We will never be conscious of how amazing grace really is until we are conscious of how repulsive and hideous sin really is. We will not see the full beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ as long as we fail to deal with the grave reality that sin is indeed a hard taskmaster. How a person views unregenerate man and what unregenerate man can or cannot do will determine his views regarding grace. Those two subjects, sin and grace, were at the heart of the Reformation. The Reformation was obviously a very active period of time, but at the very heart of it was a theological conflict between sin and grace. And these two subjects were at the heart of quite possibly one of the most important theological controversies during the Reformation era, and that was a controversy between Erasmus and Martin Luther. Both of these men saw the abuses in the medieval institutional church. Both of them recognized that changes needed to be made, but their methodology of how that was to be done, those changes, were polar opposites. The methodology that both men chose was determined by their view of the will. Now again, at the beginning of the Reformation, Erasmus and Luther seemed to be on the same page because of their identification of the problems. And many people lumped these two men together, and there was a mutual respect that they had for one another. But as time went on, and as each man wrote more, their mutual admiration was diminishing, to say the least. And Erasmus' enemies wanted to link him with Luther because everybody hated Luther. And what Erasmus did in order to distance himself from Luther is he wrote a little book called The Freedom of the Will. He knew that they both agreed on the abuses, but Erasmus saw that the real controversy of the day was not about cleaning up the priesthood, not about the papacy, not about any of those peripheral matters. It was solely about salvation. And Erasmus believed that man, because his will was only weakened, could engage in good works. He could do things that would merit grace. And Luther saw this and he completely opposed that teaching. And he wrote a book in response called The Bondage of the Will. And that book is really the great literary masterpiece of Luther. It is the literary masterpiece of the Reformation. And it is a book that I would recommend to your reading because the issue in the Reformation is the same issue today. What we have in American evangelicalism is a ingrained idea that I can contribute to grace. That if I act a certain way, if I do good things, then God will be pleased and he will come alongside me. And he will accept me and he will kind of clean up the rest with grace. And Luther says, no, that is not the case because of what man is in their very nature. Grace has to be evident from start to finish that our salvation is completely and totally of grace, that man cannot do anything that is morally good. And so Luther thanks Erasmus for hitting on that issue. At the end of his book, The Bondage of the Will, Luther thanks him. He says, you know, Erasmus, you are the only one in this whole era who sees what the problem really is. And he expresses his frustration having to deal with the priesthood, the papacy and all these things. He says, this is the heart. This is where it's at right here. It's all about grace. And so this morning, I'm not really going to address much of the history, but I do want to address really the bondage of the will and the liberation of the will. And there are various passages that we could go to this morning, but I've chosen Ephesians 2 because this is a passage that Luther addressed in his treatise. And I trust that this is a reminder to us of our constant dependence upon the grace of Jesus Christ, our constant dependence that we can do absolutely nothing apart from grace, that if it was left to us, we would remain children of wrath. If it was left to us, we would be happy being children of wrath. Such is the bondage of the will. So I want to address first the bondage of the will and see at the very start that man's will in his unregenerate state is dead to God. Our text begins and you are dead in the trespasses and sins. And Paul's treatment of man outside of Christ is the furthest thing from happy news that an individual could hear. No one wants to hear that. Hey, you're dead. You are completely and utterly dead. You are absent. of all life. You have absolutely nothing in you that reaches out to God. You have nothing that is in you that even has a desire for God. And so what Paul addresses here and what Luther addresses is that man in his very nature, his very condition is completely and totally dead. And this deadness is traced back to one man. And we read about that in our confession this morning, that all of this goes back to Adam. And again, one's understanding of the fall will revolutionize our understanding of grace. Because when Adam sinned, we sinned. He was there as that representative of all of his posterity. And when he fell, when he took of the fruit of that tree, death came. Spiritual death, eventually physical death. And there was that moral death, that ability to only do sin. See, when Adam was created, he was created in original righteousness. He was created with that ability to do good or not to do good. And that is evidenced by that condition that was given to him. You eat this, you die, you don't eat it, you live. And Adam chose to eat. And so when he chose to eat for all of his posterity, he earned them deadness. He earned for them a lack of life. And no more could man have the ability to choose either good or evil. He could only choose within that nature. He could only do what his nature demanded. And that is what Luther refers to as the bondage of the will. That man's will is in complete and total bondage. His nature is dead. And so we must first come to grips with what was done in Adam, because that is, again, that is going to explain a lot about Christ and what Christ does. So we need to see first that man in his unregenerate state is dead to God. The second thing we see that man is alive to sin. And this may seem like an irony. And this was the great irony that Luther addressed that according to man's nature, his will is in bondage. But yet within that bondage, he is free. He is free to completely and totally act according to his nature. And so what is man free to do apart from Christ? He's free to sin. He's free to do unrighteousness. He's free to do wickedness. And that's what his heart desires. Again, Paul addresses man in his condition, you're dead. But then that condition leads to a behavior. Dead and trespasses and sin in which he once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the year, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. You lived in the passage of the passions of your flesh. You carried out the desires of the body and the mind. You acted according to your nature. So you were dead to God, but you are incredibly alive to sin, Paul says, if you are outside of Christ. All that you want to do is sin. Now, this does not mean that you cannot do a good deed. You can do something that looks good. But what we're addressing here is the worth of that good deed. Does God see that good deed as morally worthy, as that which he says, I will accept that is meritorious in my sight? And Paul says, no, man cannot do anything that is morally good. Such is the heinousness, such is the odiousness of man's nature in which he was born into. It's completely vile. And that vileness, that sinfulness is what man desires. And again, that's what we must come to terms with. That man desires only evil. That man does only that which is wicked. And that is the sphere out of which grace pulls a man. But apart from grace, man is completely happy within that. So we can't look at sin as something that's, you can dink around with it. No, it is impure before a holy God. And it drives you away from God. But man in his nature is so vile, is so wicked, that he's happy to do that. He's happy to exist in that sin. And he's incredibly alive to that sin. And he thinks he's free. Man thinks he's free. He follows after all of these promises, all of these desires that the world holds out is this will satisfy. And man moves from one sin to another sin. And as Calvin said, that man's mind is a factory of idols. He's just exchanging one false god for another god, and he's happy to do so. And he thinks he's free. But Paul leads us next. to the reality that man, in his unregenerate state, is enslaved to Satan. They follow the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. For all the freedom that unregenerate man thinks he has, he's just a slave to Satan. He is in bondage to that taskmaster, and Satan is a very hard taskmaster. And he gives you all the promise of freedom. He gives you all the thought that you are in complete control. But yet he is the one at work and the life of an unregenerate man. He is the one at work and the disobedience of the sons of Adam. And Luther says that's bondage that is complete and total. bondage. And Erasmus, you say that man can do good. You say that man in that state can merit God's grace. That's impossible. That's impossible. You cannot merit God's grace by law keeping. That's what Paul addresses in Romans and all of the book of Corinthians and even here in chapter two, that the law, these laws, they cannot do anything to merit God's grace. They teach us that we're sinners. They show us where we have failed. They show us where we abhor God. But by keeping them, you can't keep them. You can't keep them. Let's bring this to our situation in 2008. Within conservative Christianity, sometimes we can act as though if I do certain things, if I live a certain way, if I look a certain way, if I talk a certain way, then God's happy with me. Then God will accept that. But Paul says, God will not accept anything as meritorious if it comes from the unregenerate man. We are completely and totally indisposed to evil. We call this total depravity, that sin, our fall in Adam has affected every being of us. It's not just our mind and our emotions. It's also our will, that we cannot even will to do good. Total depravity does not speak in terms of degree that man is as bad as he can be. It speaks of extent. that every facet of man is fallen, that every aspect of man is tainted by sin, that every aspect of man is governed by Satan, by the prince of the power of this air, by the spirit of the age that works in the children of wrath to do disobedience. There's nothing free about any of that. There is nothing of liberty in any of that. And we've got to come to terms with what man is in his natural state. We've got to grasp it because grace will never be grace if any part of us thinks that we can do something to please God. Grace never comes to the person who's fine. Grace only comes to the person who is conscious of his utter dependence on grace for everything. Again, so that's why I say even the truth of justification by faith alone cannot be adequately interpreted until we address the bondage of the will. Because even the faith alone of the justification is not a work. It's grace. It's grace. Everything is grace. And we desperately need that. Even once you're a believer, and we'll get to this in a moment, we rest on grace. Again, how often do we sometimes think in our minds, I get grace for my acceptance with God. Sure, I've got no problem with that. My coming into an acceptance with God is totally of grace. We're not going to argue that, but my continued acceptance with God, that's where we sometimes have a little problem. We think, yeah, I'm saved by grace, but I live how? I live by works. I have to live a certain way in order to keep God's acceptance on me. To keep me at peace with God. And Paul and Luther say, no, it's totally of grace. It's completely and totally of grace. Once we're saved, even our good works is because of grace. From start to finish, salvation is of the Lord. Salvation is of grace. And that is what Erasmus could not say. Erasmus would not admit that salvation from start to finish was completely of grace. And Luther said, that's where you're wrong. But this is not a matter of theological dotting of I's and crossing of T's. It's damnable. If we think that salvation is at any part a result of my works, or your works, You continue to remain in that enslavement. You continue to remain in that bondage of the will. So man in his unregenerate state is dead to God. He's alive to sin. He's enslaved to Satan. And he's doomed to wrath. And this is one of the most frightening realities of those who remain in bondage. Again, think of the freedom that you once thought you had. Think of the freedom that the world thinks they have. And the reality is that they are under the wrath of God. That God's condemnation stands over them like a sword waiting to be dropped at any moment. That's what drove Luther to scripture. He could not get out from under that impending doom, that impending judgment. And again, Luther's own testimony is if anybody could be saved by works, it's me. I was the best of the best. I did better in the monastery than anyone else could do. If anybody could be saved by works, it was Luther. But he could not come out from under that wrath, that judgment that was by a holy God. What a sobering, sobering thing it is to see that individuals enjoy their sin and have no clue, have no clue what awaits. It's on that that Luther and Erasmus were worlds apart. Erasmus says, do good, grace will come alongside. Luther says, flee to Christ, for in him is grace upon grace upon grace upon grace. Because if you hold on to anything of yourself, you're doomed. And before you can ever get to the good news of the gospel, what man is in his unregenerated state has to be seen. We need no good news if there's no bad news. If we are free to do good, we don't need something outside of ourselves. If we can please God on our own, we don't need grace. But the testimony of scripture from Genesis three on is man needs grace because man because of his fall is completely and utterly indisposed to do any good. So that brings us next to the liberation of the will. If we stopped at the bondage of the will, we all go home depressed. We all go home in that bondage. But the beauty of Scripture, the beauty of redemptive history, is that from sin's first entrance into this world, God pursued with grace. As soon as Adam and Eve knew that they were naked and were ashamed, what do you have? You have the rustling leaves, You have God calling out, Adam, where are you? Adam hid himself, because he was naked, because he was ashamed. And God says what? There's going to come a seed, and that seed is going to be your redeemer. And Adam, just as you represented all of your posterity and earned death for them, Adam, so this seed that I will bring will earn salvation for all those whom he represents. And here's the beauty of the gospel. That what Adam did, Christ, that second Adam, undid. All that the first Adam could not do, Christ, the second Adam, did do. And in doing so, we find the will is able to be liberated. But again, not because of any of our works, but solely because of the grace of God, which devised a plan that was accomplished in Christ and was applied to the hearts of believers by the Holy Spirit. And so when we come to the liberation of the will, we see, first of all, that grace changes our nature. But God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he had loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive. Grace brings life. Grace breathes upon that dead will. That dead soul life. Completely and totally of God. Completely and totally of that merciful and loving God who loved us because he loved us. What were we? We're in bondage. Was there anything in us that called out, called forth the love of God? No. Everything in us called forth God's wrath. But because God is love, because of that great love wherewith He loved us, He breathes. And He brings life to the soul that was once dead. He infuses grace where there was once deadness, He imputes righteousness where there is once unrighteousness. We call that the effectual call, that grace changes our nature. God's divine intervention removes from us that a state of sin and misery and brings us into a state of salvation by a Redeemer, and He changes our nature by grace. And that grace unites believers to Christ. It changes our nature and it unites us to Christ. It makes us alive together with Christ. We're raised up with Him and seated with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That what this grace does is it takes us out of that estate in Adam and brings us into an estate with Christ. We're no longer in that sphere of sin. We're now in a sphere of grace, and we're united to Christ. And now when the Father sees us, he sees us as Christ. Not for anything that we have done, but solely because of everything that Christ has done. And we ask, what did Christ do? Well, first, what did the first Adam do? The first Adam failed that covenant of works. The second Adam came to this earth and he fully fulfilled that covenant of works. He lived a perfect life. A lot of times when we talk about salvation, we limit the glory of that just to Christ's death. But remember, his death has no value if his life was not what it was. He was able to die a sinless death because he lived a sinless life. And what he did in his life was earned a righteousness for his people. He earned obedience for his people. So the righteousness that is imputed to believers is an earned righteousness. It is what Christ earned in his life. Adam earned death. Christ earns life. And he earns righteousness. And to the individual who casts everything upon Christ, that righteousness is imputed. That individual is declared to be holy. That individual is stripped of all his unrighteousness and is clothed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. You say, how can that be? Because Jesus Christ lived a perfect life. And he died a perfect death. What we could not do in fulfilling the law, he fulfilled. What we could not do in paying the penalty of the law, he paid. And so as Christ, in that perfect life, went to the cross and became that vicarious substitute who paid the penalty of real sin for real people. that all of my actual sins, all of your actual sins, were paid for in the cross. Christ did not die to make a sacrifice for sin in general. He died to pay the penalty of a real people's real sin. And so that's why we speak of that verse that is really beyond comprehension. He who knew no sin became sin, that we who knew no righteousness might be made the righteousness of God in Him. There's a sense of, what do you say? How can you explain or even begin to comprehend what it was for the Holy One, the Son of God, who enjoyed bliss in the Father's bosom, that he took upon flesh, that he walked in this sin-stained world. He moved in and about sinners, yet without sin. And then that day on Calvary, when everything became black, He who knew no sin was made sin. That is amazing grace. That is what grace is. That what we could not do in the bondage of our will, Christ did freely, voluntarily, sacrificially. for you and for me. And we experience all of those benefits by grace. Because grace changes our nature. Grace makes us alive in Christ. It unites us in Christ. So now, what is our standing? Our standing is in Christ. So you see, you can't get to justification by faith alone, through grace alone. until you wrestle with the bondage of the will. Again, why do I need to be freely justified by grace if I can do it on my own? But Paul says you can't. Luther says you can't, but the glory is Jesus Christ has done it all. And you are united to Christ by grace. And that is what Luther calls the alien righteousness. That we have no righteousness of our own to offer to God, but Christ's righteousness becomes our righteousness. And so now, what is our plea before God? I stand before you, not in myself, but in Jesus Christ, because we are united to him. But grace doesn't stop there. Grace makes us alive to good works. Again, what is the impossibility of the natural man? To do good. But when Christ liberates us, when the believer is liberated in Jesus Christ, the will has been made free. And now God says, you can please me. You can do good work. Because you're in Christ, because your will is no more in that bondage stuck as a slave to sin. And the reformers would often speak of this in terms of faith is the alone instrument of justification, but justifying faith is never alone. The faith that justifies looks like something. The faith that justifies in that grace now allows the believer to do what? To do good works. This is the liberty that believers have. That's Christian liberty. Christian liberty is not license. It's not loose living. Christian liberty is what? It's the freedom to please God. It's the freedom that now I no longer stand under that law as a system of salvation. I now stand under grace. And under grace, I'm free to do good. I'm free to do good works. So why do Christians live a certain way? Not to gain acceptance with God, not because they want to maintain their acceptance of God, but because they have acceptance of God and added gratitude I'm going to delight in your law. I will delight to do your will. So the law is not set aside as a rule of life. It is set aside as a system of salvation. But the believer is free to obey. The believer is free to be holy. And again, that's because of grace. So here we're talking about our sanctification and justification. Righteousness is imputed to us and we are declared to be holy and sanctification. We are made to be righteous in our experience and we become holy. And any confusion of those two will lead you either into antinomianism, loose living or legalism. And both of those are really bad. We want to stay away from both of those. We want to be holy because our standing is one that says we are holy. We are not sanctified in order to gain the acceptance. The acceptance is there, but justification and sanctification are inseparably linked. Justification gives impetus to sanctification. Sanctification flows from justification. And in that sanctification, we are made free to please God. And that's what I want us to sometimes remember. With children, a father looks at his child and the child obeys, hopefully. And when the child obeys, What does that do to the father? Brings a smile to the face. Now, the child is not obeying to gain any acceptance. Just obeys because it pleases the father. We once stood under wrath and condemnation. But now in Christ, because of grace, we're able to do things that bring a smile to God's face. That's astounding. That's remarkable. That the one whose righteous judgment hung over us now holds what? Peace and a smile. Do you see the radicalness, if that's a word, of grace? Grace changes everything. Where there was once wrath, there's now a smile. Where there was once no righteousness, now we're being made righteous in sanctification. And we're able to be made righteous because we have the righteousness of Christ shrouding us. And that in our sanctification, the Holy Spirit is chipping away, chipping away at the corruption that remains. And he's doing what? He's conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ. What do we all want to be like? We all want to be like Jesus. What is our standard of living? Jesus. Not someone else's code of conduct. I don't do things to make someone else happy. I do things to be like Jesus. And in sanctification, because of grace, we're able to look like our Savior. So we're not saved to be like the world. We're not saved to remain in that slavery. We're saved to be like Jesus. Justification, an act of grace. Sanctification, a work of grace. God's grace works within us to do what? To will and to do of His good pleasure. We've been created for good works. And notice the relationship there. The good works are the consequence of grace. not the cause. Let us, in all of our natural tendencies, plead with God to be removed from every effort of self-righteousness. Again, we know theologically, we know in our head that our righteousness doesn't do anything. We know that, but What do we sometimes do? I forgot to read my Bible today. Well, tomorrow I'm going to read it four times as much because then God will really be pleased with me. I'm going to like overdo what I should have done yesterday. That's not how we live. We live free in Christ. When we do fall in Christ, we confess because he's faithful and just. And God will always forgive us of our sins because of Jesus. You ever stop and thought, what does it mean that he's faithful and just to forgive us? Because he's already paid for it in Jesus at Calvary. If we are in Christ, if our sins are forgiven. Then he has to forgive us. It's what Isaac Watts called the double payment theory. God's not going to require double payment for your sins. So when we fall, we don't get up by our self-righteous, we get up by grace. Grace governs and dictates every aspect of the Christian life. It changes our nature, it unites us to Christ, it makes us alive to good works, and it reconciles us to God. Remember, in the bondage of the will, man is doomed to wrath. But when grace reconciles to God, there's no more wrath to be had. There is now, therefore, no condemnation. Paul says in Ephesians 2, you that were afar off have now been brought near by the blood of Jesus. There's peace. There's reconciliation. There is a reuniting of creator and creature now as Redeemer and the redeemed. And so there is no more wrath for the child of God. But what does that mean in our experience? That means that the guilt we sometimes feel and we think, oh, that was a big one. I blew it today. There is wrath for me? No. Jesus Christ drank fully the cup of wrath at Calvary. We don't want to think that Christ took 98% of the wrath of the cross and I've got to deal with that 2%. You realize even 2% of God's wrath is eternal. Christ took it all. So because of grace, we have been translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of his dear son. Because of grace, Again, I can't stress it enough. All of the privileges that we have today, all the privileges that Luther spoke of in his day, all the privileges that Wycliffe and Tyndale and Augustine from earlier days spoke of was all because of grace, was all because God for that great love wherewith he loved us while we were yet sinners. sent His Son to die for us, that we who only knew sin, that we who were happy to only know sin, might be made the righteousness of God in Him. May God give each and every one of us eyes to see what we really are in Christ. the freedom that we truly have because we are clothed with his righteousness. Never to be unclothed again. Never to return to that scene in the garden where Adam says, I realize I'm naked in the shade. The believer is always and will be for eternity clothed with the righteousness of Christ. not by anything He has done, lest He boast, but solely because God lavished His grace upon us, solely because God took that divine initiative to rescue man from his fallen estate and to bring him into an estate of salvation. May God give us the eyes to see that reality. Our experience contradicts it sometimes, but we're not to live by the sight of experience, we're to live by faith. So may we look above our circumstances, unto the author and the finisher of our faith, and get our eyes fixed on Jesus, in whom is grace upon grace. Amen.