Contemporary Worship | Justifying/Saving Grace

Community United Methodist Church, Naperville, IL | January 19, 2025
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SCRIPTURE |Ephesians 2:8-10, 14-19 (CEB)
You are saved by God’s grace because of your faith. This salvation is God’s gift. It’s not something you possessed. It’s not something you did that you can be proud of. Instead, we are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.
Christ is our peace. He made both Jews and Gentiles into one group. With his body, he broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us. He canceled the detailed rules of the Law so that he could create one new person out of the two groups, making peace. He reconciled them both as one body to God by the cross, which ended the hostility to God.
When he came, he announced the good news of peace to you who were far away from God and to those who were near. We both have access to the Father through Christ by the one Spirit. So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household.
SERMON
Justifying/saving grace: Doorway into new identity, new creation
Prevenient grace prepares us for justifying grace. "Justification," said Wesley, "is another word for pardon. It is the forgiveness of all our sins, and ... our acceptance with God." Justifying grace is the assurance of forgiveness that comes from repentance, from turning toward God's gracious gift of new life. It is being reconciled and realigned with God and the acceptance of God's atoning act in Jesus Christ.
Wesley considered justification, or justifying grace, as the doorway into the house of God's salvation. God reconciles us to Godself, adopts us into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, bestows upon us our identity as beloved sons and daughters and incorporates us into the body of Christ, the church.
Wesley's description of his experience at Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738, perhaps portrays the meaning of justifying grace: "About a quarter before nine, while he [the leader] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ. I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death."
Realizing our identity and worth as being rooted in the one to whom we belong is the essence of justifying grace. To accept that identity is to enter the doorway into a whole new existence. It is an identity we can never earn, nor can it be taken from us.
Continuing the analogy of the house, justifying grace is the doorway and the process of walking through it. The door is open with a welcome sign on it. If grace is compared to a journey, there comes a time when the traveler packs the bags, joins the guide and sets out toward the destination. That is justifying grace, turning toward a new future.
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