Journal: Emmaus Journal
Volume: EMJ 07:2 (Winter 1998)
Article: “Saved by Grace Alone—This is All My Plea” (An Exposition of Ephesians 2:8-10)
Author: Jim Townsend

EMJ 7:2 (Win 98) p. 230

“Saved by Grace Alone—This is All My Plea”
(An Exposition of Ephesians 2:8-10)

Jim Townsend*

Introduction

An acquaintance of mine once told how he became a Christian. During his pre-Christian period a Christian evidently asked him out of the blue if he had ever been “saved.” My acquaintance was obviously quite unfamiliar with Christian jargon. He thoughtfully considered the question and responded, “Yes, I remember being out swimming in a lake as a kid. I felt a powerful undertow catch me and pull me down. I would’ve drowned, but someone jumped in and saved me.”

Paul Little related a similar misunderstanding with reference to familiar Christian terminology. During the days of hippiedom a young person spotted on a billboard the old words “Jesus Saves.” “Hmm,” thought the hippie, “I suppose if Jesus was thrifty, I ought to be thrifty too.”1 That was the message communicated to this individual who hadn’t been initiated into a Christian understanding of what it means to be “saved.”

The Subject of Salvation

The term salvation is used ninety times in Psalms and Isaiah alone in the King James Version. The word savior is found thirty-nine times in the Bible (KJV). The verb save occupies close to three columns in Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible. Salvation is a subject of indispensable import to the message of the Bible.

* Jim Townsend is a graduate of Emmaus Bible College and for the past twenty years has been the Bible Editor for Cook Communications in Elgin, Illinois.

EMJ 7:2 (Win 98) p. 231

Inherent in the very concept of salvation is some dire need—something to be saved from. Romans 5:9 speaks of being “saved from [God’s] wrath.” “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). Since “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23), “God our Savior…desires all…to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4).

The heart of the human problem is the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9). We need salvaging from the wreckage caused by sin. God’s diagnosis is sin; God’s prognosis is salvation. An old hymn declared:

God could not pass the sinner by;
[Our] sin demands that [we] must die.
Yet in the cross of Christ we see
How God can save us righteously.

Salvation is heaven’s remedy for t...