This morning's scripture is found in Matthew, chapter 20, verses 1 through 16. For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, you also go and work in my vineyard and I will pay you whatever is right. So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing? Because no one has hired us the answer. He said to them, you also go and work in my vineyard. When evening came the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, call the workers and pay them their wages beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first. The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. These men who were hired last worked only one hour, they said, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day. But he answered one of them, a friend. I'm not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first and the first will be last. This is the word of the Lord. I read about an organization the other day in, pardon me, in LA that operates an apology sound off line. You call this number and you apologize. You can be anonymous. You don't have to leave your name. Nobody's going to call you back. But it's an opportunity to just confess. Apology sound off line. 200 people a day call that number. Some call to admit to having an affair. Some say they've stolen something from their employer. Some have even confessed to things like rape and child abuse. A few people have admitted to murder. An alcoholic left this message. He said I'd like to apologize to all the people I hurt in my 18 years as an addict. A young woman sobbing uncontrollably called the line. She had caused a car accident that had taken the lives of five people. And she left this message. I'm sorry. I wish I could bring them back. 200 people a day looking for grace. What's grace? Grace is what you have when you're loved in spite of your failures and sins. Grace is free, undeserved favor. And grace is at the heart of what it is to know the character of God. We've been talking about his character, his attributes. Two weeks ago we looked at the glory of God. Last week we saw the holiness of God. Today let's talk about the grace of God. Grace is at the heart of the character of God. I want to say basically three things. First of all, our resistance to grace. Secondly, God's affection for grace. And in time permitting, I'm going to leave us a few things as a church family that will direct us to become more and more of a community of grace. So let's talk first about our resistance to grace. In my NIV Bible, which is probably the one you have as well, there are titles, you know, to the different stories that we find in the scriptures. And the one that is in my particular Bible is it's called the parable of the workers in the vineyard. But I don't like that title. I think it's a better title if we say that it's the parable of the generous landowner. Because that's really what this story is all about. It's a generous landowner. And you got the story when you were listening to Tim. Let me just review it basically this way. You have a story here about a landowner. He owns a vineyard. And he's got to have work done in his vineyard. So he goes to the town square five different times during the day. He goes at day break, nine a.m., 12 noon, three o'clock in the afternoon. And all the way up to five o'clock in the afternoon. Now quitting time is six o'clock. So he hires different groups of people for all of those different times. And then when six o'clock does roll around, the landowner lines up all his workers and pays them all the same thing, one denarius, which was a typical day's wage for a day's work back then. Now let's stop and I want you to ask yourself how you feel about that first original group that was hired at six o'clock in the morning. I mean, does it your heart go out to those guys? I feel their pain, don't you? I want to identify with them because it seems so sensible that they would be as upset as they are. So pretend for a moment that you're one of them. One of those original workers that woke up at like five o'clock in the morning to get to the main town square and get a job for the day. Pretend that you're one of them. You've been sweating out under the hot Judean sun. You've been lugging loads around in the garden of this guy. You've been picking grapes. You've been pulling weeds. You've been doing everything else that the landowner needed a worker to do during the day. All day long, from six a.m. all the way to six p.m. And during the day you see these guys coming on board, you know, at different times, nine o'clock, 12 noon, three o'clock, and five. And you got it figured out. You're not dumb. You know what's going on. You're saying, well, okay, one denarius for 12 hours. Let's see, those guys that started at nine o'clock, they'll get three quarters of a denarius. The guys that started at noon, they'll get a half of a denarius, three o'clock, a quarter of a denarius. And then those guys that started at five o'clock in the afternoon, they'll just get one twelfth of a denarius. That's to be expected. That's the way things work. That was good business back in that day. So what happens is during the day, they work, they get their work done, and then it comes quitting time, six o'clock. The landowner says everybody line up, and he lines them up in order of the time in which they started. From left to right, from the six a.m. guys all the way up to the guys that started at five o'clock in the afternoon. And the landowner goes to them first. And he proceeds to reach in his money bag and hands the guys that started at five o'clock, one denarius. Well, you're standing there in line, and you punch your neighbor there, John, let's say. And you say to him, whoa, we're going to get a raise. Those guys got a full denarius for one hour work. We can do the math. We're going to get twelve denarius for twelve hours of work. And so you're really excited. You think this is fabulous. But then the landowner proceeds to go down the line and he goes to the guys that started at three. And he gives them one denarius. Then he goes to the twelve o'clock guys, one denarius. Then he comes to the nine o'clock guys and you're really panicking now, one denarius. And then he comes to you. You've been there full twelve hours working all day long. He gives you one stinking, lousy, measly, denarius. And verse 11 says, when that original group of workers received their pay, they began to grumble against the landowners. Well, no, duh. I would, wouldn't you? That's not right. That's not fair. Verse 12 says that they say to the landowner, these men who were hired last worked only one hour. And you made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day. Let's change the story a little bit. You don't identify with workers in the vineyard. Okay, let's say you're a college student, shout out over here. Let's say you're a college student and you spring semester and you've been in organic chemistry. And you have worked your behind you off. You have handed in your papers on time. You've done your work. You've aced all those quizzes. You've put your head to the grindstone. And you have worked hard during that semester to make an A. And in your class, your organic chemistry class, there's this little group of frat boys. The only reason they came to college was to party. You know that, everybody knows that. And all during this semester, they've just been loafing and goofing around and cutting up in class. They don't even attend class half the time. Quizzes forget it. Papers, they didn't hand them in. Final exam. You know they bombed on that. So, you know, you figure, okay, the grades are going to be all over the map. You go to the hallway where the professor has posted your final grades. You find your name. All right. Hey, I got it. And then you scan the rest of the names of the people in the class. Hey, hey, hey, hey, wait a minute. That's not right. What are you going to do? You're going to go to ratemyprofessors.com and give that guy a big fat zero. That is not right. So, you can think of all kinds of scenarios here. It's the same thing. The same lesson is being taught as it's in the parable here. But see, that is Jesus' point. You're going to say, wait a minute, this doesn't work this way in America. There's no such thing as a free lunch. You get a full day's wage for a full day's work. You don't get an A if you're a slacker. I mean, that's the way we think. But that's the whole point of this story. Because in Jesus' economy, you do get a free lunch. In Jesus' economy, you don't get what you pay for. You get what you don't pay for. That's what grace is. Grace is free, undeserved favor. The love of God is not something you work to get. It's something that you simply receive. Free of charge. But that's so dang counterintuitive, isn't it? Human beings are hardwired to think and to behave in terms of merit, not grace. That's our default. My daughter, Jennifer, I looked at her Facebook page the other day. And Jennifer has a little girl named Lucy. We're going to go see her later today and tomorrow. And Jennifer is expecting a baby in May. So we're all very excited about that. And I read Jennifer's latest Facebook post. Let me read it to you. She says, I'm brought to tears today. I have the most precious little girl and another life in my belly. Kicking up a storm and reminding me that all is okay. My husband works hard so we can provide a wonderful home for these little ones. God, she says, is so, so, so good. I cannot deserve all he has blessed me with, exclamation point. And then I noticed that a friend of hers commented on that post. When Jennifer said, I cannot deserve all this, she said, yes, you can. I just ruined everything. Yes, you can, Jennifer. Why are you saying you can't deserve it? Of course you can. And she is speaking for all of us human beings who think instinctively of merit, of dessert, of earning things, instead of being freely given things like Jennifer was trying to voice. This debtor's ethic is what let's call it. It follows us around everywhere we go. It looks like this. If I do this, I deserve that. That's the way we think. From the day we're born to the day we die, we're brainwashed with this formula. And it affects us in almost everything we do. You've encountered it. If you work hard, you'll be successful. If you're beautiful, you'll get asked out on a date. If you make the team, you'll be popular. If you're rich, you'll be admired. If you have well-behaved, obedient children, you'll be the envy of the neighborhood. I mean, it's A is leading to B. If I do this, I deserve to get that. Grace is alien to us. That's why my point is that we resist it. Naturally, it's alien. Because the world, the flesh and the devil, they all conspire to push us in the direction of works, instead of grace. Now look, I'm not knocking hard work. The Bible commends working hard. The Bible calls us to do all things well and excellency for the glory of God. But the problem comes when we import that thinking into our relationship with God. And we turn his love into something that we must work for in order to have. And you do that, don't you sometimes? Don't you often do that? Don't you sometimes think, Lord, I've done this for you. I've done that for you. What will there be for me? I've worked really, really hard for you today, God. You're going to really bless me today. I feel it in my bones. I'm going to have a 12-dinary day today. Because look, I woke up earlier. I prayed for a full 30 minutes. God, I read my Bible today. Now I don't have to feel so guilty for the things I said to my wife yesterday. See, that's the dead earth's ethic. That's the thought that if I do this, I will get that. It works in the world, it might as well work with God. We may not put it that way, but it's often the way we behave. And when we don't get, now listen, when we don't get the good day, when we don't get the happy feelings, when we don't get the answers to prayer, we grumble against our Maker who has every right to give and to withhold blessings as He sees fit. Just like those workers. Well, so much then for our resistance to grace. I think you get that point. Let's move on to talk about God's affection for grace. God's affection for grace. God loves to give grace to the undeserving. It's an essential part of His nature. Take grace out of God's character. He's no longer God. God is gracious. Think, for example, of the people that Jesus hung out with the most. It was fishermen who often stumbled in their faith. It was tax collectors who were hated by the people. It was women who had no voice in society and who were thought of as less than men. It was the poor, the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the lepers who were considered unclean. Children, as I said earlier, who were considered bothersome to adults. Those prostitutes whom the townspeople would just as soon picked up a stone and thrown at them. Those are the people that Jesus seemed to favor. Why? Because Jesus is gracious. He gives love to the undeserving, to the people who start work at five o'clock in the afternoon and contribute nothing to their salvation and to their relationship with God. Grace, grace, grace in every case. Go down the line through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And you see Jesus living out the nature of God being gracious. You see God here, we get to the punchline. God is the generous landowner of this story. And you and I are the workers that started at five o'clock in the afternoon who basically had nothing to contribute to the work. It's ridiculous, isn't it? Would you hire somebody and give them a full day's wage for one hour of work? It might as well have been 559 pm. The point of the story is that those people were the undeserving ones. And that is who you and I are. It wasn't because of anything you had to offer God that he brought you into his family. It was because God saw you in your sin and misery and his heart moved with compassion toward you. And he adopted you as his own child. God didn't check the P&L statement, the profit and loss statement when he looked at you, when you showed up. He didn't add up your good deeds and weigh them against your bad deeds and figure out if you had more good than bad, then you were okay. You should be his child. He didn't check your theology or your race or your IQ or your background or your psychological profile or anything else that the world says is valuable about you. Because God operates by the new math of grace with Jesus you do get something for nothing. Like it says in verse 16, the very last verse that Tim read, the last in line are brought up to the front of the line. And the people who push and shove themselves who may say that they deserve to be first in line are ushered into the back in line. The new math of grace, the great reversal as Eugene Peterson called it. Now let's be clear, don't walk out of here thinking, well, I was born, says good works aren't important. They are important. Good works are something to which God has called his people. But your good works, listen, are a response to the love of God that is given to you irrespective of your good works and in fact in spite of your bad works. Good works are a thank you to God saying thank you for the unconditional free grace that you've given to me. Lord, in thanks to you for your grace, I want to do this. I want to do that. And that wasn't just true when you became a Christian. It is just as true now that God loves you because you were in Christ as it was true back then. It is just as true now that God loves you because you're his, not because you are good or do this or do that. God says you're my child because I love you and you're in Christ and he died for you. If you've embraced Jesus Christ by faith, then nothing you do can make God love you more and nothing you do can make God love you less. I'll put it even more dangerously than that. Let's be bold. If you're a believer in Jesus, you could never say another prayer. You could never again open your Bible and read it. You could never set foot in this church again. You could never give another penny in the offering basket and God would still delight in you with joy. He would still marvel at being your father because his love for you is not based on those deeds. It's based on his grace, marvelous, infinite, matchless grace. We're going to sing this song in closing, freely bestowed upon all who believe. You know, we sing that hymn, amazing grace. I think there is no story in the Bible that better shows you how amazing grace is than this one that we're studying today. It's amazing. Any person with half a brain would want to pull this landowner aside and say to him, brother, you're being unreasonable. Don't you know that if you keep practicing business this way, you're going to go bankrupt. Why people are going to take advantage of you, Mr. Landowner? If they get the idea that you pay a full day's wage for one hour of work, then they're not going to show up at 6 a.m., they're going to show up at 5 o'clock. Why they may not even show up until 559? Mr. Landowner, you are unreasonable in your generosity. We would say to him, and in the same way we might want to pull Jesus aside, right? And say to him, Jesus Christ, you shouldn't tell your followers stories like this one. Don't you realize Jesus, if you keep telling them about this kind of amazing grace, they're just going to take advantage of you? They're not going to try to work hard to be good Christians. If you keep telling them that you love them in spite of their bad deeds, and in fact that their good deeds have nothing to do with your love, they'll just stop trying to be good Christians. Well, Jesus must not have been worried about that, and neither am I, because Jesus knew, and I know, and I believe you know, how grace works. The more you understand God's free undeserved favor, the more you will want to serve Him, the more you will want to give, the more you will want to serve other people. Because you know that He has given you that unreasonable grace, you will want to give it away. The other people, because you won't be doing it out of spirit of fear and slavery, you'll be doing it out of a spirit of joy and of gratitude. See, the power of grace is much, much, much greater than the power of the debtor's ethic. So if anybody here is trapped under the bondage of the debtor's ethic, if I do this, God will do that, then let the Bible and the gospel free you today to receive His grace freely and undeservedly. We've seen our resistance to grace and God's affection for grace. The more I studied this passage, the more I saw its radical implications for the church. And so let me close you with a few takeaways for our obligation as a community of grace. After all, that's what we say in our mission statement. We say in part that our mission as a church is to strive to be a community of grace, and it goes on to say some other things, but we are, we value being a community of grace. At the end of verse 15, what I started noticing is those words that the landowner says to the original group of workers. In verse 15, he says, are you envious because I'm generous? Now, literally in the Greek what he says is, is your eye evil because I am good? Your margin may say that, if you look carefully in your margin, is your eye evil because I'm good? And so the NIV translators have said, are you envious because of my generosity? I don't really think that envy was the problem there. Instead, the attitude of those original group of workers was more directed at the landowner. And so I like the ESV translation, do you begrudge my generosity? You see that in verse 15, do you begrudge my generosity? Or better yet, the way I look at verse 15, he says to them, are you annoyed because I'm generous? Are you resentful because I'm gracious to people that you consider to be slackers? Are you stingy with my grace or are you generous like me? I see the more I started thinking about that, I thought that has something to say to us as a body and to every church. Because the sin that Jesus is driving at here is not just finding fault with God for being generous. But it's also looking down our noses at people who don't perform as well as we think we do or as well as we think they should. So let me give you six takeaways, six things that I think are implications for us as a community of grace. What does a community of grace look like? Well, first of all, if we're a community of grace, it means that we give each other the benefit of the doubt. This means as a body of believers, we cut each other some slack. Let me give you a quiz, and I got this quiz from Jerry Bridges. Let's say that you're in traffic and somebody cuts you off in traffic. What are you going to say? A or B. A, you idiot. B, hmm, something must be really bad or else he wouldn't be in such a big hurry. There's no C. Which one are you? You idiot or there must be a reason that he did that. Now that is being generous, isn't it? When everything in us wants to resist grace, being generous, being willing to cut the guys some slack, there must be a reason she said that. There must be a reason, there must be something going on underneath the surface that I might not even be privy to that made him or her do that. That's what it is to give each other the benefit of the doubt and that's what a community of grace does. Secondly, we keep on forgiving. We're going to sin against each other, we're going to disappoint each other, I'm going to disappoint you, you're going to disappoint me. That's just part of what church is all about. And so Jesus said in Matthew 18, you don't forgive just seven times, you forgive 77, that means you forgive and you forgive and you forgive. Thirdly, a community of grace celebrates effort, not just results. I think this is so important, many times people in our church are going to try to do things. They're going to try to do things for God, they're going to try to exercise their spiritual gifts, they're going to try to come up with an idea or whatever. And it may bomb. Here's the mentality we need to have as a body of believers, failure is to be expected. And in fact, it's a good thing because it means that we're growing, it means that we're learning, we're going to get better. The more we fail, the more we learn, the better we get. And so this third one is we celebrate effort, not just results. Number four, we focus on each other's strengths rather than weaknesses. We've all got a ton of weaknesses, but we choose to focus on what it is that people are doing positively to contribute to the body of Christ. Five, we welcome people who are different from us. This is tough because our tendency is we want to have a profile of the person who fits here, UPC. Racially, economically, politically, lifestyle-wise, theologically. They've got to be this way, see, that's what our resistance to grace is. But our embrace of grace means, no, you fit, you fit already. We welcome diversity here, we welcome differences. And six, then finally, we work through our conflicts, face to face, instead of avoiding them. We work through our conflicts, when we have an issue with somebody, we go to that person directly and we talk it through. Now, these are the six things that apply to churches, but guess what? It applies in your home, it applies in your life group, youth group, it applies at the source. College group, RUF, it applies there, it applies in your ministry area. All six of these things are the ways that communities of grace are supposed to behave. So don't be annoyed at the grace of God. Celebrate it, receive it, and spread it around to other people that you meet. Because everybody around you is looking for grace. And so are you. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for grace that is so amazing. It's almost too good to be true. The idea that we could be loved and accepted in spite of what we do. Lord, we thank you that you do work so differently from the rest of the world. Thank you for the new math of grace. Thank you, Lord, that when we resist grace, you say no, let it come on. Thank you for giving us heaven when we didn't work for it at all. May we, Lord, with your spirit's help give that unreasonable grace away. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.