the right to give merit because none of us individually, the church taught,
would be able to have enough merit to amount to salvation.
So you would need other merits, you got through the sacraments
of the church, you got it through, indeed, indulgences and all the rest.
But the reformers came back and they said, "You know, you can't have grace and merit.
You can have grace or merit.
And if grace is God's unmerited favor, then it means just that."
Here's the great good news, we're saved by grace alone,
God's gift of salvation comes to us by grace alone.
It's not grace plus meritorious works.
And that means, and this was where the pope understood exactly what the threat
of the reformation was, this means that the church really isn't a
treasury of merit after all.
- [Kevin DeYoung] It's a proclaimer of good news, which is what the reformers
then wanted to discover, "What we have to announce is not any kind
of self-help program but the announcement of good news.
Grace that you can receive by faith in Christ."
- [Trevin Wax] This talk about merit though, we do believe that righteous works
get us to God, it's simply that we don't believe there are righteous works that get
us to God, that it's the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
And so, Kevin, can you help us understand the difference between...a lot of this
language is similar.
You've got different churches, different denominations even today that
will use language of righteousness and grace, but the definitions are really
where you see that difference.
And this theme of imputation, this doctrine of imputation comes
to the fray here.
- [Kevin DeYoung] Yeah, we have to think very carefully about it.
We have to be fair to, you know, Roman Catholic friends.
They would talk about grace, certainly, they would, you know,
elevate grace and they would even say, "We're saved by grace."
But how do you understand that?
So key to the reformation was that word imputation, the righteousness of Christ is
imputed to our account.
Which means it's reckoned to be ours, though we do not possess it in our own
behavior and life.
So the difference was between an infused righteousness and
an imputed righteousness.
And on that, they saw that this is the very definition of justification and the
very heart of the gospel.
Do you have a righteousness that, you know, maybe God has worked in you?
Certainly it's from God, it's from His grace.
But he's worked it in you, so that what you are doing or performing
is actually righteous.
And the reformer said, "No, that's not what the Scripture teaches,
rather it is a transaction," sort of like God, you know, counting to us.
We don't hold, you know, $100 bill in our hands but it's counted
to belong to us, to be ours, though it's an alien righteousness,
it's something foreign to us.
So it really does get to the heart of what Jesus said, in Luke 18,
with the tax collector and the pharisee.
Do you say, "I thank God that I'm not like other men," okay?
"God, You've done this, Your grace has helped me to be
a good person."
Or are you justified like the tax collector who says, "Beat my breast,
have mercy on me.
I'm a sinner."
An eternal difference is at stake between those two approaches to grace or to merit,
even if we think the merit has somehow been wrought in us by grace.
- [Albert Mohler] Yeah.
You know, Kevin, we are so tempted to think in terms of merit.
Luther even understood this, it's like we keep getting pulled back
into the logic of merit because this is how the world acts.
So, I mean, when you go to school, you want to earn merits.
And a child wanting the pleasure of his parents will want to earn merits
from them, whether you're in the military or whatever.
I mean you want to be continually adding to the merits that people will
give to you.
And so, we apply that to our salvation, and Luther said, "That's what's so deadly.
Because this is not an earthly father, this is the holy and righteous God whose
righteousness we can't possibly meet in any sense, we fall so infinitely
short of it."
This is Paul saying, "All have sinned and fall short of the
glory of God."
There's no amount of merit that could possibly add up to it,
and this is where the Apostle Paul also helps us by saying, "It turns out the
merit doesn't really amount to merit.
Our righteousness is as filthy rags."
And that's where the reformers also came back and said, "Here's the
problem with merit.
It doesn't exist.
It's not just that it's not enough, it's that it actually doesn't exist.
All that really exists is the sheer grace and mercy of God."
- [Trevin Wax] So, when we think about why this was so controversial back then and
why it continues to be controversial is the main reason, you would say,
because people worry that, if you are not in some way trying
to earn merit, if you're not in some way trying to work your way forward,
that you're going to just sit back and...I mean the pushback to the idea of grace
alone is that you wind up in this scenario where you no longer have motivation to do
the right thing.
You can simply sit back and say, "Well, I'm saved by grace, doesn't matter what
I'm going to do."
You know, you sometimes hear that phrase, "Oh, I'm just a sinner saved by grace."
And then, it's almost as if there's a lax standing back, like,
"It doesn't matter anymore how I'm going to live."
Is that why the Catholic Church saw this at that time as so controversial and why
people continue to see it as controversial today?
- [Kevin DeYoung] That's certainly one of the reasons.
I mean you get at the motivational level, why we do what we do.
And they felt like, if you take this idea out of some kind of merit or
infuse righteousness, people will do whatever they want.
But of course, again, that's not the Gospel logic.
What we see in Scripture is we need to understand God is not one-dimensional.
So, if we only relate to God as a judge, then it's, "I'm guilty or I'm innocent.
I'm acquitted or I'm condemned."
And so, if that's all you do, then you think "Well, I'm acquitted,
I'm innocent, then it doesn't matter, I'm free to go."
But if you realize there are other images of God, He is our father, well, then,
as a father, now, as his adopted children having done nothing to earn our way
into His family, now we want to please Him as a good Heavenly Father,
we want to obey Him, we want to listen to Him.
You know, the Holy Spirit can be grieved when we sin and God is pleased when we
obey through faith by grace in Christ.
It's not meriting, it's not that our position in the family was in jeopardy,
but it's because we relate to God.
Not only as a judge, "You're in or you're out," but as a father
with a dynamic personal relationship that we begin to understand what we do and why
we do it really matters.
- [Trevin Wax] So, this grace is transformative but it's transformative
precisely because it is unmerited, because it is unmerited favor from God
that changes the heart as we trust in Christ.
- [Kevin DeYoung] The grace that saves a wretch like me is also the amazing grace
that leads us home.
- [Trevin Wax] I love the illustration you just gave about a father because sometimes
we can have this image of God simply as Judge and not also have these other images
that the Bible does give us.
I love the image of a father who's telling their child who's just learning to walk,
you know, to come to Him.
Or a father who's on the sidelines of a soccer field and saying, you know, "Score,
shoot," you know, "you can do this."
One of the beautiful things about the grace of God is that,
because it does transform us and because the Holy Spirit does empower us, that God,
the Father can look down and can give us commands and expect us to meet those
commands because He has placed His spirit in us, we're saved.
Our status in the family is not under threat but that we are now called to live
in a certain way and we have this dynamic relationship with the God who
has saved us.
- [Albert Mohler] But we have to be really careful and that is that we do not
transform grace into something that might be called cheap grace,
that we do not act as if grace means that God has simply been indulgent
to His sinful creatures.
It isn't that.
He demands an absolute righteousness, that's what He provided in His own Son.
And so, grace to us comes without cost but it cost Christ everything and it was
an infinite cost that God provided in Christ.
So we have to be really careful when we talk about this because I think a lot
of people, and perhaps evangelical Christians, are just prone,
when they hear "grace," to think, "Oh, that's just an indulgent act whereby God,
like an indulgent parent, He wipes the slate clean."
That is not at all the case.
He requires full penalty for sin.
He provided the full penalty for sin in Christ.
And now salvation comes to us, which also means that,
if we ever divert from grace, we're depreciating from what God
did in Christ.
It's not just that we're misunderstanding salvation, we are actually misleading...we
are slandering the cross and the empty tomb of Christ.
- [Kevin DeYoung] And that's so important now because you hit at one of the other
reasons that the Catholic Church didn't like this doctrine.
They said that justification by faith through grace was a legal fiction,
meaning God just sort of waved His hand and, one day, He was having a good god day
and He woke up and just said, "Forget about it," you know,
"just your sin isn't a big deal anymore."
When we are not saved by the setting aside of justice but by the fulfillment
of justice, which gets to the very heart of assurance in the good news
of the Gospel.
That's the problem in Romans 3, how can God be just in His own character
and the justifier of the ungodly?
And it's because of this imputed righteousness of Christ,
God didn't just say, "You know what?
I don't care about sin anymore."
No, He infinitely cared about sin so that he sent His son of infinite worth and cost
to die for our sins.
So we do a disservice not only to grace but to Christ himself when we
misunderstand how and why we're saved.
- [Trevin Wax] That takes us right back to the cross.
The cross is not only the demonstration of God's great love for us but it's also the
demonstration of the seriousness with which He took sin, that this would be the
cost of our sin.
So, as we think about grace alone going forward, one of the truths that remains
in my heart and mind, when I think about this,
is the fact that knowing that God has done this, that He has paid this infinite cost
of our sin by sending His Son.
There is nothing that He cannot ask of us.
So there's a comfort that comes with the reality of grace alone,
knowing that we are saved by grace.
But then there's the challenge that comes from this as well, to understand that,
because God has done this, now because we are part of His family,
it's extraordinary responsibility and calling that comes along with it.
- [Albert Mohler] You know, the Apostle Paul gets right to this with,
therefore is found in the Book of Romans, for example, where we read, "Therefore,
there is now no condemnation to the one who is in Christ Jesus," but then very
quickly we read, "I therefore beseech you, brothers," He says, "that you present your
body as a living sacrifice.
So, on the basis of that unmerited favor that God has granted to us in Christ,
we're also called to be living sacrifices.
There's an if-then, getting that sequence right is absolutely vital.
- [Trevin Wax] Well, I'm praying that the people watching this
video and studying these core truths of the reformation are going to be refreshed
anew by the power of grace, by the transformative work that God does
in our lives and hearts through the grace that He's given to us in Jesus Christ.
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