Grace Alone

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Let's begin with prayer. Lord God, this day, as we study these solas, as we study your word, as we focus on you, we ask, Lord, this message would give us a deeper understanding of your grace and what that means for our lives and how freeing that is and how wonderful that is and how amazing it really is, Lord, to be saved by grace alone, through faith alone, recorded in the scriptures alone, that that gives us such freedom, such joy, such peace, everything from you, Lord God. Thank you, Lord, for that. We thank you, Lord, that we're not the only Christian church celebrating this or being a part of this movement. Your Christian church throughout all the ages, at all times, is focused on this grace, Lord, that we have through Jesus. So we thank you for, in our area, many other pulpits, many other places, many other pastors and many other Christians who are celebrating your grace today. We pray that for your one church in many expressions, that your grace would be clear and true and full, that others may understand who they are because of you. All this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Today we're going to focus on the first of the solas. That's a Latin word, actually, sola, meaning alone. And the first is sola gratia. Latin was the key language in those days that everybody could communicate in, actually, in the 1500s, across the entire Western European world. It was the scholastic language, I guess you would say, and I'm glad it died out. Because that's the last thing I really wanted to learn. Anybody learn Latin in school? You did. Did you like it? Yeah. I know Pig Latin. Are you serious? Wow. A dead language. Well, it's very good in terms of a lot of things. It helps you understand many other languages out of Latin. But anyways, sola gratia today. It was written in Latin so that anybody could read it, instead of just in one language like German or maybe Swedish or something like that. We're only a few. And that's kind of the important thing, too, is to get it out, to get the word out in whatever language, to get the understanding out. So we're looking at that, and we're going to be reading from Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 through 10. So you can follow along, and this is what it reads. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved, and raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages we might know the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward 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, not a result of works, so that no one can boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So 500 years ago, this Tuesday, was the start of what's called the Reformation. It was really a revolution, an earthquake, that not only impacted Christianity, but actually most civilization. If you study this in history, you will find it affected how families operate, how cities, how villages, how towns, how everything. It was like throwing a huge rock in a pond, and you know how those waves kind of come out? It just affected everything, because that's the reality of God's grace. When it is received and fully understood, fully comprehended, as fully as we can, it impacts everything in your life. It doesn't just hit this little spiritual area, everything is impacted in your life and mine. And so we're going to look at what this means today, grace alone. What's so amazing about grace? It's a great book, by the way, by Philip Yancey, written a few years ago, and in fact I heard one of the home huddles is reading this book, fantastic, I'm glad, and he asked that question, what's so amazing about grace? So if you're looking for a good devotional book, this one's a good one to start with right now. I think it's got a lot in it. And he says, well, I'll tell you what's so amazing. Just imagine right now a world of ungrace, where grace does not exist. None. It's where every wrong is forever wrong and cannot be righted in any form. It's where everything that has been made a mistake is permanent, where there is no forgiveness, and where retribution and that cycle keeps going. So if somebody does something to you, you do it back to them twice as hard, then th...