Transformed In Christ - God’s Gift for Us

Welcome, readers, to our ongoing exploration of the deep, life-transforming truths of God’s Word. Today, we are embarking on a profound journey into the very heart of the Christian gospel. We will be diving into the sermon delivered by Pastor Sam Merigala at Grace Gospel Church, titled "God’s Gift for Us," which is part of his "Transformed In Christ" series. 

Pastor Merigala’s sermon bring us to what he beautifully describes as the "magnificent pinnacle of spiritual life" where we can pause, catch our breath, and behold the glorious view of God's redemptive work. Our foundational passage for this blog is from Ephesians 2:8-9, which states: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast". Pastor Merigala rightly identifies these immortal words from the mountaintop as the "gospel in a nutshell"—the most cogent, powerful summary of salvation's dynamics found anywhere in divine revelation.

Let us unpack the theological riches of this sermon, exploring how Pastor Merigala masterfully contrasts human inability with divine grace, and intellectual belief with saving faith.

The Chasm of Human Incapacity: The False Gospel of Works

Pastor Merigala begins his sermon by establishing the stark contrast between our natural state and our redeemed state. He notes that without Christ, humanity is spiritually dead, utterly incapable of responding to the witness of the Holy Spirit or comprehending the glories of Christ. We begin our journey in what Pastor Merigala vividly terms the "Death Valley of the Soul" before making an exuberant ascent into the heavenly places in Christ.

To understand the heights of this ascent, we must first confront a negative affirmation: salvation is "not by works". Pastor Merigala offers a culturally urgent theological critique here. He explains that to accept this biblical teaching requires us to stand in direct opposition to the prevailing notions of our modern culture. To illustrate this, he shares a poignant story of an unbelieving preacher who used the metaphor of a frog trapped in a milk can. By relentlessly paddling, the frog eventually churned the milk into butter and leaped to its own salvation.

Pastor Merigala rightly identifies this frog as the "apt symbol of American folk religion". The prevailing mantra of our age is that if you "just keep on keeping on," or simply do your best, or rely on the fact that you are "not perfect, but there are a whole lot of people worse," you will ultimately secure your own deliverance. However, as Pastor Merigala emphatically declares, that might be a suitable philosophy for Kermit the Frog, but it is entirely foreign to the biblical language of salvation.

This brings us to a profound theological reality: the radical nature of human sin versus the radical nature of divine righteousness. Pastor Merigala takes us to the etymological root of the word "radical," which derives from the Latin word radix, meaning "root". He teaches that the very root of our being—every singular part of our personhood—is deeply tainted and corrupted by sin. God, conversely, is "radically righteous," and His very being serves as the impossible standard that no human can ever attain.

To demonstrate the utter futility of our works, Pastor Merigala points to the Apostle Paul’s devastating litany of human condemnation in Romans 3:10-18. He highlights Paul’s use of a rabbinical teaching technique known as charaz, which translates from Hebrew as a "string of pearls". Paul strings together an overwhelming list of Old Testament evidences to prove the universal, total corruption of human character and conduct. The conclusion is inescapable: the entire human race—whether Jew or Gentile, religious or irreligious, pious or pagan—suffers from this radical inner corruption. Because even our very best moral efforts are colored by sin, no moral ladder we attempt to climb will ever be high enough to reach God.

Pastor Merigala illustrates this total human inability with a brilliant and sobering metaphor of a plane crash in the South Atlantic. Three survivors—an Olympic swimmer, an average swimmer, and a non-swimmer—find themselves a thousand miles from the coast. The Olympic swimmer confidently takes off, swimming fifty miles in twenty-five hours. While his effort is vastly superior to the non-swimmer who drowns in thirty seconds, the ultimate result is exactly the same: death. They are all separated from the shore by an impossible distance. In the realm of salvation, as Pastor Merigala beautifully articulates, relying on our own paddling and moral works is as tragically futile as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic".

The Elimination of Human Pride: A Brotherhood of Boasters

Why, then, does God so strictly forbid works as a means of salvation? Pastor Merigala points to the divine purpose explicitly stated by the Apostle Paul: "so that no one can boast".

From a theological perspective, human pride is the original sin, the great usurper of divine glory. Pastor Merigala paints a terrifying picture of what Heaven would look like if salvation were achievable by human effort. Eternity, he warns, would spawn a "fraternity of rung-dropping, chest-thumping boasters". Heaven would be populated by an endless line of "celestial Pharisees," perpetually echoing the self-righteous prayer found in Luke 18:11, thanking God that they are not like other sinful men.

To counter this, Pastor Merigala draws our attention to Jesus’ profound parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. He points out a fascinating biblical detail: the goats, who are sent to eternal judgment, are the ones who do all the boasting about their supposed good works. Conversely, the sheep—the saved who inherit the kingdom—are utterly oblivious to their own good deeds. They cannot even recall them, precisely because true salvation does not arise from human works, and therefore produces no grounds for human boasting. As Pastor Merigala notes, no saved individual will ever have grounds to boast before God, nor will they even possess the desire to do so.

The Sumptuous Reality of Grace: A Divine Gift

Having dismantled the false gospel of human achievement, Pastor Merigala transitions to the glorious positive reality of Ephesians 2:8-9: Salvation is a gift. He rightly observes that the concept of grace completely captures the mind of the Apostle Paul in these verses, marking the great reversal from our spiritual death to our spiritual life.

But what is grace? Pastor Merigala defines it powerfully as "unmerited favor—the love of God going out toward the utterly undeserving". He describes grace with words that thrill the theologian's heart: it is a "lavish, sumptuous, joyous word". Crucially, Pastor Merigala unpacks the grammar of Paul's sentence to reveal a stunning theological truth: we must not view salvation as a cooperative transaction where God provides the grace and we dig deep within ourselves to provide the faith. No, the grammar indicates that the whole of salvation is a gift. The grace is a gift, the salvation is a gift, and astonishingly, even the faith itself is a gift from God. We were spiritually dead; we had to be divinely awakened just to be able to believe.

To drive this point home, Pastor Merigala shares one of the most moving illustrations in his sermon—a story of a combined Communion service involving a prestigious city church and its slum missions. At the communion rail, a former burglar and convict found himself kneeling right beside the very Supreme Court judge who had sentenced him to seven years in prison. After the service, the judge remarked to the pastor, "What a miracle of grace". When the pastor assumed the judge was talking about the miraculous conversion of the hardened criminal, the judge corrected him.

The judge recognized a profound theological truth: his own salvation was actually the greater miracle. The burglar, having a history of crime and utter brokenness, knew he desperately needed a Savior. But the judge had been raised as a gentleman, sent to Oxford, taught to say his prayers, take Communion, and live a highly moral life. As Pastor Merigala points out, the judge’s prestigious position and moral upbringing had made him proud, naturally rendering him the exact kind of man who would find it nearly impossible to humble himself to receive a free gift. It took an overwhelming, miraculous work of God's unearned grace to draw a self-righteous man to the cross.

Pastor Merigala uses this story to highlight how utterly contrary God's grace is to the spirit of our age, where we pride ourselves on "earning" what we have. He warns that introducing even the smallest percentage of human works into the equation of salvation debases and perverts grace entirely, quoting Romans 11:6 to prove that if salvation is by grace, it is no longer of works. We must become meek enough to receive this grace, abandoning any delusion that we can earn our admittance into Heaven.

The Instrument of Appropriation: Through Faith

If salvation is completely a gift of grace, how do we appropriate it? Pastor Merigala explains Paul’s third major point: salvation comes "through faith". He states unequivocally that without faith, there is no grace and no salvation, noting that faith is the single quality God honors more than any other in Scripture.

However, as a teacher of biblical truth, Pastor Merigala is careful to precisely define what true, saving faith actually is. He warns that faith is not merely the intellectual reception of Christian truth. Many people possess a historical or intellectual belief in Jesus, but they remain unsaved. True faith, Pastor Merigala argues, is belief plus trust.

To illuminate this vital distinction, Pastor Merigala tells the thrilling historical story of Charles Blondin, the world-famous acrobat who pushed a wheelbarrow and even cooked an omelet on a tightrope suspended 160 feet above the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. On one occasion, Blondin carried a man across the falls on his back. After safely depositing his rider, Blondin asked a man in the crowd if he believed he could do the same with him. The man eagerly said yes, because he had just intellectually witnessed the feat. But when Blondin said, "Hop on," the man vehemently refused!

This is the crux of Pastor Merigala's sermon. As he points out, there are perfectly rational reasons not to trust a human acrobat—we might slip, the rope might break, or the acrobat might make his one fatal mistake. But there is a universe of difference between a human tightrope walker and the sovereign Lord Jesus Christ!. Jesus cannot drop us, and with Him, there is no such thing as chance. Pastor Merigala challenges us deeply: we might believe Jesus died for our sins and resurrected, but have we actually trusted Him?. Have we metaphorically hopped onto His back to let Him carry us from the Death Valley of the Soul to the highest heavens?

Soli Deo Gloria: To God Alone Be the Glory

Pastor Merigala concludes his magnificent exposition by bringing us to the ultimate end of our salvation: the glory of God. Because we have not worked for our salvation, there is only One who should be exalted. God alone provided the Son to live the life we could not live, to die the death we deserved to die, and to rise on our behalf.

Therefore, as Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 1:31, "The one who boasts must boast in the Lord". Pastor Merigala leaves us with three foundational words of the Christian gospel: Salvation, Grace, and Faith. Salvation is our total deliverance and new life; Grace is God's free, undeserved mercy; and Faith is the humble trust by which we receive it.

This sermon dismantle our pride and exalt the finished work of Christ. It forces us to ask ourselves: are we still paddling in the milk can of our own works, or have we fully trusted the Savior to carry us across the chasm of our sin?