Grace is More than Amazing
“Grace is More than Amazing”
Rom. 3:9-26
A. On August 5 2010, 33 men were trapped in a copper and gold mine in Copiapo Chile. They
were rescued on Oct. 13 after 69 days. They were trapped over 2,300 feet below ground and
3 miles from the mine’s entrance. The miners survived longer than anyone else trapped
underground. The 33 men moved to an underground emergency shelter area, where they
discovered just several days’ worth of food rations. As their situation grew more desperate
the miners, uncertain if anyone would find them, considered suicide and cannibalism. Then,
on August 22, 17 days later, a drill sent by rescuers broke through to the area where the
miners were located, and the men sent back up a note saying, “We are fine in the refuge, the
33.” Food, water, letters, medicine and other supplies were soon delivered to the miners via
a narrow bore hole. The miners maintained a system of jobs in order to keep up morale.
Rescuers eventually drilled and reinforced an escape shaft wide enough to extract the men,
one by one. (Employees of a Pennsylvania-based drilling-tool company played a role in
drilling the rescue shaft.) On October 12, the first of the miners was raised to the surface in
a narrow, 13-foot-tall capsule painted white, blue and red, the colors of the Chilean flag.
The approximately 2,000-foot ascent to the surface in the capsule took around 15 minutes
for each man. The miners were greeted by a cheering crowd that included Chile’s president,
Sebastian Pinera; media from around the world; and friends and relatives, many of whom
had been camped at the base of the mine in the Atacama Desert for the entire 69 days.
1. We will come back to the Chilean minors a little later, but before that we need to talk
about what’s so amazing about grace.
B. Grace may be the most-known word in the Bible that very few people really understand.
1. A madman shot up a concert in Las Vegas, NV killing 60 people including himself and
wounding so many more. The next day I saw a vigil being held and participants were
singing Amazing Grace. Since it’s Las Vegas, I bet you that 95% of the people in that
audience don’t understand grace. As a matter of fact, I’m still trying to understand it.
2. Eph. 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it
is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
3. Bob Lowery of Lincoln Christian College says that outside of God and Jesus, the word
“grace” is the third most-important word in the Bible. Jesus never used the word, but He
demonstrated it. John said Jesus was full of grace.
4. Grace contains both good and bad news.
I. THE BAD NEWS: YOU ARE NOT GOOD.
A. If you have ever been to a funeral and most of us have, somewhere along the way someone
will say something like this, “Zeke was a good man.”
1. The real question is good compared to what? Good compared to his neighbors, good
compared to his brothers? Good compared to his co-workers. How about compared to
Jesus? Well, Zeke wasn’t perfect you know. Yes, and that’s a problem.
2. Mark 10:17-18 “As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt
before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ And
Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.’”
B. Grace is meaningless without the knowledge of sin.
1. Grace only has meaning if there is an alternative that has to be considered.
2. In our text, Paul made the following 14 statements:
There is none righteous, not even one;
there is none who understands,
There is none who seeks for God;
All have turned aside, together they have become useless;
There is none who does good,
There is not even one.
Their throat is an open grave,
With their tongues they keep deceiving,
The poison of asps is under their lips;
Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness;
Their feet are swift to shed blood,
destruction and misery are in their paths,
And the path of peace they have not known.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
3. That is how God sees the human race. Therefore, Paul said in Rom. 3:19b “so that every
mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God.”
a. The idea conveyed here is a court room where a prosecutor brings charges against a
defendant and they cannot say a word—it is an open and shut case.
C. God saves good people is the biggest lie ever told.
1. Brochure I created called “The Biggest Lie Ever Told.”
2. Rom. 3:20 “For no one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law
commands. The law simply shows us how sinful we are.”
3. Jas. 2:10 “For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who
has broken all of God’s laws.”
4. The only way good old Zeke can go to heaven is if he was as good as Jesus was in His life.
Jesus lived over 12,000 days and He ALWAYS got it right. How are you doing with that
II. THE GOOD NEWS: GOD IS PURSUING YOU.
A. The good news is God is pursuing us in spite of the fact that we are offensive to Him because
of our sin.
1. This is why grace is called amazing—it is because God is willing to treat us in the opposite
of what we deserve.
2. Grace is you finding someone stealing money out of your wallet and you give them the
money rather than calling the police. You treated them the opposite.
3. “Chemistry class during my senior year of high school was almost my Waterloo. On the
final day of the school year I had to pass a chemistry test to get a passing grade in order to
graduate. I had studied hard, but I knew deep down inside I was going to fail. When the
bell had rung to open the class, the teacher made this announcement. ‘I have made a
terrible mistake. As you know, I have two chemistry classes and you are my second class.
I ran off only enough tests for one class. A I hold those finished tests in my hand. Here’s
What I am going to do. I’m giving each of you a completed test by another student. Write
your answers on a clean sheet of paper. I know the other student’s answers will be on the
test you will be using, but you have to make a decision as to whether you think their
answer is correct.’ He proceeded to give out the tests. Guess who got the valedictorian’s
test? Guess who didn’t change many answers? Guess who passed the final exam with
flying colors. (That is a good way to explain grace.)
a. When it comes to God’s final exam, we will be graded by Jesus’ paper if Rom. 8:1
is true of us.
b. Rom. 8:1 “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ
Jesus.”
B. God is pursuing you in spite of what you have done.
1. Sometimes people have a hard time accepting God’s grace. Perhaps you are thinking, “I
hear what you are saying, but you don’t know what I have done.”
a. Sometimes people carry tremendous guilt about things they have done.
b. We have a man in the New Testament like that. His name is St. Paul.
1 Tim. 1:12-14 “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He
considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a
blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. Yet I was shown mercy because
I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with
the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus.”
c. Paul was involved in killing Christians, but grace covered him and he wrote ½ NT.
C. In spite of what has been done to you.
1. Sometimes it’s not what we have done, but what has been done to us that holds us back.
2. The number one thing that shocked me after being in the ministry only 5 years was the
number of people who told me they had been sexually abused.
3. I have a sermon I preach from time to time on forgiveness. I preached it in a rural Indiana
church and 11 people came forward at the invitation including a lady in her 60’s who had
been trouble by being sexually abused since she was a child. That night, healing started.
4. “I hear what you are saying, but you don’t know what’s been done to me.” Grace will take
care of whatever it is.
D. In spite of what your life has become.
1. “I hear what you are saying, preacher, but my life is just a mess.”
2. We have someone to take care of that. He’s called a “Mess-iah.”
3. God can use a cracked vessel if it’s clean and God is far more concerned where you
are going than where you have been.
4. Today is the day to start to let Jesus clean up your mess.
5. 1 Cor. 6:9-11 “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom
of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers,
nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor
revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but
you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
CONCLUSION
A. What’s so amazing about grace?
1. Does anyone know where grace first appears in the Bible?
2. Gen. 6:8 “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”
a. When God lowered a rescue ship into this world, Noah climbed in. You?
3. Let’s go back to the Chilean minors. After 17 days, the rescue team broke through that
2,200 foot barrier. The minors were able to send messages back up. Let me tell you
what was not any of their messages. “We don’t want out of here, just leave us alone.”
“We can make it out on our own.” “Just give us another day or two and we will dig our
way out.”
4. Gal 1:3b-4 “the Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue
us from this present evil age.”
5. As the minors were pulled out they kept uttering one word, gracias, gracias, gracias,
gracias. It means “Thank you.” Let me ask you a question, how do you spell “gracias” in
English? Grac…