March 22, 2008   BACK TO  ARCHIVES >>

"But for the Grace of God"

I sat at my desk deeply troubled while reading the headline stories of the day. The blatant sin of the world was enough to make me ill, even worse, the blatant sin of the church. But as I meditated on these things, a thought came to my heart that sent me to my knees completely broken. I began to weep as the thought sunk deeper and deeper into my mind, "But for the grace of God".

How we take for granted this simple, yet transforming gift of God. Jesus reminds us of this great grace when he says, He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone. (John 8:8)  Two thousand years later, who among us could cast a single stone? Truth is, but for the Grace of God, the stone would be aimed at you and I.

"...the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ..."   1 Corinthians 1:4

"...by the grace of God I am what I am..."   1 Corinthians 15:10

God's Grace
The grace which is given you by Jesus Christ: and includes all sorts of grace, adopting, justifying, pardoning, regenerating, and sanctifying grace; every particular grace of the Spirit, as faith, repentance, hope, love, fear, humility, self-denial, &c. all are gifts of God, and entirely owing to his free grace, and not to man's free will and power, or to any merits of his; and all come through the hands of Christ, and are given forth by him, as the Mediator of the covenant, and in consequence of his blood, righteousness, sacrifice, and merit.
    — John Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

"So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. Romans 9:16

To speak more properly, it is not I, but the grace of God that is with me - This it is which at first qualified me for the work, and still excites me to zeal and diligence in it.
    — John Wesley's Explanatory Notes

But by the grace of God I am what I am. By the “favor” or mercy of God. What I have is to be traced to him, and not to any native tendency to goodness, or any native inclination to his service, or to any merit of my own. All my hopes of heaven; all my zeal; all my success; all my piety; all my apostolic endowments, are to be traced to him. Nothing is more common in the writings of Paul, than a disposition to trace all that he had to the mere mercy and grace of God. And nothing is a more certain indication of true piety than such a disposition. The reason why Paul here introduces the subject seems to be this. He had incidentally, and undesignedly, introduced a comparison in one respect between himself and the other apostles. He had not had the advantages which they had. Most of all, he was overwhelmed with the recollection that he had been a persecutor. He felt, therefore, that there was a special obligation resting on him to make up by diligence for the lack of their advantages of an early personal conversation with the Lord Jesus, and to express his gratitude that so great a sinner had been made an apostle. He, therefore, says, that he had not been idle. He had been enabled by the grace of God, to labor more than all the rest, and he had thus shown that he had not been insensible of his obligations.
    — Albert Barnes Notes on the Bible

As he was what he was by the grace of God in a private capacity, upon a level with other Christians, being a chosen vessel of salvation, not by works, nor on account of faith, or any holiness of his, but by grace; being regenerated, called, sanctified, justified, pardoned, and adopted by it; being a believer in Christ through faith, as a gift of God's grace, and having a good hope of eternal glory the same way; so he was what he was, as a minister of the Gospel, as an apostle, as in that high office purely by the grace of God: he was not made one by men, nor by his education, learning, and industry, nor through any merits of his own, but by the free favour and sovereign will of God, bestowing on him gifts and grace, by which he was qualified for apostleship, and to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ:
    — John Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

It is God's prerogative to say, I am that I am; it is our privilege to be able to say, “By God's grace we are what we are.” We are nothing but what God makes us, nothing in religion but what his grace makes us. All that is good in us is a stream from this fountain. Paul was sensible of this, and kept humble and thankful by this conviction; so should we. Nay, though he was conscious of his own diligence, and zeal, and service, so that he could say of himself, the grace of God was not given him in vain, but he laboured more abundantly than they all: he thought himself so much more the debtor to divine grace. Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Note, Those who have the grace of God bestowed on them should take care that it be not in vain. They should cherish, and exercise, and exert, this heavenly principle. So did Paul, and therefore laboured with so much heart and so much success. And yet the more he laboured, and the more good he did, the more humble he was in his opinion of himself, and the more disposed to own and magnify the favour of God towards him, his free and unmerited favour. Note, A humble spirit will be very apt to own and magnify the grace of God. A humble spirit is commonly a gracious one. Where pride is subdued there it is reasonable to believe grace reigns.
    — Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible

"But for the Grace of God — Continued >>

Also by
Charles Spurgeon

Distinguishing Grace
By Charles H. Spurgeon

"For who makes you to differ from another?"   1 Corinthians 4:7

OR, as it is in the Greek—“For who distinguishes you?” “Who gives you distinguishing and discriminating mercy?” “Who makes you to differ from another?” Pride is the inherent sin of man and yet it is of all sins the most foolish. A thousand arguments might be used to show its absurdity. But none of these would be sufficient to quench its vitality.

Alive it is in the heart and there it will be, till we die to this world and rise again without spot or blemish. Yet many are the arrows which may be shot at the heart of our boasting. Take for instance the argument of creation—how strongly that thrusts at our pride. There is a vessel upon the potter’s wheel, would it not be preposterous for that clay which the potter fashions to boast of itself and say, “How well am I fashioned! How beautifully am I proportioned!

I deserve much praise!” Why, O lump of clay, whatever you are, the potter made you—however elegant your proportions, however matchless your symmetry, the glory is due to him that made you, not to yourself. You are but the work of his hands. And so let us speak of ourselves. We are the thing formed—shall we say of ourselves that we deserve honor because God has formed us excellently and wondrously? No, the fact of our creation should extinguish the sparks of our pride.

What are we, after all, but as grasshoppers in His sight, as drops in a bucket, as lumps of animated dust? We are but the infants of a day when we are most old. We are but the insects of an hour when we are most strong. We are but the wild ass’s colt when we are most wise. We are but as folly and vanity when we are most excellent—let that tend to humble us.

But surely if these prevail not to clip the pinions of our high soaring pride, the Christian man may at least bind its wings with arguments derived from the distinguishing love and peculiar mercies of God. “Who makes you to differ from another?” This question should be like a dagger put to the throat of our boasting—“and what have you that you did not receive?”—it would be like a sword thrust through the heart of our self-exaltation and pride.

We shall now, for a moment or two, endeavor to put down our pride by observing wherein God has distinguished us and made us to differ and then by noticing that all this comes of him and should be a reason for humiliation and not for boasting.

Message Continued >>

Read previous
Messages

Read about the Puritan's >>

The Greatness of God's Love to His Elect
By Thomas Goodwin

"But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Eph. 2:4-6.

The Apostle in the former verses having given a full and exact description of man's misery by nature and in the state of nature, both by reason of sin and the wrath of God that is due thereunto, begins here to set out the greatness of that love and that mercy in God which is the cause and the fountain of our salvation. And he sets it out, as I shewed you the last discourse, when I ran over the series of all these three verses, in the most taking and most advantageous way, and in the greatest truth. I shall not repeat what I then delivered.

I came to the exposition of the words, and what I shall now say will be some little addition, as I go along, to what then was said.

But God.—Besides what I said of this particle but in the last discourse, I only add this, indeed as the main thing, that it serveth to usher in, not only a great turn, the greatest turn that ever was,—it doth not only usher in the notice of a remedy to misery, that there is balm in Gilead that may be had, because that God is merciful, and that is his nature, and that therefore he may be merciful to us, and so that there is hope concerning this thing,—but it ushers in and gives the intimation of a forelaid intention in God, of a contrivement and design beforehand taken up and set upon, whereby God had beforehand preceded all the mischief and all the danger that was like to arise from the misery and sin which the elect were fallen into. He had laid such a design as all this misery and sinfulness that the elect ones had fallen into should be so far from undoing them, that it shall but serve to set out that love the more; and so the words that follow do evidently shew. 'But God, for the love wherewith he loved us;' he hath loved us and chosen us out of love from everlasting, and hath shewed it in this, by triumphing over all that misery, that even 'while we were dead in sins and trespasses, he hath quickened us,'

And it is a love not only which mercy and pity stirs up, after he had seen us thus miserable; but it is a love that having been so great, and so long borne to us, and first pitched on us, that it stirred up mercy and bowels to us in this misery; for so, if you mark it, the words run: 'God,' saith he, 'who is rich in mercy,'—there is his nature—'for his great love wherewith he loved us.' And not only so, but this love being seated in a nature infinitely rich in grace and mercy, had conspired with mercy, and contrived the depth of misery, to extend that riches. On them so great a love had set itself, even to this end, as in the 7th verse, 'that in ages to come he might shew forth the exceeding riches of his grace, in kindness and love to us.' And thus also in Titus 3, that but even now mentioned ushers in, upon the like occasion, the like reserve or design beforehand laid, to glorify love and goodness. But when the kindness of God and love to man appeared; namely, when that love, taken up by him long before this sinfulness he spake of in the verses before, hath lain hid as it were in ambushment, letting you march on in sinful ways under Satan's banners; that in the end appears and precedes all that misery, and rescues you out of it. There is, I say, a kind of ambushment, if I may so express it, a waylaying of all that sin and misery the elect fell into.

And how many such buts of mercy, lying in wait to deliver and save us out of great and strong evils, did we meet with in our lives? And this but here, of this great salvation, is the great seal and ratification, or Ante signamus, of all the rest. To this purpose you may observe that oftentimes in the New Testament, when mention is made of God's ordaining us unto salvation, this phrase is used, he did it 'from the beginning.' So it is in 2 Thess. 2:13: 'God,' saith he, 'hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation;' that is, he had beforehand, even from the beginning, set his love upon you, so that all that sinful estate you have since run into should be no prejudice nor damage to you. And it comes in here, as if that a company of men, whom a king or a prince loveth, or children whom a father's heart is set upon, are permitted and let alone to run into the highest rebellion, to do as evil as they could, as the phrase is, Jer. 3:5, so that by the law they are dead men, men undone, men of death and condemnation, there is no hope for them: but—but that the king, as he is merciful in his nature, and so apt to pardon any, so besides he hath had his heart set upon it, and it is but his design, to shew his princely grace the more in pardoning them and advancing them to higher dignities upon it.

Message Continued >>

More from
A. W. Tozer

Glory of the Trinity
By A. W. Tozer

"...the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Matthew 28:19

The more I read my Bible, the more I believe in the triune God! With the prophet Isaiah, I am stirred by the vision of the heavenly creatures, the seraphim around the throne of God, engrossed in their worship and praise. I have often wondered why the rabbis and saints and hymnists of the olden times did not come to the knowledge of the Trinity just from the seraphims' chorus: "Holy! Holy! Holy!"

I am a trinitarian-I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, begotten of Him before all ages. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.

Isaiah was an astonished man. He could only manage this witness: "Mine eyes have seen the King!,, Only the King of glory can reveal Himself to the willing spirit of a man, so that an Isaiah or any other man or woman, can say with humility but with assurance, "I know Him!"

Previous Manna >>

William Ames   (1576-1633)
"He was known and quoted in the colonies of the New World for his theology more than Calvin and Luther combined."

William Ames was born in 1567 at Ipswich in Suffolk, that region east of Anglia where Puritanism had first "begun", and where the persecution of the crown was least effective. His father was a merchant who was sympathetic to the Puritan cause; his mother was a relative of later colonist Pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Both his parents died, and William was taken in by his uncle, Robert Snelling of Oxford, who took William into his home, and with understanding and generosity saw to his needs and education.

Ames chose the center of Puritan learning, Cambridge University, over Oxford for his higher education. Cambridge was dominated during Elizabethan and Jacobean time by the teaching and preaching of Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), William Perkins (1558-1602), and John Preston (1587-1628). Ames had the good providence to become close to William Perkins, and their relationship not only grew as teacher/student, but also as friends.

Ames received his A.B. degree in 1607 and was promptly invited to become a fellow (professor) of Christ's College. He was even in the running for the mastership of the college as a successor to Edmund Barwell in 1609. But higher authorities in state and established church interfered to prevent the election of such a strong nonconformist candidate. Ames refused to wear vestments, and he spoke out against the sign of the cross administered during baptism and other ceremonies. Another candidate was chosen, and in the eyes of Ames and other Puritans, the college status deteriorated. Ames withdrew his fellowship, and never returned again to English Academia.

Ames made the transition from being a fellow to taking up the pastorate, but it was not long afterward that persecution began to intensify under the reign of James I and Archbishop Bancroft. Particularly, Ames was sought after since he had translated William Bradshaw's treatise "English Puritanism" which set forth in hard terms the nonconformist views. Ames made a decision to leave England and go to Holland.

Ames arrived in Holland in 1610 to begin a new life that would bring him fame, conflict, the death of his first wife, financial insecurity, continued interference from English authorities, and his own death at age 57.

During the first years of exile, Ames supported himself by offering his ministerial services to one of the several large communities of Englishmen living in the Netherlands. Ever since the Marian persecution of the 1550's, English nonconformist ministers in exile had always been able to find professional employment, although usually at a bare substance level. Supported by Colonel Horatio Vere, a Puritan sympathizer, Ames succeeded John Burgess in 1611 (same year as the KJV version was published for the second time) as chaplain to the British community at The Hague. Ames courted Burgess' daughter and married her, but she died soon after and left him childless.

Biography Continued >>

The Imitation of Christ
By Thomas À Kempis

Obedience and Subjection
By Thomas À Kempis

IT IS a very great thing to obey, to live under a superior and not to be one's own master, for it is much safer to be subject than it is to command. Many live in obedience more from necessity than from love. Such become discontented and dejected on the slightest pretext; they will never gain peace of mind unless they subject themselves wholeheartedly for the love of God.

Go where you may, you will find no rest except in humble obedience to the rule of authority. Dreams of happiness expected from change and different places have deceived many.

Everyone, it is true, wishes to do as he pleases and is attracted to those who agree with him. But if God be among us, we must at times give up our opinions for the blessings of peace.

Furthermore, who is so wise that he can have full knowledge of everything? Do not trust too much in your own opinions, but be willing to listen to those of others. If, though your own be good, you accept another's opinion for love of God, you will gain much more merit; for I have often heard that it is safer to listen to advice and take it than to give it. It may happen, too, that while one's own opinion may be good, refusal to agree with others when reason and occasion demand it, is a sign of pride and obstinacy.

Read the whole Book >>

Previous Martyrs

Summary of the Inquisition

Of the multitudes who perished by the Inquisoition throughout the world, no authentic record is now discoverable. But wherever popery had power, there was the tribunal. It had been planted even in the east, and the Portuguese Inquisition of Goa was, until within these few years, fed with many an agony. South America was partitioned into provinces of the Inquisition; and with a ghastly mimickry of the crimes of the mother state, the arrivals of viceroys, and the other popular celebrations were thought imperfect without an auto da fe.

The Netherlands were one scene of slaughter from the time of the decree which planted the Inquisition among them. In Spain the calculation is more attainable. Each of the seventeen tribunals during a long period burned annually, on an average, ten miserable beings! We are to recollect that this number was in a country where persecution had for ages abolished all religious differences, and where the difficulty was not to find the stake, but the offering. Yet, even in Spain, thus gleaned of all heresy, the Inquisition could still swell its lists of murders to thirty-two thousand!

The numbers burned in effigy, or condemned to penance, punishments generally equivalent to exile, confiscation, and taint of blood, to all ruin but the mere loss of worthless life, amounted to three hundred and nine thousand. But the crowds who perished in dungeons of torture, of confinement, and of broken hearts, the millions of dependent lives made utterly helpless, or hurried to the grave by the death of the victims, are beyond all register; or recorded only before HIM, who has sworn that "He that leadeth into captivity, shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword."

Such was the Inquisition, declared by the Spirit of God to be at once the offspring and the image of the popedom. To feel the force of the parentage, we must look to the time. In the thirteenth century, the popedom was at the summit of mortal dominion; it was independent of all kingdoms; it ruled with a rank of influence never before or since possessed by a human scepter; it was the acknowledged sovereign of body and soul; to all earthly intents its power was immeasurable for good or evil.

It might have spread literature, peace, freedom, and Christianity to the ends of Europe, or the world. But its nature was hostile; its fuller triumph only disclosed its fuller evil; and, to the shame of human reason, and the terror and suffering of human virtue, Rome, in the hour of its consummate grandeur, teemed with the monstrous and horrid birth of the INQUISITION!

From Fox's Book of Martyr's

More
Great Hymns

Historian Edward Gibbons' five reasons for the decline and fall of Rome

1. The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society.
2. Higher and higher taxes; the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populace.
3. The mad craze for pleasure; sports becoming every year more exciting, more brutal, more immoral.
4. The building of great armaments when the great enemy was within; the decay of individual responsibility.
5. The decay of religion, fading into a mere form, losing touch with life, losing power to guide the people.

—From The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

        "Any of this sound familiar?"

More Quotes & Stories >>

"Every man is as holy as he really wants to be."   A. W. Tozer

"Lastly, are not the Church in their present state, a standing, public, perpetual denial of the gospel? Do they not stand out before the world, as a living, unanswerable contradiction of the gospel; and do more to harden sinners and lead them into a spirit of caviling and infidelity, than all the efforts of professed infidels from the beginning of the world to the present day?"   Charles Finney

"First we practice sin, then defend it, then boast of it."   Thomas Manton

"Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us."   Charles H. Spurgeon

"An idle life and a holy heart is a contradiction."   Thomas Brooks

"The question isn't were you challenged. The question is were you changed."   Leonard Ravenhill

"A servant of God has but one Master"   George Mueller

"A person repents when he comes to the place where he discovers that the will of God is the government of his life and the glory of God is the reason for his life. He only has repented who has changed his mind about his reason for being."   Paris Reidhead

"If Jesus ever commanded us to do something that He was unable to equip us to accomplish, He would be a liar. And if we make our own inability a stumbling block or an excuse not to be obedient, it means that we are telling God that there is something which He has not yet taken into account."   Oswald Chambers

"We are not to be isolated but insulated, moving in the midst of evil but untouched by it."   Vance Havner

"Jesus Christ has undertaken by His redemption to put in me a heart so pure that God can see nothing to censure."   Oswald Chambers

"The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity."   Matthew Henry

"Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish for spiritual things then it is sin for you, however, innocent it may be in itself."   Suzanna Wesley

"Do you realize this? That if you were to somehow purpose to, from this day on, perfectly please God and succeed in doing it, that that perfect obedience, from this moment, would not acquire in the remainder of your life, enough merit to atone for one past sin, because God exacts and God demands perfect obedience and there's no merit for giving him the minimal requirement."   Paris Reidhead

"The nature of Christ's salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist. He announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of Fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness."   A. W. Pink

"You knew one thing about a man who was carrying a cross out of the city... you knew he wasn't coming back."   A. W. Tozer

"Entertainment is the devils substitute for joy, and when you get satisfaction out of that dumb thing, your joy will diminish."   Leonard Ravenhill

"The pure, mere love of God is that alone from which sinners are justly to expect that no sin will pass unpunished, but that His love will visit them with every calamity and distress that can help to break and purify the bestial heart of man and awaken in him true repentance and conversion to God. It is love alone in the holy Deity that will allow no peace to the wicked, nor ever cease its judgments till every sinner is forced to confess that it is good for him that he has been in trouble, and thankfully own that not the wrath but the love of God has plucked out that right eye, cut off that right band, which he ought to have done but would not do for himself and his own salvation."   William Law

"Whatever call a man may pretend to have, if he has not been called to holiness, he certainly has not been called to the ministry."   Charles H. Spurgeon

"The only right a Christian has is the right to give up his rights."   Oswald Chambers

Back to Top