Alive in Christ

Well, good morning. It's good to see you all. Good to have you here in the house of the Lord. This morning, we are going to read through Ephesians 2:1 through 10. And this passage is a really joyful passage. It's a, it's a sweet passage. We have the gospel message clearly put before us. And the context of this is what we have to remember is in chapter 1, uh, the Apostle Paul, uh, says that he is writing to the saints who are in Ephesus.

In other words, this book of Ephesians is written to the believers. It's written to Christians. If you are a believer, then as you listen to what Paul says when he se-speaks of, uh, you were this, you walked formerly in these ways, he's talking about the saints, Christians, you, if you're a Christian. But if you're not a Christian, if you don't follow God, then when he talks through verses 1 through 3 and he says, such were, for those who are not in Christ, such are.

This, those, those past tense statements that we're going to look at are present tense statements for all of you who do not fear God, if you do not fear him. And so, take warning. My desire this morning is to remind us of what we were before Christ, and of what we are now, and of the encouragement this should give us and compel us to walk better in the ways of Christ.

If you're able, please stand for the reading of God's word. This is Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 through 10. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them, we too all formerly lived in the lust of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

But God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not it is the 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, so that we would walk in them. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated.

Well, the good news of the gospel starts in a difficult place, a place that it's often hard for us to accept, but when we consider salvation and where it started in all of our lives, it's a dark and desperate place. We go back to Adam in the garden, and in Adam in the garden, the Lord warned him that in the day he ate of the tree, he would die.

Adam does eat of the tree. And in that moment, there's two things that happen. There's a spiritual death and this beginning of physical death. The decay begins. And every descendant of Adam has inherited from him a sin nature. We call this the doctrine of original sin. And so when the Apostle Paul says that we are born dead, this is part of what he's getting at. We are born in sin, which means we are born dead physically born alive, but spiritually dead.

Now, throughout church history, this has been a hotly debated point because who here wants to own having been born dead? There was first raised this point by a man named Pelagius, and he and his followers were the worst. They denied original sin. They taught that man was not inher-had not inherited guilt. Humans have free will. They can choose righteousness. Sin comes from individual choices rather than beginning in a corrupted human nature inherited from our father Adam.

Essentially, man is good. He was opposed by the great church father Augustine, and eventually his teachings were declared as heresy because his teachings made the work of Christ void, null and void. There's no need for Christ if you don't have a sin nature, if you can be good on your own, if salvation is of man's works. And so he was declared a heresy, but there were others who followed in his footsteps, and they did not want to deny the work of God Christ, so they tried to find a halfway between it.

And these are what you may have heard as semi-Pelagianism, or more, uh, commonly you may know them as Roman Catholics or those who have an Armenian theology. To some degree, they would deny the totality of man's depravity, the fullness of original sin. And so an example that someone who falls into this line of thinking would be, may use, would be, when we think about salvation, a man is out in the middle of the sea and he doesn't know how to swim.

And this is the picture of the sinner, right? Uh, he has a sin nature, he's going to drown. There's another man on a boat, and he has a life ring, and he throws the life ring to the man in the water. And in this semi-Pelagian, Arminian-ish way of thinking is, what the man in the water has to do is flop his arm over the life ring and get pulled in.

If he does that, he'll be saved. Many of us probably grew up being taught this. This is my thinking, the way I grew up. Maybe some of us still think this. Of course, the problem with this analogy or this story is that it's not biblical. Right here, what Paul says is that you were dead. Not partially dead, not mostly dead, which means a little bit alive. You're dead.

You're not in the ocean treading water. We are born dead under the waves in the midst of the weeds with them clinging and holding us down. That man has no ability to flop his arm over a life ring and be pulled to safety. We begin spiritually dead in our sins and trespasses. You can't coax a dead man to salvation. He's dead. He has to be resurrected. Now, we notice in the next verse what the unregenerate man is like.

The unregenerate man follows the world, the devil, and then the flesh. This is a common phrase that you'll see as you, if you read Puritans or older writers, they'll always talk about the enemies that we have, the world, the flesh, and the devil. And we see that here in Ephesians. He says that we walked according to the course of this world. Remember Pastor Timothy's sermon about we are not to be conformed to the world.

We're born conformed to the ways of the world. That's how we walk. But we have to be transformed. We can't be conformed. That's our natural state, and we begin as conformed to this world. We are born conformed and conforming to the world. This, the constant messaging that we have, the, the teaching, the air that we breathe, the water that we breathe is the world teaching us to conform to its ways.

Then he says, talks about the prince of the power of the air. The devil was the first to engineer a rebellion against God. In heaven, he wanted to be God in his pride, and he was kicked out of heaven. He was cast from it, and then on earth he orchestrates the fall of man, and he has been on a rampage ever since, seeking to destroy man. Satan is actively deceiving and seeking to deceive men.

He goes around, we're told, like a roaring lion, seeking whom he can devour. He has men who follow him, and he uses them to accomplish his designs. Think of Cain killing the godly seed Abel. Think of Queen Athaliah seeking to kill all of David's descendants. Think of King Herod seeking to kill Christ himself. All of these people that Satan is deceiving and manipulating and, and using to try and bring an end to God's plans.

He's an active enemy, an active foe, actively working against us. But if we are unregenerate, we're in his s-employ. Uh, Luther talks about in his Bondage of the Will that, that we are like a, a, a donkey or a mule, and you're either being ridden by God or ridden by the devil. Man in his unregenerate state are being ridden by the devil, doing his will. If that's not a bleak enough picture for us, if it's not bad enough to be opposed by the world and deceived by the world and the devil, our own flesh is in on the action.

Our own flesh. And I think when we think about the desires of our flesh, it's often worse than what we tend to think, right? We know that our sin is bad, but do you realize or think about that your desire for sin is sin? Original sin is this doctrine in scripture that, that we are born with a corrupted nature from our father Adam. It's not just the loss of an original holiness or righteousness that Adam possessed, so that if original sin is removed by baptism, as the Roman Catholics would teach, then now we just have sinful desires we have to combat that that are not necessarily stemming from a sinful nature, but they're just there because a consequence of the fallen world.

It's it's deeper than that. There are many who teach that the mere presence of what they would call concupiscence, the desire, the sinful desire that wells up within us, there are many who would teach that that is not itself a sin. That sin only occurs when it's engaged, but that the wicked desires themselves aren't actually sins if they're not engaged in. But this is not biblical. Our sin is deeper than the outward actions that we commit.

Our sin reaches down to our thoughts and our motives, our affections and our desires. Anytime we willingly embrace what God has forbidden, that desire reveals the corruption of the sin that remains in our flesh. Do you see how deeply rooted your sin is? How deeply rooted it is in your hearts? This is clearly taught to us in the Ten Commandments and in the Sermon on the Mount.

If we were to think about what is, what is the last of the Ten Commandments? You shall not covet. Why does God have that as a commandment? Wouldn't coveting already be covered under the previous nine? What is unique about the sin of coveting? Coveting gets at the heart of the matter. He's already told you not to steal, but the act of coveting, of wanting to steal itself is a sin.

Coveting never has to go be born into action for it to be a sin. This is very similar to what Jesus says on the Sermon of the Mount. He says, if you are angry, it is murder. If you lust, it is adultery. That is, the desires are sin, as is the action. It's not simply good enough for you to not act on sinful desires. Indulging the lust of the flesh and of the mind is sin.

As Christians, we should not simply confess our actions, and we should not cut ourselves slack because though we desired something sinful, we didn't follow through with it. Because the very desire for that sinful thing is sin. It is sinful enough that that will send you to hell, if not forgiven and repented of. Sitting on the couch, not going out and actively breaking the Ten Commandments is not holiness.

Sure, I'll grant you, it's better than doing the sin. It is better to get angry and not murder someone than to murder them, but it's not righteousness. That's a pathetic form of righteousness. This is why Christians cannot have sin be a descriptor of their life, because the very desire for the sin is sin. The sin is deep. This is why with, with the stuff with Revoice and this b-side B gay Christianity, these things where we want to say, well, I'm a gay Christian.

No. Sin cannot define your Christianity. Because the very desire for it is sin that has to be rooted out of your heart. Our sin is deeper than our hands. It's deeper than our mouths. It reaches down to our desires and our affections. And so the beginning state of every man is one of death. There is no spiritual good in him. There's nothing in you for God to coax into life.

There's no like little spark that he just has to, like a little flame, just nurture and blow on and and bring into life a fuller flame. No, you're dead. He has to put life into you. The final dreadful thing that Paul tells us here is that we all are born as children of wrath in our very nature because of our inherited sin from Adam and the sin that and and we just nurture and grow that sin.

We are children of wrath, everyone. Because of our deadness, our sin, our desires, we are under the wrath of God. Or we were, that is. Because this is written to the saints. Did you notice what Paul says in these verses? You were dead. You formerly walked according to the world. You formerly lived. You were by nature children of wrath. Were, formerly, past tense. We are not these things anymore if we are in Christ.

Do you remember what your life was like before Christ? Do you remember what you loved? Do you remember the things that controlled you? What you thought about God, how little you cared about holiness and pleasing him? Now, I'm going to read this again. Listen, listen to what Paul says. This is who you were. You were dead in your trespasses. You walked according to the course of this world, according to the power of the prince of the air.

You formerly lived in the lust of your flesh. You indulged in the desires of your flesh and of your mind. You were by children, you were by nature children of wrath, but God. Paul doesn't say, but man tried harder, But man decided to make the right choice. He decided to flop his arm over the life ring and get himself saved. He says, but God. It's the essence of the gospel.

The gospel starts with but God. But God is rich in mercy. But God loved us. But God made us alive. But God raised us from the dead. But God seated us at his right hand. But God displays his grace in us. God. God did that for the poor, wretched, dead man who's walking in his sin, enslaved by Satan, under the wrath of God, and deserving of eternal torment.

And across the black sky of the despair of who you were come the words, but God. God is rich in mercy. What is mercy? Mercy is not getting what you deserve. And God isn't like sort of merciful. He isn't like trying to find enough mercy for all the people he wishes he could save. No, says he is rich in mercy. He has mercy to go round. God is rich in mercy, and he gives it to his people.

And he doesn't have just mercy, he has love, but it's not just love, it's great love. But when? Why? But why? Why would he show us mercy and love? Is it because he found something good in us? No! We had a mockery of life. We walk around as if we were alive, and yet we were going around sinning and despising the very God who created us and gave us breath.

I was talking with my mom, um, the other day, and I don't remember what the context was, how this came up, but when she was a nurse, uh, she said one time she had to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and she said it was the most awful thing she's ever had to do. She's like, because at that time, they didn't all have like the mask, and so it was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and the person was dead.

They had coded. And she's like, there's the most awful thing is tasting death. It's horrible. That's what God did to you. Amen. He touched the dead man and raised him up to new life. This is the work of God, the Holy Spirit. It's what he does. He regenerates his saints. He brings them to life. A dead man cannot resurrect himself. What can he do? Nothing. He's dead.

It has to be an outside force acting upon him. We all speak about being born again, about rebirth. And this is the idea that Paul's getting at. You were dead, and now you're alive. You were dead, and now you're alive. Not because of anything good in us or anything that we've done, but because God loved us and made us alive in Christ. We are united with Christ in his death and in his resurrection, and that would be good enough, wouldn't it?

But it doesn't stop there. It gets even better because we're told that Jesus is seated in heaven at the right hand of the Father, and guess what? So are you. And notice, Paul doesn't say you will be seated with Christ in heaven. He says you are seated in Christ with heaven. Doesn't that blow your mind? It doesn't mean that we physically left earth. Paul is talking about our present spiritual union with the exalted Christ and the new position that we have in him.

Do you realize what this means about the Christian's relationship to Christ? Do you see how closely we are united to Christ? We must be reunited to Christ. In him we live and move and have our being. Were we to be separated from Christ, we would have nothing. We would lose it all. This is why we can't be separated from Christ. There's nothing that can get in between us and Christ as Christians, because if it were to happen, we would have nothing.

The fullness of what Paul means here is mysterious. It's this, this already not yet aspect of the Christian life, where, where we are seated with Christ now, though we're here on earth. We're saved, but we're waiting for the full consummation. We're still battling sin. We're still awaiting the final resurrection because we have to go through that last valley of death, physically. And yet, our identity and our standing are secure because it is in Christ.

Your circumstances will tell you that you're weak, you're defeated, you're insignificant, you're forgotten. But Paul says something greater. Our life is hidden with Christ. We will be exalted with Christ. Your standing before God is not determined by how you feel this morning or what you see in the world around you. It's determined by where you are in Christ. And why did he do this? Well, he did it for his own glory, and he did it so that he could show his greatness and his glory in you to the world.

You think about first time parents and how proud they are of their baby, right? They want everyone to see their little baby. Or you think about how many of you have done, um, you know, I have so many pictures on my phone I could show you of jobs I've done, of houses that were decrepit that I turned into places that you would want to live. We all have things like that, right?

We have a project that w-was we invested, we built, we made beautiful, and we have pictures of it, and we want to show people our handiwork. Well, this is Christ with you. He wants to display his handiwork in you. He took a dirty, dead sinner and turned him into a beautiful saint. A trophy of his grace. The glory has nothing to do with us. It is all about the work of God in our lives.

And this is amazing. It's the best news you could hear. You may be like, well, okay, does this require anything of me? Let's see what Paul says. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. Okay, so Paul is basically summarizing the things that he said, and he twice he has said this phrase about it being of grace.

So mercy, we said, is not getting what you deserve. Grace is getting what you don't deserve. It's the unmerited favor. Salvation is by grace through faith, but it all comes from God. We don't earn faith. It's a gift. Salvation is a gift. If our salvation was something that we worked to accomplish, we would have grounds for boasting. God in the ages to come would show how great a builder we were.

How accomplished we were. It-it's-it's a ridiculous thing, isn't it? We were dead. Nothing in my hand I bring simply to the cross I cling. Naked come to thee to for dress, helpless look to thee for grace. Right? That is us. Christian, remember what you were. You were dead. You were a child of wrath. You were walking according to the ways of the world, the devil and the flesh.

What distinction did you make that God would owe you salvation? None. We're saved by grace. This should destroy our pride. Who are you? What room do you have for spiritual arrogance, for thinking you're superior to any other man or woman? You ought to be, as a Christian, the most humble person in the room because you know that everything you have is a grace, a mercy, a gift from your Heavenly Father.

When you look out and you see people trapped in their sin, you shouldn't first think, how could they be like that? That was you. That was where you were headed, walking in the ways of the world until God, but God. Well, Paul destroys two errors in these verses here. In verses 8 through 9, he destroys our boasting. He reminds us that we're not saved by works, we're saved by him.

But in verse 10, he knows us so well, he destroys our temptation to laziness. You were not saved by good works, you were saved for good works. Ephesians 2:10 says, for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. We are God's workmanship by virtue of having been created by him, but that's not what Paul's talking about here.

The workmanship that he's talking about and referring to is the regeneration, our being made alive in Christ, and then the continuing sanctification that happens throughout our life. He's talking about the shaping that he does with all of his sons and daughters. This shows us again that salvation is a work of God, not of our own. It's not faith plus works. The works are a outflowing of the work of God in our lives, but works are still part of it.

I think in some ways our culture has pendulum swung all the way from the Reformation, where where we have the great and godly man Luther, who is pounding it through. It's by grace through faith. And we've gone over to say, well, that means there's as if it has no further implication for our lives. But we were created for good works, not by good works. This means that works are a necessity in the Christian's life.

Again, not because they save us, but because good works are always the product of salvation. Remember how Paul's been talking throughout this passage. You were dead formerly, walking according to the world and the lust of your flesh and your mind. Christians no longer walk in those ways. I'm not saying that Christians are perfect. They aren't. We still have bodies that are corrupted by sin, but we're now alive.

We fight our sin. The same God who raised us from spiritual death to life has broken sin's dominion over us. The Holy Spirit now gives you power to fight sin, and that fight will continue your entire life. But the Christian no longer fights as a slave trying to earn freedom. He fights as a son who's been set free. A Christian is not to be defined by their sin or be ruled by it.

To be ruled by sin is a denial of the power of the Holy Spirit and the regenerating of the Christian's life. Works, good works do not save us, but if you're saved, they will be seen in your life. We know this is true because it tells us that the Lord has prepared beforehand good works for us to do. Again, we don't have room to boast because the good works that we're to do were prepared by God.

He made them, he gave them for you to do. And so you have to ask, what good work has God put before you to do today, this week? How often do we find it so hard to love others that are different than us, that sin against us? You think God loved you while you were still a sinner and showed you mercy. So, what good work do you need?

Is it di-loving a difficult spouse? Is it one of your children needs particular instruction and patience? Maybe it's your neighbor. You need to help them. You need to witness to them. Share the good news of the gospel with a coworker. Have you noticed someone's discouraged? Maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's someone here, and the work that God has set before you is to go and speak words of encouragement to them, and you just don't want to do it?

Visit someone who's in need? What is it? We were created for good works. Now, ultimately, what does that mean? Well, ultimately, it means that actually what we were created for is to worship God. And so the proper response of reading through these verses is not that I just need to try harder. It, it begins by thankfulness and, and joy in worshiping Christ for this great and mighty salvation that he has wrought.

And so the obedience that ought to mark our lives doesn't flow through some rigid, um, adherence to the law. It flows from the joy and the love of a heavenly father who loved us, who called us and saved us and brought us out of darkness into light. And then, having broken the power of sin over us, we go forth in obedience out of love for that great Savior.

Not as slaves, not as people who think they can earn something from God. Christ earned it all. To say that you have to earn something is to demean the work of Christ. Rather, it's out of love for Christ. We go forth in obedience to him. God saved you in order to make you into something, to fashion you, to build you. You are his handiwork. Does our life reflect that?

Sometimes our lives may look pretty grim in our fight against sin. The fight is a sign of life. Dead people aren't known for their fighting abilities. And the hope also that we have in this is that the work is Christ's. If, if, if salvation depended on us, we know the song, right? Prone to wander, Lord, we feel it, prone to leave the God I love. We, we need the work to be Christ's because we are so fickle. And so we take hope and assurance in the fact that our salvation rests in Christ and Christ alone. And then, it should go forth and bear good fruit in our lives, that we should do that work that he has prepared before us.