Hang tight while we fetch the video data and transcripts. This only takes a moment.
Connecting to YouTube player…
Fetching transcript data…
We’ll display the transcript, summary, and all view options as soon as everything loads.
Next steps
Loading transcript tools…
Sinclair Ferguson: A Reformation of the Heart | Ligonier Ministries | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Sinclair Ferguson: A Reformation of the Heart
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
Well, I want you to turn with me, if you will, to Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and to
open your Bible or your artificial Bible at Ephesians chapters 1 and 2.
I don't plan to expound these chapters.
It's not going to be quite that long, but I do want to refer to a strand of teaching
that runs through this passage.
And while I do that, I probably ought also to clarify that the condensed Bible that is
being given away is not a condensation of the Bible; it's the notes to the Bible that
are condensed.
The whole Bible is in that condensed Bible.
So if you are the next one to get the prize, do not be disconsolate that Ligonier is going
to give you half a Bible; it will give you the whole Bible.
Well, where are we in our conference?
We began yesterday evening with Derek Thomas and thinking about the darkness, that there
was darkness in a very real sense covering the earth, although there were stars shining
in the firmament before the Reformation.
Burk Parsons led us, in a sense, through the need that there is in man's heart, not only
at the time of the Reformation, but in our own times, to hear the gospel, and the burden
that was placed on the Reformers to bring that gospel to men and women throughout the
world, and the burden that's placed on our hearts as we become conscious of the needs
of men and women.
It's as we understand that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that we
become constrained by the love of Christ to bring Christ to the nations.
And we've been thinking this morning with Dr. Reeves about the marvelous breakthrough
that there was in the life of Martin Luther, the way in which he discovers this glorious
truth that a righteous God justifies the ungodly, because of, in, and through our Savior Jesus
Christ, and the relief and release and obviously, the empowerment that this brings.
And our topic for this session is "The Reformation of the Heart."
And it would be a platitude, although a true platitude to say that the heart of the Reformation
did turn out to be a reformation of the heart.
Luther's own experience, hating the righteousness of God in Romans 1:16 and 17, and then having
this great breakthrough created in his heart by the understanding of the gospel that the
righteousness of God he hated was now the righteousness of God that justified him as
a sinner and therefore led him to love God.
Although he moved from an Augustinian understanding of justification from Romans 5, he did move
into an understanding of Romans 5, being justified by faith, having peace with God, being able
to glory in his sufferings.
And then, ultimately in Romans 5:11, being able to glory and to rejoice in God Himself.
So that the God he hated by nature, he came to love by grace.
And the doors of paradise swing open for him, and his heart is set free by the gospel.
And, of course, John Calvin, very different personality, very different academic background,
a totally different experience, a Frenchman and not a German, experiences the same reality,
put in different terms.
"God," he said, "subdued me.
I, who was so addicted to the teachings of the papacy, God subdued me, by this sudden
or unexpected conversion."
So much so, that as you know his motto becomes, "Lord I offer my heart to You promptly and
without duplicity, sincerely."
And so in these different ways, through different passages of Scripture, although probably both
from Paul's letter to the Romans, these very different individuals discover that the gospel
that brings justification is the gospel that transforms the heart.
That there is no justification without heart transformation, that there is no forgiveness
of sins without the Christ to whom we are united for the forgiveness of sins, effecting
in us by the Holy Spirit the transformation of life that comes through the gospel.
And I want us to think about that transformation in a number of different ways.
Let's, for a moment, go back to what the Reformers encountered in the teaching of the Roman Catholic
Church.
Sometimes we have to help Protestant believers understand that the Roman Catholic Church
taught that salvation was by grace, salvation was by grace.
But, what the Reformers were probing was the question, "How do you spell 'grace'?"
And the answer to that question was that you are given grace at baptism, but you lapsed
from that grace with which you were called to cooperate until your life was justifiable.
And since you lapsed from that grace, through the Church there are instruments placed into
your life, into your ears, before your eyes, occasionally into your mouth, that will restore
you to that grace and enable you to cooperate with that grace.
So that as your life is flanked by these seven, as they eventually decided, these seven sacraments,
as you cooperate with internal grace infused into your heart, you may, although it is extremely
unlikely, you may reach the point where those sacraments have wrought such grace in your
heart that at the end of the day you become justifiable because your heart is suffused
with perfect love for God.
And therefore, on the basis of what grace does in you, you become justifiable, and if
you become justifiable because your faith is suffused with perfect love, then at that
point, God justifies you.
Truth to tell, you may know that by supernatural revelation and a few may have done.
We count some so to have thus been justifiable on the basis of that grace-wrought transformation
in their lives that we count them as saints.
But apart from those few individuals, among whom you are certainly not included, it is
harmful for you to think that it is possible to have the assurance of salvation.
I've never forgotten reading in the writings of Robert Bellarmine, who was a massive Roman
Catholic figure in the wake of the Reformation, a Counter-Reformation figure -- there are
schools named after Robert Bellarmine.
He is one of the doctors of the Roman Catholic Church.
And in his work on justification, beginning of the third book, he says that the greatest
of all Protestant heresies is, and I guess 99.9% of us would say it must be justification
by faith alone, the greatest of all Protestant heresies is assurance.
Because of course, if the gospel gives me assurance, the entire structure of this theology
that has been worked out over an entire millennium falls to the ground.
The power of the church decays, the significance of the sacraments is diminished.
The role of the priesthood as the mediators of grace is abandoned.
And what happens is that consciences are released, hearts are filled with joy, and we are able
to say that we know nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
We are able to rejoice in our justification.
We are able to rejoice in the assurance of our salvation.
We are able to rejoice in God, the heart is set free.
Glory begins to fill our souls.
Lives are transformed.
The gospel begins to run to the ends of the earth through the testimony of ordinary Christians.
This is the gospel that delivers.
Then according to the promises of the Old Testament God, in His mercy, regenerates us
and gives us new hearts and sprinkles us clean, and the result is that we delight in the law
of God, and we are careful to keep His commandments.
The very things that the Reformers had to defend the gospel about are the very effects
of the gospel itself.
And it is not surprising, therefore, that the gospel was such a glorious experience
for those who were believers.
And in a sense, in terms of the transformation of the heart this, this, in a sense, could
be brought down to two basic principles that you need to understand the depravity of the
heart, and you need to understand the wonder of grace in Jesus Christ.
You need to grasp your sinfulness on the one hand, and you need to grasp the wonder of
the love and ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And the Reformers understood that in both of these respects, for all the architecture
of medieval theology, the Roman church had produced a superficial view of sin and a substantial,
that is, substance like, rather than personal view of grace.
The Council of Trent which met in the wake of the Reformation, 1545 to 1563, has in its
fifth session one of the most amazing statements you will ever find in a theological document.
"Concupiscence," this is the desire to sin, the waywardness of the human heart, which
the Apostle Paul calls sin, "the Church has never really understood to be sin."
What was that an indication of?
That was an indication of a, to use a well-worn illustration, that was an indication of the
Church's view that man was sick, but alive.
That by exercise of free choice, he could progress to justification by cooperating with
grace.
This is where the expression "Heaven helps those who help themselves" comes from.
And lest anyone think this was a medieval idea, I grew up in Protestant Scotland in
the 1950s, in which that was standard Protestantism.
And my guess is it was also standard Protestantism in Northern Ireland.
So if you said to somebody, "Are you going to heaven?"
They would say, "I'm trying my best.
I hope so."
And if you were 17 and somehow let slip that you were sure you were going to heaven that
was regarded as the highest form of arrogance.
How could you possibly have done enough at the age of 17 to have this assurance?
So what was medieval Catholicism also, because unlike that domestic cleaner that reached
where other domestic cleaners never reached, the Reformation never reached to the heart
of our country.
That's actually to tell you the truth, you need to get this out of the video recording.
That's a kind of American myth that Scotland was a land where everyone believed the gospel,
that Northern Ireland was aflame with the gospel.
So we can well understand the existential situation of those early Reformers and the
ordinary people they taught and the glorious radical transformation not only of the understanding
that took place through the preaching of the gospel, but the transformation and liberation
of the heart because interestingly, because they were taught a deeper view of sin.
And that's still true, isn't it?
So long as people think that they are sick and simply need a physician and don't understand
that they are spiritually dead and need a resurrection, so long as they have a superficial
view of sin, they will correspondingly have a superficial view of grace.
And we are awash, we are awash in the, in the pseudo-evangelical culture with that superficial
view of grace in which grace tops up who I already am to give me a better style of life,
to give me more happiness.
And contrary to what Dr. Reeves was speaking about at the end, offering Jesus Christ is
the very thing of which he was critical that is on offer today.
And now it's free on your television set in the United Kingdom.
What's on offer is a better style of life and health, wealth, and happiness.
People are thrilled that the gospel is being preached on television and don't understand
that there is a veil over our eyes, if we think that what we need is a physician because
we are sick, rather than a Savior who is able to resurrect us from the dead.
And these two things always go together, a superficial view of sin and a superficial
view of grace.
But when the gospel breaks in, as we've been hearing, it broke into the life of Luther
as it broke into the life of Calvin, then there is a very simple principle that is understood,
that is not well understood, and it's this, you and I can never be more justified than
we were the moment we came to faith in Jesus Christ.
You can never be more justified than you were the moment you came to faith in Jesus Christ.
Or to put it another way, the holiest saint in this room is no more justified than the
newest baby Christian.
It is as radical as that.
It isn't just a matter, as we've been hearing, that we're put back to square one.
That actually, amazingly, is a kind of Roman Catholic teaching.
You are put back to square one, but now you've got to cooperate with grace in order that
you may, you may keep the justifiability going.
And, we all recognize how many Christian believers we have known and perhaps have even been,
who have long been held captive to the notion that they must do something to top up their
justification, who fall foul of Roman Catholic teaching that if you teach anything else,
people will live anyway they want.
You understand that when we are in Jesus Christ we can never be more justified, because we
are justified not with our justification, but with His justification.
From one point of view, as we stand before the holy throne of the righteous God and the
devil accuses us, we are able to say to him, "I have exactly the same right to stand here
as He, the Son of God, does because the justification with which I am justified is actually His
righteousness, His justification.
Not my own, but His."
And you see, what is objective there, I mean that justification, is ours in Him.
It's not ours down here; it's ours in heaven.
"When Satan tells me to despair and points me to the sin within, upward I look and see
him there, who made an end of all my sin."
That's, that's what Luther was preaching.
That's what Calvin understood, because they understood that what transforms the heart
is what is ours in Jesus Christ.
And when the New Testament expounds this and in a very interesting way, when you look through
the New Testament, you see that the New Testament writers can come to these truths from two
apparently different positions.
They can bring you to the glory of the gospel by first of all showing you your depravity
and then offering you Christ.
Or they can bring you to the glory of the gospel by showing you the glory of Christ,
who He is and what He has done, and in the light of that, as it were, revealing, manifesting,
the sinfulness that needs such a Savior.
Sometimes people say that Paul does the first, he uses the first approach in Romans, Romans
1:18 to 3:20, the exposition, exposé, of the depravity of the heart.
And then, in with the message of Christ and justification.
Whereas it is sometimes said, he uses the opposite method in Ephesians.
In Ephesians, he begins with everything that is ours in Christ.
Now in a sense, that's true.
But in another sense, because I asked you to turn to Ephesians, and you've been wondering
the last twenty minutes why I asked you to turn to Ephesians, in Ephesians he uses a
kind of pincer method.
In chapter 1, he's setting before us everything that is ours in Christ, that we've been chosen
in Christ before the foundation of the world, and then he goes on to expound everything
that is ours in Christ.
And then in chapter 2 he moves, as it were, to the other polarity, and he speaks about
the depravity of the heart, the sinfulness of sin.
And the very interesting, even striking thing he does is in the middle, as it were, holding
these two things together, he prays that our understanding will be illumined to this glorious
gospel that is ours in Jesus Christ.
And I want us, as it were, just to reflect on that approach that the Apostle Paul uses,
to see that the gospel is made manifest by the riches of grace that are ours in Jesus
Christ, and the gospel is also manifested by the way in which the depravity of our sinfulness
is met, not only objectively, but subjectively by the power of Jesus Christ.
That the Christ in whom all the riches of grace are ours is the Christ who, in bestowing
His riches upon us, also works within us to transform us.
And I think the expression that Mike Reeves used, that the Reformers used, this, this
glorious, joyful, wonderful exchange, they have several different adjectives that they
preface the idea of exchange by, is such a key to helping us understand the riches of
the gospel.
And it's a key that our children can understand.
He gives me what's His, He takes from me what is mine, and the great exchange is made.
Now in Ephesians 1, Paul comes at this from the privileges that are ours in Jesus Christ.
And you'll notice how he works with it.
For example, he says that in Jesus Christ, there is the forgiveness of our sins.
And the implication of that is that in Jesus Christ this wonderful exchange is made, my
sins for His righteousness, His righteousness for my sins.
But this is not the only dimension to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Indeed, it would be inadequate to say that is in totality the gospel, because one of
the things that I think Paul wants us to see is that there is an integration between the
multifaceted character of our sinfulness and the multivalent character of Jesus Christ,
as Calvin would say, "clothed in His gospel."
And this is such a help to us when we ask ourselves, "What does it mean to offer Christ?"
And what Paul is doing in Ephesians chapter 1 is saying, "Let's put under the microscope
what has been offered to us and given to us in Jesus Christ."
And when we, when we, as it were, put Jesus under the microscope here, we begin to see
the multivalent character of all that He is for us as our Mediator and all that He has
done for us as our blessed Redeemer and Savior.
And so, clearly there is in Jesus Christ forgiveness that we need, because we are sinners.
But not only does Christ deal with our guilt, He is given to us to deal with our guilt,
He is also given to us to deal with our disinheritance.
And you notice Paul uses this language that in Jesus Christ, we are adopted into God's
family and we receive the inheritance that is ours in Jesus Christ.
Now there's a sense in which that tells you the whole story of the Bible.
The whole story of the Bible is that God creates His children as His image to extend the garden
that He has given them to the ends of the earth, to take pleasure in Him, to glorify
Him and enjoy Him forever, and because of their sinfulness, they are disinherited.
They not only lose their fellowship with God, they lose the whole creation.
But now in Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, who in a sense, bearing in His own body
to the tree our alienation, experiencing, as it were, disinheritance, "My God, why have
you forsaken me?" is the one who through being disinherited, who through coming to the far
country of our sin and being made sin for us, having that sense of alienation, not addressing
His Father on the tree as, "My Father, why have you forsaken me," but in faith, clinging
to the Lord, "My God, My God, My covenant God, I am disinherited.
Why?"
And the answer is, of course, in order that we might be adopted.
In order that we might enter into the inheritance that was, in a sense, our destiny in Adam
but lost in him and now has become again in Jesus Christ our destiny.
And you remember how Paul follows this through in various places.
Indeed, he follows it through here in Ephesians chapter 1, because he hints also in Ephesians
chapter 1 that part of the result of our sinfulness is disintegration.
And not just that we are, as it were, disinherited but that we become part of a cosmic disintegration.
So that the whole creation is groaning even until now, longing for the day when our being
disinherited will be finally reversed, and we will experience the glory of the liberty
of the children of God in the resurrection of our bodies and in the final resurrection
and reconstitution of all things.
We, who were made to have dominion over the earth, become part of the earth.
We, who were made to have dominion over the animals, are trodden underfoot by the animals.
The creation groans.
We have no fellowship with that part of our family that remains unfallen in heaven's glory.
The very cosmic family of God has been fractured by our sinfulness.
But do you notice what he says here in Ephesians chapter 1, that God has shown us that according
to His purpose, verse 9, which He set forth in Christ, He has a plan for the fullness
of time to unite, to reintegrate all things in Christ, things in heaven and on earth.
That is to say, those strange creatures of whom we read in Isaiah chapter 6 and throughout
the book of Revelation, who are at least our cousins in glory, created, and indeed exercising
dominion as ministers of God from whom we are alienated.
To think that those two branches of the family that have been fractured by our sinfulness
are reintegrated in Jesus Christ so that it is true.
You have all experienced this, that He gives His angels charge over you.
Now many of you in this room those angels have protected, unseen, invisible.
You may even have entertained some of them unawares, because they usually don't look
like angels.
And this is the glory of the gospel.
Incidentally, this is why when people today come into a living church, even if, as most
of them are, completely ignorant of what the Christian gospel is, or antagonistic to what
the Christian gospel says, if they come into a living church, one of the first things that
they should experience and indeed, by God's grace, do experience is, "However much I am
antagonistic to what these people believe, I cannot deny that that there is something
about the way these people are with one another that reminds me of my sense of what life really
ought to be that we have lost."
And in chapter 1, Paul is therefore opening out to us the riches of our privileges in
Jesus Christ.
And as we, as we kind of, as we kind of do what we should never do with our pullovers,
as we as we pull on those loose threads a little, we discover that they unravel us and
reveal the totality of our depravity, the reality of our need.
And indeed, they help us to see behind the surface.
You know, if you read this Saturday glossy magazine and the quality newspaper that you
all read, whichever that is politically, I wonder if you have ever noticed the number
of asterisks that appear in the interviews with the beautiful people.
It's, it's really astonishing.
That have foul hearts, beautiful faces and that's, that's what our youngsters are encouraged
to aspire to, to be beautiful outward, but foul inward.
And you see, what does it tell us?
It tells us that you can gain the whole world and lose your own soul, because the whole
world will never transform what you are inwardly.
But the gospel of Jesus Christ, to whom we are united for justification, and in whom
we are simultaneously brought to share in His death to sin and resurrection to new life,
brings about this glorious gospel restoration.
And one day we will see it.
You remember how Paul speaks about this in 1 Corinthians 15, when he portrays Jesus as
the second man and the last Adam, bringing about this restoration?
And that little section in the middle of 1 Corinthians 15 ends with some of the most
challenging words in the whole of the New Testament, when he tells us at the end our
Lord Jesus as the second man and last Adam, having subdued everything to Himself, that
is to say brought together all the disintegration, all the disunity, under the unity of His own
headship, will then present it all, as our Mediator, in His capacity as the second man
and the last Adam, and then He Himself will be subject to the Father.
That doesn't mean that the second Person of the Trinity is subjecting Himself to the first
Person of the Trinity.
That means that the Son of God as the second man and the last Adam, that is as your Representative
and Savior is, as it were, leading the whole host of the redeemed to the throne of God
and saying, and this is the significance of the cry from the cross, "I have done it, and
now I do what Adam was called to do, having brought everything under My dominion.
I do that which he was created to do, when he had done it.
I bring it back to You, and say, 'Father, You gave me the garden, and now it's all garden,
and it's our love gift to You."
And instead of bowing before the tree, as you remember, Milton has Eve do as she leaves
the tree in Paradise Lost, the whole created order with Christ as its Head will do obeisance
to God, and He will be all in all.
The gospel brings us back to where we were created to be.
And this is what he's expounding here.
And he also hints in this context, we need our eyes open to be able to see this.
You'll notice how he puts this.
He speaks about God lavishing grace upon us in all wisdom and insight in verse 8, making
known to us the mystery of His will.
That's the difference between being a Christian and not being a Christian.
The mystery's been solved.
It's then that you notice how the greatest of our scientists who, in a sense, are at
pursuing what we were created to do, the dominion over all creation, not understanding that
they are seeking a dominion over a fractured creation.
You notice one of the things that drives them, at the, at the bottom of things, is to find
a principle of unity in the cosmos, while at the same time denying the existence of
God.
That's not true of all of them; it's true of some of them.
They are driven to explain the cosmos without explaining it in theistic terms.
And they are driven by it, and it's very evident.
And here is this great truth of the gospel that the humblest believer, who knows no scientific
formula, who failed his O Grade or GCSE algebra, is given the clue, the key to the mystery
and to the only way in which mankind will ever discover the unification of all things
in Jesus Christ.
And then Paul prays that our eyes will be open to see this.
And he does a very interesting thing, having done that, he says, "Now in order that our
eyes may be opened, let's look at this from the other direction."
And in chapter 6, in chapter 2, he comes to the wonder of the gospel in Jesus Christ from
the perspective of our sinfulness.
In chapter 1, from the perspective of the riches of God's grace to us in Jesus Christ,
in the first section in chapter 2, from the perspective of our sinfulness.
And he begins to explore what the fall has done to us.
We are not just sick, but we are dead in our trespasses and sins, for all it looked to
us that we were completely alive.
And he has this marvelous expression.
You know G.K.
Chesterton said that one of the great things about the gospel, which of course he didn't
fully understand is, it seems to go quirky exactly where things go quirky.
We were dead in our trespasses and sins in which we once walked.
Is that a contradiction?
The dead do not walk, but these dead do walk.
We were the -- when I went to the United States first of all I used to run into these, not
literally, but behind these bashed up cars with signs on the back "Grateful Dead."
And I thought it was a Roman Catholic prayer society until I was enlightened that I was
just a generation too late, and these were deadheads.
And I thought, "You know, maybe I should put a bumper on the, a bumper sticker on mine
that says "Living Dead," living dead, because we have all the appearance of living and walking,
but when we are walking in our trespasses and sins, we are in fact spiritually dead.
And this is why we, and this is why Paul is praying that our eyes will be open to see
that this life is actually a living death.
I remember sitting outside on one of the two sunny days there were in Scotland a number
of years ago, and just out of the corner of my eye, I saw a robin.
For some reason or another, ever since childhood, I have liked rabbits and robins.
Seagulls are after your fish and chips, you know, in Pittenweem, or Portstewart, and blackbirds,
pigeons, they are all the result of the fall, somehow or another.
Robins, and, just as I was reading a bit, out of the corner of my eye, I just caught
the redness, and it was near to me, and it just seemed so beautiful, my heart was, my
heart actually leapt at the thought, that, you know, here is tenderhearted Sinclair Ferguson,
and this robin knows it, and, you know, he knows I'm safe.
And then, I realized the robin wasn't moving, and as a lover of robins, when I realized
the truth, my heart sank.
The robin was beautiful, but it was motionless.
It was dead.
That's what Paul is saying here.
No matter how beautiful, this is why the billions that are now being poured into schools and
other organizations by governments all over the Western world to help youngsters have
a better self-image are bound to fail because they keep saying to the dead, "Live," but
they have no gospel that will bring the life.
And Paul is saying, "You see, if you're going to understand."
This is surely one of the reasons why God put Luther through the mill all these years,
because when he discovered the depravity of his best works, then he was shaped providentially
to be the instrument to teach men and women raised up by God that there is salvation for
the most depraved, including Martin Luther.
So we are dead in our trespasses and sins, and in which we have walked, and we're not
only dead in our trespasses and sins, but think of how relevant this is, the result
of that, says Paul, is that we walk in a certain way.
That's not, that's not kind of language that's become so common, and sometimes in our translations,
actually, the Greek is kind of shaded "to live" but it means "walked."
And isn't it interesting?
Yet, it must have crossed your mind that there are two things you can do instantaneously
for which you have no explanation.
You pick up the phone, you hear one word, and you know exactly who it is.
And the other is, you're walking down the street and you see somebody, and you are just
looking at the bottom half, and you know exactly who they are by the way they walk.
And Paul is saying, "When your eyes are opened, you understand that what you're looking at
is the walk of death."
And the evidence of the walk of death is that if you are one of the great rebels, actually
you turned out to be a conformist.
We're awash with that, aren't we?
How do I conform to these other people who are the living dead?
And we are, we are prisoners.
We are following the course of this age.
We are following the prince of the power of the air.
We think we are walking to our destiny when we are walking to the pit, and we don't know
But when the gospel comes, we begin to see it.
And the marvel of this is there is an integration in the mind and then in the affections and
therefore, grabbing the heart when we understand this counterpoint of sin and grace.
It is not possible to find God's grace in Jesus Christ, that is as we have been reminded
Jesus Christ Himself.
It's not possible to see Him as a wonderful Savior, unless you see the depravity from
which He has saved you.
Superficial views of sin inevitably are connected to superficial views of grace, and superficial
views of grace in Jesus Christ are inevitably connected to superficial views of sin.
And the two are inevitably connected to a superficial view of the Christian life.
But Paul is saying when you realize all the that is yours in Christ, and when correspondingly
God, as it were, opens up to you the depravity of your heart and the depravity of your lifestyle,
then the glory of the gospel, not only in this aspect of what Christ has done for us,
but what Christ does in us, becomes truly a wonderful exchange.
And the dead are made to live, and those who walked as prisoners walk as Christ's free
men.
You would almost think that Paul was able to see that the Reformation would take place,
because you notice where he says in that context.
It's as though he says, "I know what you're thinking."
If you preach this gospel of free grace, then the response is going to be "free grace, free
lifestyle."
Teach people that they are justified in Jesus Christ by grace through faith, and they will
live anyway they want.
And Paul deals with that in several places.
You notice the way he deals with it in this context.
He says, "Far from it, because those who are united to Christ, for whom all this is true
-- justification, redemption, adoption, inheritance, reintegration in Christ, life from the dead
in Christ, they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for the good works that He
who chose them in Christ before the foundation of the world has destined them to walk in."
I mean the thing about the gospel is its utter rightness as a glorious way of salvation.
And this, as we have been hearing, is what the Reformers discovered, what by God's grace
we too have discovered, that fills our hearts with praise and joy.
And you'll notice what is the most obvious thing in Ephesians chapter 1, that Paul says
all of this brings us back to our created destiny.
Remember, I put, it said in Romans 1, he says the problem is we have exchanged the glory
of God for our sinfulness and idolatry.
And when he describes sin in Romans chapter 3 verse 23, which you all memorized within
two weeks of your conversion, "all have sinned."
And as if I were finishing the sentence, I would say, "All have sinned and have broken
the law of God," he does not actually say that.
It's true, but it's not the truth that he teaches in that verse.
He says the real tragedy is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
And you'll notice the refrain that runs through Ephesians chapter 1.
All this is to the praise of the glory of His grace.
All this is to the praise of His glory.
It's sola Scriptura, as we've been hearing.
It's sola gratia, as we've been hearing.
It's sola fide, as we've been hearing.
It's sola Christus, as we've been hearing, and it's soli Deo gloria as well.
What a gospel!
And what a privilege to be a Christian.
Are you a Christian?
Let's pray together:
Lord, we thank You for Your Word.
We thank You for the riches of the gospel.
We thank You for giving us attentiveness this morning.
We've listened to more this morning than we usually do in an entire week, and we've learned
more history than we usually do in an entire year.
We thank You that we belong to the company of those who are justified and are being sanctified
and one day will be finally glorified in our Savior Jesus Christ.
Oh, keep with us, we pray today, and help us to taste and see that You truly are good.
We pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
Chrome Extension