Well, By Grace Alone, a number of years ago,
I think probably sometime around ten years ago, our church in Scotland bought a new hymnbook.
And the real reason we bought a new hymnbook…. You understand that when you go to Scotland,
you are not given a hymnbook that’s got tunes it. You’re given a hymnbook that has
only words in it. And so coming to live and work in the United States of America, I discovered
when I was about 30, in my early 30s that I was usually going up when I should have
been going down. And I still have something of a tendency to do that. It’s usually accidental.
But we bought our new hymnbook for one simple reason. It was that this hymnbook had understandable
and singable versions of the 150 Psalms (or Psalms [American pronunciation]). And one of the things I’ve really been committed
to during my ministry is that the congregations I’ve serve should read through or sing through,
and preferably both, the entire Psalter. In fact, in our own church in Columbia, this
Sunday night we come to the 150th Psalm, as we’ve read and sung our way through the
Psalter. And I’m sure at the church door on Sunday night people are going to say to
me, “So, what do we do now that we’ve finished number 150?” And it was in this new hymnbook that I first
came across this hymn by an African pastor by the name of Emmanuel T. Sibomana. Pastor
Sibomana was I think converted in the days of what some of you may know as the Rwandan
revival. That was a very remarkable movement of God among the Rwandan people. And Pastor
Sibomana was brought to faith in Christ, became a gospel minister. Not very much is known
about him. Actually one of the things that has been suggested to me about him – I’ve
no reason to regard this as deficient information – but that there was a time when he drifted
away from the Lord. And in God’s grace, he was restored wonderfully to a joyful walking
in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as we made our way through this hymnbook,
we came to this particular hymn – a hymn about grace. It’s actually printed in the
book. I think there may still be a version of it on the Ligonier website, so that you
can actually hear what it sounds like. And I became intrigued by this hymn that we just
discovered as we made our way through the hymnbook, “How the Grace of God Amazes Me.”
And there were several things in particular that struck me about the hymn. The first thing,
of course, was that it was yet another hymn on the grace of God. And I think I had come to feel in many ways
that many of us in the Christian church, not least in Reformed churches where we emphasis
that salvation is by grace alone, that we had actually grown rather accustomed to grace
and that many little subtle things had begun to take place in our lives. Of course, we
needed the saving grace of God in order to become Christians, but now that we are Christians
then in a kind of exponential way we might need the grace of God less and less. Whereas
one of the things that the New Testament so emphasized was that the longer you go on in
the Christian life, the more you became conscious of your need for the grace of God in Jesus
Christ. Another thing I supposed I’d learned just
through pastoral experience was this, that Christian people tend to fall off the gospel
center either into what we usually call legalism or on the other hand antinomianism – a legalism
in which we are restricted and bound and we make sure that other people will be restricted
and bound with us, or an antinomianism that makes us think and say things like, “Free
from the law, oh blessed condition. I can sin as I please and still have remission.”
I’ve found that fairly frequently when people I was traveling with were breaking the speed
limit, and I might say, “Ahem, ahem.” And they would say, “Well, I’m free from
the law,” the implication being that once you have found the grace of God in Jesus Christ,
who has obeyed God’s law for you, you can forget about obedience to God’s law. And that had become a very striking thing
to me because of course in the great promise of Jeremiah about the new covenant in Christ.
The effect of the new covenant – and I’m astonished how many Christians emphasize that
we’re living in the new covenant but don’t take the time to read what the Scriptures
say about living in the new covenant – that the effect of living in the new covenant and
the power of the Holy Spirit is that what the Spirit writes into your heart is the law
of God. It’s a very striking statement, isn’t it, and cited of course in the letter
to the Hebrews, the kind of thing that Paul says in Romans 8:3 and 4. As he has emphasized
there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, he goes on to emphasize that
what the law couldn’t do because it was weak through our flesh, God has done sending
His Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh in
order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in those who believe
and who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. And so I found myself often trying to walk
that narrow but wonderfully liberating path that the New Testament teaches us that enables
us to disable legalism and preserve us from antinomianism. And as I pondered this, I began
to realize reading Paul’s letter something that seemed to me to be of primary importance,
and it was this. Our tendency when we are legalists is to think we can resolve the problem
by throwing in a little antinomianism. And our problem when we confront antinomians is
to what to turn them into legalists. But the New Testament does neither of these two things.
The striking thing that I felt the New Testament greatly emphasized and especially the Apostle
Paul, not just in Romans and Galatians but everywhere, was that he saw that the resolution
for both antinomianism in our spirits and legalism in our spirits was one and the same
resolution. And it was this – the grace of God in the gospel. And you notice when he deals with antinomians
in, for example, Romans, chapter 6, “Will we continue in sin that grace may abound?”
His answer is not, “No, you need to add obedience.” His answer is, “My friend
if you ask that question, it’s fairly clear you have very little understanding of what
the grace of God actually is.” And similarly, on the other hand as he deals with legalism
in its various forms, he emphasizes that it is the grace of God in the gospel that transforms
legalism into joyful, faithful obedience to Jesus Christ. And I think it was probably that in my spiritual
and pastoral pilgrimage that rather led me to believe that the grace of God might not
be as well and clearly understood among us as it really needs to be. And when I came
across this hymn, which actually is very different from every other hymn I’d come across. I
thought, you know, it would be a great thing for our people if I took seven Lord’s Day
evenings – because there were seven verses in the hymn – and picked up the theme of
each of these verses and expounded it from some passage in Scripture. Because of that,
this book does not have a kind of systematic order, nor is it for that matter an exposition
of the hymn, but it is an exposition of the themes of the hymn. And they are as follows, first of all that
saving grace sets us free from bondage. Second, that saving grace is God’s unconditional
love that transforms our lives into joyful obedience. Thirdly, that God’s grace comes
to us through Jesus Christ. Now, just at that point let me pause and say
something that I think is quite important for the thesis of this book. God is not gracious
to me because Jesus Christ died for me. Let me say that again. God does not become gracious
to me because Jesus Christ died for me. Jesus Christ died for me because God is gracious
to me. Now, why do I say that? Because I’ve often heard the gospel preached in exactly
that way. What Jesus Christ did on the cross made God gracious towards us. But that’s
not the teaching of John 3:16, apart from anywhere else in the Scriptures, is it? What
John 3:16 teaches is that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. And that
I would say turning an element of the gospel on its head was something that I wanted to
emphasis in the course of this book for this reason, that if I believe that the Heavenly
Father becomes gracious to me because Christ did something that constrained Him to be gracious
to me, then one of the things I’ve done is to place a wedge in between the grace of
the Lord Jesus Christ and the grace of the Heavenly Father. And actually that was significant in this
book, and it was significant for me behind it in pastoral ministry because I had met
so many Christians who had a disposition of love and faith toward the Lord Jesus but had
very little sense of the absoluteness of the grace of God the Father towards them and a
certain uncertainty and therefore a lack of confidence and assurance as though so how
or another the Father was hidden behind the Son, and there might just…, you know, his
hand might just be in a clenched fist behind His back if Jesus didn’t get in the way
to say, “Father, don’t hit them.” And of course, what was even more fundamental
than that was that that notion that Jesus did something to constrain the Father to be
gracious meant that there was an inbuilt, essential difference of disposition towards
sinners between the Father and the Son, and therefore, between the Father and the Son
and the Holy Spirit. And our doctrine of God the Trinity and His unity of disposition towards
us – that the Father lovingly, graciously planned salvation, that the Son willingly
effected salvation, that the Spirit delights to apply salvation – that in a sense as
we’ve been thinking already in this conference, the very doctrine of God was a stake in this.
And therefore, a right understanding of the grace of God in the gospel was so very, very
important to us. And of course, that’s effected in the work of Jesus Christ for us. And if
Christ has died for us, that guarantees our security. Again, that was simply a principle
of the grace of God, the Trinity, that the Holy Spirit would not fail to accomplish that
for which the Son died, and that which the Heavenly Father in his infinite and eternal
glory had planned for us, and that at the end of the day, it was sinking ourselves into
this grace that enabled us to withstand the subtle temptations of the evil one. Because one of the things I’d become convinced
of, and I thought that I saw echoes of this in Pastor Sibomana, was this that just as
Steve Lawson was emphasizing from Genesis 3 that the serpent was engaged not only in
a denial of God’s Word, but he was actually engaged in a twisting of God’s character.
“Has God put you in the marvelous garden, all these magnificent trees, and has He said
to you you’re not to have any of them?” I sometimes pictured that like a Christian
who felt towards the Heavenly Father like a child who had been taken into a department
store the week before Christmas and shown the toy department, and then with a kind of
malicious cackle, his father would say to him, “Did you like all these toys, son?
Well, none of them will be yours this Christmas.” And I’d come to realize actually that was
how many Christians actually felt about the Father. And then as I’d read I began to
discover that this was… this was a pastoral need with which the great masters of pastoral
ministry had already dealt. John Owen, for whom I had a great love, was a primary illustration
of this. And he says at one point, I think in the second volume of his works, he says,
“How few there are who have a real appreciation of the Heavenly Father’s gracious disposition
towards them.” And I find myself with doubting and struggling Christians, having to re-gospel
them and in a sense to re-Trinity them. And in so many ways, this particular hymn gave
wonderful expression, not systematic expression, not even logical expression, not exegetical
expression, but real expression to the nature of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. There are two particular verses, and therefore
two particular chapters that I thought at the time were very important to include. The
fifth verse of Pastor Sibomana’s hymn goes like this: Now all my heart’s desire
Is to abide In Him, my Savior dear,
In Him to hide. My shield and buckler He,
Covering and protecting me; From Satan’s darts I’ll be
Safe at His side. That expression Satan’s darts, how does
the grace of God in the gospel protect us from Satan’s darts? And then in the next
verse: Lord Jesus, hear my prayer,
Your grace impart; When evil thoughts arise
Through Satan’s art, O, drive them all away,
And do You from day to day, Keep me beneath Your sway,
King of my heart. And I was struck by this, particularly that
last verse. “Lord Jesus, hear my prayer, Your grace impart; when evil thoughts arise
through Satan’s art.” What are these evil thoughts? Well, I thought I knew what they
were both by pastoral observation, by reading in the works of far greater pastors than myself,
and from observation of the human heart. That there were – I couldn’t say how many Christians
– but there were numbers of Christians that I found myself seeking to help and encourage
who came to me in a spirit of dread because for example they had found malicious or even
blasphemous thoughts about the Lord Jesus coming into their minds. Now, it’s likely
that in a group this size there are many of us who… who if somebody said that to us,
we just couldn’t imagine what that would be like and we would doubt whether this person
was really a Christian. That would be a sign among other things that we’d never read
Pilgrim’s Progress, that we, for we all we love Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that we didn’t
know much about Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and that this was the experience strikingly of
both John Bunyan and C. H. Spurgeon. That there was a… there were darts of Satan and
there was an art of Satan, and that art of Satan in some mysterious way was his ability
for in ways that we cannot understand, as it were, to fire those darts suddenly into
the minds of believers, believers not knowing that they had come from an ambush and therefore
not able to distinguish between those injections of Satan and the thoughts and dispositions
of their own hearts. And I found as I had tried to read widely over the years of my
Christian life, that many of the Puritan writers had found among Christians exactly the same
thing. And that the response therefore, you can’t possibly be a Christian if there are
thoughts like that in your mind, was actually somewhat akin to Job’s comforters saying
the root of the problem is in you. And the striking thing because there’s a
lengthy section in this book on the experience of Job, the striking thing about the book
of Job is that some of the most magnificent theology in all the Bible is in the book of
Job in the mouths of Job’s comforters, and they do disastrous things with true theology
because their minds are dimmed to the reality which every reader of the book of Job understands
if he opens the book or she opens the book at the first page and realizes what neither
Job nor his comforters realize, that all that’s happening to Job that’s effecting these
struggles against God – he feels that God is pounding him and destroying him – and
so inevitably he’s beginning as the older writers used to say, to think hard thoughts
of God. But actually all of that was the production of the evil one, and that therefore his place
of ambush needed to be thrown over and the origin of these thoughts needed to be unmasked,
not as the disposition of the individual who struggled against them and hated them even
while having them, but to recognize as Job does at one point in the book of Job, – what
actually I think is the high point in the whole point of Job before you reach the climax
– he cries out as he’s saying to God, “God, why are You doing this? I hate it.
Why are you doing this to me?” And then he asks this question, “If it isn’t
Him, who then is it?” And if we were here as an audience watching Job as a drama being
played out on the stage, and before the drama had begun out onto the front of the stage
before the curtain was drawn for us to see Job and his whole experience, we had seen
those descriptions in Job 1 and Job 2 of the desires of Satan. At that point in the drama
of Job, most of us would be standing up, shouting to him, shouting at him, “Job, it’s not
God. These dispositions you feel, and you’re feeling them now, beginning to feel them towards
God, they’re actually injected into you by Satan, and they’re really fit to be directed
against Satan. And this has been true, I think, through most
of my ministry, that there’s a constant little dribble of God’s often dear sensitive
saints, who as Calvin says in The Institutes, find themselves almost driven to madness by
despair. And they don’t know where the ambush is. And they assume it’s all coming from
their own heart, and they need to learn to distinguish between the thoughts and intentions
of their regenerate spirits and these malicious and at times blasphemous thoughts that have
crept into their minds. And actually, I think one of the interesting
things about the book is that when on those occasions people try to encourage you by telling
you they’ve actually enjoyed the book, it’s been interesting to me that I think of all
the chapters, those are the particular chapters that seem to have helped many Christians most
of all. There’s one other thing that I think I maybe
should mention about the book – one thing I should say and one thing I should mention.
The only reason I’m doing this is because of the golden rule which says you’re supposed
to do to others what you would want them to do for you. And I just find, I find that endlessly
fascinating listening to people talk about what they’ve done and why they’ve done
it. So I’m constrained joyfully to do this. The other thing I want to say is this. Just
in the course of life and in the course of my study of theology, I had become somewhat
convinced that even after the Reformation many Christian thinkers maintained an understanding
of grace that belonged to the pre-Reformation church and not to the New Testament gospel
or to the teaching of the post-Reformation church. And what I mean by that was this,
that in the pre-Reformation church with its sacramentalism, grace was essentially a substance.
And you got more or less of it. And I had begun to feel actually that many Christians
think and speak of grace in exactly that way. It’s a substance of which you get more or
less. And so I wanted to emphasize in this book that grace is not a substance. In that
sense, it’s not a thing. What the New Testament speaks about is not grace as a substance,
of which you can get more or less, but the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ because grace
isn’t a substance. Grace is a person characterized by His saving work. And so if I can put it
this way, there isn’t… there isn’t anything between the sinner and Jesus Christ. I don’t
go to Jesus Christ to get grace. I go to Jesus Christ to get Jesus Christ. And as Paul says
in Ephesians 1, when I get Jesus Christ, I get all grace and every spiritual blessing
in Him. At least I think that’s what the book is about. It’s a couple of years since
I read it.
