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 may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8-10 ESV)
By grace we are saved through faith in Jesus Christ.
Question is: saved from what? The Apostle Paul lays that out at the beginning of Ephesians, chapter 2:
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. (Ephesians 2:1-3 ESV)
By our faith in Jesus Christ, God takes us from death to life! We were dead in our trespasses and sins. Before faith in Jesus, we are alive physically, but dead spiritually. We were walking dead — spiritual zombies. Jesus did not come to make bad people good, or to make good people great. He came to make dead people live.
In trespasses and sin, Paul says we were following the prince of the power of the air (Satan), and by carrying out the desires of the body we were children of wrath. God is holy, and His gut reaction to sin is wrath. Anger. His reaction is holy anger at all that separates us from Him and causes great harm in the world He created and called "good". Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Our sin separates us from His holiness, and if He did not do something about it, we would be helplessly, hopelessly lost.
The next two verses in Ephesians 2 are striking:
"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..." (Ephesians 2:4-5 ESV)
We were walking dead, but God sent His Son to give us life. We were children of wrath, but God gave us mercy and grace. He gave us mercy. He did not give us the death we deserve, He gave us mercy. "Lord, have mercy" is more than an expression when we are at our wits end. It is a call for God to spare us the death sentence we deserve by our sin. And He gave us grace. He gave us the life and blessings and riches in Christ that we don't deserve. Jesus paid a debt He did not owe because we owed a debt we could not pay.
In Him, we are declared "not guilty" and adopted into God's family as sons and daughters! "But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God." (John 1:12 ESV) No wonder John Newton, a former slave driver become pastor and evangelist, penned:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see
Grace seeks us when we are lost — like the shepherd who leaves the 99 and looks for the one lost sheep. And grace saves us from sin and death — like the father who welcomes home the son who renounced him and spent his inheritance on "riotous living".
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 may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9 ESV)
We don't earn this salvation. It is not of our own works or our own doing. It is a gift of God by grace through faith, because He loves us. We cannot save ourselves. We can only receive the gift of grace through His Son, Jesus Christ, who died in our place. And that's the part of salvation that rubs us the wrong way.
You see, we're enculturated (at least in the USA) with a mindset that does not want to take charity. We want to earn our keep. We want to make our own way. If someone does something nice and generous for us, our first reaction is to believe we need to pay them back because we don't take charity.
This pride and self-sufficiency is the root of sin, and it makes God's amazing grace seem too-good-to-be-true. But this is not a scam. There is no other way to be saved from sin and death. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone, according to His Word alone.
And what is our response? Gratitude. Loyalty. Faithfulness to Jesus, who saved us. And good works — not to earn our way to heaven but to demonstrate that heaven is already in us. Our good works become about honoring Him and making Him real in other's lives.
This grace has been called justifying grace. It justifies us before our holy God, before whom we cannot stand in our sinfulness. It makes me just-as-if-I'd never sinned.
Jesus paid a debt He did not owe because we owed a debt we could not pay. I have given my life to Him, and I will walk with Him, by faith, as long as I live (which by His promise, includes eternity). I will forever be thankful. How about you?