God’s Heart of Deliverance

Ephesians 2:8

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you turn to Ephesians please and look at the verse that we’re on today, Ephesians 2:8. “For by
grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.”
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of
God.” It’s really the conclusion of those verses you remember, that began there especially at Verse
4, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were
dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and
raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the
coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ
Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the
gift of God.” So that’s it.

I don’t know if you had the same difficulty I had with the gospel. It was – it came to me as God
has forgiven you your sins because Jesus has died for you. And I wasn’t – I mean, I wasn’t a good
little catholic boy but I was a good little protestant boy and I wanted obviously, to believe the
authorities and our preachers. And so I of course, accepted that. God has forgiven me my sins,
because Jesus has died for me. I have to say that – I mean, I wouldn’t have put it in these terms
at that time, but I thought it was the stupidest thing. I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying that
because I would have thought that is sacrilege, and I’m wrong. But inside in my little heart and
little mind, I thought, “Wait a minute; God has forgiven me my sins because Jesus has died for me.”

Alright, but I don’t see why God should have done that. I just don’t see why he should have done
that. If the wages of sin is death, and I’m the one that sinned, then I should have died. And how
come God – again, I didn’t put it in these terms in those days, but I really thought, “Why did God
kill the wrong guy?” Why did Jesus’ dying enable God to forgive me my sins?

And when I began to study theology, you realize that there were verses like, “He gave his life a
ransom for many.” And I tried to work through the various theories that the theologians put forward
to explain that. And sometimes they would say, “It’s a ransom paid to the devil.” Jesus paid that
ransom to the devil, so that I didn’t have to pay it. And of course, the ransom – the death was the
ransom that he paid. And then of course, there were other theologians who said, “Well that makes
Satan the king of the universe and means that God had to kind of satisfy Satan,” so of course then
there were others who said, “No, Jesus paid his life a ransom to the law of righteousness which
demands death. And so Jesus paid that ransom of death to the law of righteousness.”

But then I used to think, “Well, who set up the law of righteousness? That’s God isn’t it? Well,
then did God demand a ransom from Jesus?” And it was hard to understand it, because obviously there
were other verses like, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” So how could – I
mean, God seemed to be with Jesus, he seemed to be in Jesus, and yet here was Jesus paying a ransom
‘to’ God. And then I would read the verses, “This is foolishness to those who do not believe.” And
so, “God is pleased to save us through the foolishness of the gospel.”

So I kind of went with that for years. I thought, “Well, that’s it; it’s foolish; it doesn’t make

any sense, but that’s what God has presented to us, and if I believe that then he will forgive me my
sins.” And so that’s what I endeavored then to do. I endeavored to believe this thing that didn’t
make sense to me, but I reckoned, “God has forgiven my sins, because I believed it.” And that’s the
foolishness of the gospel.

Now as I went on in my own life, I have to say that God therefore, seemed a kind of flat figure to
me in a way. He seemed a kind of flat. I couldn’t make sense of him. He wasn’t somebody I could
understand, because he had kind of set up this strange arrangement for the forgiveness of my sins,
and I was prepared to believe it, because he’s the authority behind the universe. But I couldn’t
quite see the sense of it. And so it left a gap between me and God. I believed it, but he wasn’t
sort of a person I could feel with, or feel for, because of the seemingly silliness of the
arrangement. And the most important thing was, it didn’t really touch my moral life, or my
volitional life, because there seemed no sense to it: Jesus died for my sins, and God forgave me,
and so now it was up to me to do my best to avoid sin. And so that’s – I went to it.

In Methodism we would have presented it as, “You need to do works worthy of repentance.” So you do
works worthy of repentance. I think in the Catholic Church we presented it as they were good works;
these are good works by which you gain in a sense, some mercy and some grace. But however it was,
we all seemed to end up in kind of adding something to this business of faith. And it was very
easy, you can see, to turn faith itself into a kind of work, because you felt, “This thing doesn’t
make too much sense, but I am saved by grace through faith, so it’s my faith probably that saves
me.” And therefore you would try to exercise good faith. And in a strange way it was easy to fall
back into works, because it was very easy to make faith a work, to make faith something that you
felt you exercised. You felt you had it, or you didn’t have it. And I think it often brought many
of us, including myself, into doubts about where you were in salvation, because you might feel,
“Well, I’m exercising my faith. Why? Because I’m succeeding; I’m overcoming sin. And so I’m
exercising good faith.” Or sometimes we’d say it was feelings, “Oh yes, I feel, I feel I believe in
Jesus.” And so depending on whether your faith was up or down you felt you were saved, or you were
forgiven, or whatever.

Now, I think that all of this, what I would say is truncated gospel or diluted gospel, in fact — I
wonder if you wouldn’t even say it’s a perverted gospel, a perversion of the gospel. I think it
came from this total failure to see how deep and how far in the past was God’s whole plan for us. I
think it’s due to our failure to see the reality of God’s foreknowledge. And so we never really
have realized how deeply we are embedded in his own heart. And I think you only begin to realize
that and see the sense of the whole death and resurrection of Jesus, when we begin to take seriously
those verses.

And I’ll just put them up just so they are here and you can see them, but I hardly need to mention
them, because Colossians 1:15-20 is that whole passage where Jesus is said to be the fullness of the
invisible God, and that in him all things were created and without him nothing was created that was
created, and he was before all things, and all things hold together in him. And the important
phrase of course was, “He is the first-born of all creation.” And that was – I’ve explained it to
you before — that was a surprise to me, that Jesus was the first-born of all creation; that
actually before there was any world, Jesus was born as the first human being. And that’s what that
verse is. And then I think there’s one, the one we often have shared, Ephesians 2:10. And it just
runs, “For we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works prepared beforehand that
we should walk in them.” But “Created in Christ Jesus.” And that was a revelation for me, not only
that Jesus himself was the first-born of creation, I always thought Jesus was the divine Son of God,

and had nothing to do with humanity.

I did have difficulty with the Son of man phrases, where it talked about when the Son of man comes
in his glory and all his holy angels with him… And that was obviously Jesus coming from heaven on
judgment day, and yet he was called the Son of man. I was not able to make sense of that. But then
I began to realize he was the Son of man because he was the first-born of creation; he was the first
human being. And that’s why he’s always called the Son of man even when he rises from the dead and
ascends to his Father. He’s talked about as the Son of man even in Revelation, and that Jesus
became a human being as well as being the divine Son of God, and that in him, all of us were
created, long before the foundation of the world. And that’s what that says.

And then 2 Corinthians 5:14 where it says that we judge, “That one has died for all; therefore all
have died;” and that Jesus died, and we all died with him, and that he had all of us inside him.
That he was born there [Pastor indicates a time line on the whiteboard and the place on the far left
where God conceives of the creation of everything in his son, Jesus] and all of us were put into him
there. And we were created in him. And then when he was crucified then all of us were crucified
also. And he died for all and therefore all died. And then Romans 8:28 summarizes it all actually,
because – you might want to look at it, it’s that well known verse that we quote so often where it
says, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called
according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the
image of his Son.”

So he foreknew us. When he created us in Jesus he foreknew that we would actually rebel against
him, that we would go our own way. And that’s why he put us into Jesus. So that even though we
went our own way, and we would have to be destroyed and remade, we would be that inside the Savior
himself, because Jesus was the only one in which that kind of thing could take place and anything
could be left to tell the story.

And so we were placed in Christ and God foreknew that we would rebel against him, foreknew that we
would have to be destroyed, and placed us in Jesus for that reason. And he – at that moment, I
began to see something of God’s dear heart. I mean, who of us, if we had a son, would allow cancer
to be put inside him so that it could be destroyed? Especially, if it meant his destruction also.
None of us. And there I began to see, “Wait a minute, this isn’t a game that God set up whereby he
killed the wrong man. This isn’t some kind of little logical dialectic argument that he carried
out. This was something that he planned from the first moment that he conceived — not just of you
and me, but the first moment that he conceived of his Son Jesus, he saw all this.”

And then I began to realize, that God’s heart was intimately involved in all this from the very
beginning. And he, when he looked out on thousands, and thousands of years of world history, he saw
the dragging out, the draining out of the blood of his own heart as he bore us, and bore us, and
bore us. And every time one little child was destroyed by the sword of some soldier, God was in
that little child, because that little child was part of Jesus. And he felt not only the pain of
the blade going into the child’s body, but he also in Jesus, was in that solider and he felt the
strain, the anger of that solider, the hatred of the solider. So every time that kind of incident
occurred throughout history, our Father was involved in it. He was feeling it.

And you may say, “Well why, why, why?” Well, God is a responsible person. God cannot – he is not
the kind of person who can say, “I’ll make lots of little human beings, and I’ll let them tear each
other apart, and then I’ll come in at the end and I’ll pick out the good ones.” That’s not our

Father. Our Father is one who is responsible for every thought he has, and for everything that he
does. And he cannot do anything without committing himself to bearing all the consequences of that.

And that is what all this is about. And I certainly began to realize more – well, I mean, I put it
down on the paper there because I wanted to see it myself, but more how reality and the heart of God
are connected directly to one another. Reality and the heart of God are connected together. And
everything that occurs here, and the whole gospel is really an expression of God’s own heart, and
how his heart is intimately connected with all of us, and how he has said, “I am willing to bear
this, because I love you. And it’s just by grace that you’re saved. It’s because of all this. It’s
because of my attitude to you.”

I knew – I used to wonder — “your sins shall be as wool?” “Even though they are like scarlet they
shall be as wool.” And I used to think, “Well that’s just prophetic. That’s just talking about
what he was going to do with the Israelites.” I think it’s even more than that. I think it’s God
looking at all of us and saying, “Even if you sin tomorrow I’ve committed myself to you. I’ve
committed myself to you. I have already borne that. I already saw that millions of years ago.
I’ve committed myself to you. You’re saved by grace. Not by your faith, but you’re saved by grace.
And this is not your own doing. It’s not what you do. It’s not the faith that you exercise. It’s
not even your attitude to this. You’re saved by my grace, by my own merited favor, by my generous
and merciful love by my readiness to make you, even though I know you’re going to go wrong. And I’m
committing myself to bearing that wrong.” And so this is not your own doing, it’s the gift of God.
You might say even faith, even the faith, in a way, is the gift of God. It’s not your own doing at
all.

And so it comes home to you very strongly that this dear Father of ours, he’s just mercy and
generosity all the way. And actually what came home to me was probably just a personal thing for me
but, if he has this attitude to me, what attitude have I to everybody else? And I saw if he has
committed himself to keeping a place for me by his side, whatever I do, then what is to be my
attitude to everybody else? Am I going to – he has a whole whiteboard here [Pastor indicates that
place on the timeline where God conceived of all of us in his son, Jesus] where he’s wiped
everything out, am I going to keep my little notebook here and kind of “x” it out against this
person or that person? Have I any right to judge anybody, or to rebuke anybody even, in the light
of what his attitude has been to me?

So it certainly is clear, that we are saved by grace, and it’s not our own doing. And that’s why I
think Barth [Karl Barth, 1886 – 1968, Swiss theologian] says there’s only one way we can live. And
it sounds like a bit of an understatement, but I think he’s exactly right. There’s only one way we
can live and that is live our lives out in gratitude to God. In gratitude. I remember one of the
pieces of the liturgy in the Anglican service days, “It is meet, right, and our bounden duty, that
we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto Thee, O Lord, our Strength and our
Redeemer.” And let’s all begin to live our lives in just constant gratitude to him, and
thanksgiving, and in joy.

Let us pray.