Grace Alone (Ephesians 2:1-10)

As we said in our introduction, our announcements, we are celebrating God's faithfulness to this church for 50 years. And at the same time, we're celebrating God's faithfulness to the church throughout all of history. God has promised to be with his people as we've been looking at the book of Exodus. We'll be returning to Exodus next week in chapter 15. We can see that God has committed himself to his people, to be with his people, to love them, to fight for them, for their good. This morning is Reformation Sunday, and as we began two years ago, we want to continue to go through the five soul laws of the Reformation. We began with scripture alone. We are a church that's built upon the word of God. God's scripture alone is good for what we believe, what we know and how we worship. We looked at Christ alone, it is his work alone that saves us, and now this morning we're going to be looking at grace alone. It is by grace alone that we have been saved. As we think about Reformation Sunday, there's a mantra in the Reformation theology that we need to remember. We're reformed and always reforming. You never get it all. Especially if we look at grace. You continue to grow in your understanding of grace. You continue to realize how sweet and rich and kind God's grace is. How powerful it is. We never get our heads wrapped around it. No, we continue to grow and be reformed doctrinally, morally and spiritually. We continue to grasp at knowing the grace of God and its richness and its fullness. This morning, we're looking at one of these texts that you read it and every time something new is revealed about our sin, our need for God and God's great blessing to care for us. We'll be looking at Ephesians 2 this morning. If you didn't have a Bible, there are Bibles at the end of each pew. You can nudge your neighbor or the person in front of you and they'll get you a Bible. Or you can just get up and go to another pew and grab the Bible at the end of the pew there. That would be just fun. Ephesians 2 is a contrasting passage. There are two main parts. The first part describes the consequence of our sin, which is death. The second, the grace of God, which brings life. The first tells us who we are because of our sin. The second, who we are because of Christ. The first, who we are without God. The second, who we are because of God. And the key word that separates the two parts is in verse four. But. We were dead, we were condemned, but God made us alive. It introduces a dramatic change in our destiny, in our identification from death and destruction to life and love. We are made alive in Christ by grace. There are four points to our message this morning. Our sin corrupts us. Our sin condemns us. God gives us life. God gives us purpose. Let me read our passage in its entirety, listening for that great transition, the great change that takes place in verse four. 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 mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. But God. Being rich in mercy. Because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, He made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised up. And he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of work so that no one may boast, for we are his workmanship. created in Christ Jesus for good works, which he prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." You see those two parts. Our first two points are reflecting on the first part. Sin has corrupted us. Sin condemns us. Let us first look and see how we have been corrupted, or how we have corrupted ourselves with our own sin. The first line is, Really, all we need to know, he goes into more detail. We were dead in the trespasses and sins in which we once walked. The thing is, we need to remember that God is good. Whatever God does is good. God's creation was originally good. He is good. He created us to be good. He created us for a good purpose, to know Him, to be loved by Him, to worship Him. But we sinned. We rebelled. We decided that we knew better than him. And now we are discussing the natural state of man, not the natural state in which God created us, but the way in which all are born. We are all dead in trespasses and sins. Remember, God said to Adam, if you eat this fruit, you shall surely die. Now, there's two kinds of death. Here we see the first kind of death where Adam physically died. There's one kind of death, and that is when the soul is removed from the body, the body is left as an empty corpse. There's no life in that body. That body is separated from the soul. It has no power to move. It cannot respond. It hears nothing. It has no strength. It has no thought. It cannot act or react. You could put a 400-pound weight on the body and it would not know it because the soul has been removed. That is the physical death that Adam experienced much later. You could also put a 2-pound weight on that body and it would not know it. There's no capacity to respond to anything with a physical body if the soul has been removed. So, that's one kind of death, the death of the body. The second kind of death is what immediately happened to Adam. It's the death of the soul. Now, let me try to parallel the death of the soul, the death of the body, the death of the body happens when the soul is removed. The death of the soul is when the purpose for which we were made is removed. When we stop seeking to worship God and we start seeking sin, the death of the soul is no longer seeking the purpose for which we were created, it's seeking It's no longer seeking to worship the God who created us. It's worshiping the Creator. A dead soul cannot act towards God. A dead soul cannot respond to God in the same way a dead body cannot respond to someone speaking to it. A dead soul cannot respond when it hears the word of God, unless God himself brings about a mighty power. Now, a dead soul is different from a dead body in this way. It's active. A dead soul is active, but it's active against God and it's actively pursuing sin. It is dead to the things of God, it is opposed to God, it is rebelling against God, and we all being born in Adam are dead. We cannot see our own sin. We cannot respond to the things of God. See, a dead body cannot give itself CPR. A dead body cannot revive itself. A dead soul cannot bring life to itself either. It needs help from the outside. It needs the divine giving source of life, the Spirit in the name of Christ bringing life. A dead soul needs help. The scary thing about a dead soul is it can't even see It's death. It can't see it's destruction. It can't see how bad it is. It needs to be told. It's kind of like the Febreze commercials. They bring people in and they have it smelling nice, but when they turn the lights on, they see that there's dirty dogs everywhere and there's food left out and they're in filth. A dead soul is like that room with the lights off. We're surrounded by our own filth. We're living in the filth of sin. We're living a disgusting life according to God. But someone else has to turn the lights on. We can't see it by our own power. I'm fond of this illustration for death. You cannot teach a turtle calculus. It can stay there. You can feed it lettuce so it continues to stay under the shell and looks at you. There's no capacity in that turtle to actually understand what you're telling it. I can't either, so I'm not against turtles. But that turtle lacks the capacity to actually understand what you were saying. On our own, with our own strength being dead, we lack the capacity to understand the things of God. We cannot respond to the things of God. We're dead. We need help. We need someone else to come and revive us and give us life. Until we, before we get to verse four, let's continue to see what Paul says about being dead. We once walked in those sins. When you have a dead heart, it only produces destruction. See, a dead heart is one that's focused on sin. And it's focused on being opposed to God. And so the only thing a dead heart can produce is more sin. A sinful heart produces more sin. Notice here, Christian, it says the things you once walked in. It's expecting a life change. Paul, in the midst of this entire letter, is giving you the doctrine so that he knows that you are supposed to be changed by it. We're not to continue in our old ways. It's a past tense. He says we follow the sinful, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now in work, and the sons of disobedience. We are following the course of the world. Now again, world is not the creation that God intended. The world is that system that is opposed to God. 1 John 2.16 helps us understand what world means here. He says, for all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, And the desires of the eyes, the part of life, is not from the Father. It is from the world. We are wrapped up in the midst of all this system that's opposed to God. And the thing is, again, we don't see it because everybody else is like us. We need someone to come and reveal it to us. Satan, the prince of the power of the air, he has led us in a rebellion against God. He has lied to us. He's told us you can do it your way. You can enjoy that and you can fulfill that sinful appetite. And we have bought into that lie. We refuse to worship God. We insist on sinning. It's our natural inclination. We carry out the passions of our flesh, the desires of our body and mind, what we naturally know to do, what we've learned to do. That is what we do. And that is refuse God. Sin brings some kind of a sensation to her appetite. But it never brings peace. Living a life that's focused on sin, living a life that's allowing the dead heart to direct us, it brings about something, but it's not peace. As Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find rest in you. If you were not a Christian this morning, you're pursuing a life And you may have markers that say, this is what will technically make me happy and you'll never be truly happy. You're seeking rest, but you will not find it in the things of this world, you will only find it in God who created you for himself. We must stop pursuing empty happiness and pursue God. So we're dead, we're unable to hear the things of God, we're unable to own our own power, revive ourselves. The second thing we see in the text, our sin condemns us. And we were, by nature, children of wrath. Look at verse 3, the very end. We were, by nature, children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Being dead in our sins talks about how we're actively pursuing sin and how we actively are doing nothing but rejecting God. Here we get God's perspective on it. We're condemned. We're guilty. God, being a just and holy God, condemns sinners. He is holy and justice and must punish sin. Notice he says like the rest of mankind. This is the universal truth. We're all sinners. We're all in this boat together. We were all dead being born in sin. We've all rebelled against God. But God makes those alive to believe in Christ. I was encouraged by the hassle testimony, not Kathy's up here, I was able to meet with them earlier in the week, and they were sharing about how a young man called him in the middle of the night one night and said, Are you telling me everybody goes to hell doesn't believe in Jesus? I said, Yeah. So what about my mom? She's never heard a fly. And Lynn being faithful to the gospel said, Yes. Anyone who does not believe in Jesus is going to hell. It's a difficult thing to wrap our heads around because we like to think of ourselves as good people. We like to determine how we're good because we can see other people who are worse than us. We can see that we do good things to other people. We can even say things we haven't done. I've never killed anybody. I don't try to hurt other people. See, it's not how we treat other people that necessarily condemns us. It's how we treat God. We were built and created to worship by refusing God worship, we are all guilty, condemned, deserving of hell. Friend, if you do not believe you deserve God's wrath, you cannot be a Christian. If you don't believe you deserve God's wrath, you cannot be a Christian. Being a Christian means you see your need for Christ, you see your sin, you see your offense, and you see that Christ and his death is the only thing that can set you free. If you do not see that you are condemned, if you do not see that you are dead, you can't be a Christian. It is only until we see that we're dead and we need Christ's death that we can truly live. Now let's look to this transition and to actually help us appreciate the transition in verse four. I'm going to pretend it's not there. Let's actually think about the logical sequence that should happen. You see, God brings an incredible interruption to the logic here. That's what the but God does. It changes everything. But the logical sequence should have a therefore. You were dead. You were condemned. Therefore, when your body loses its soul, you will come face to face with the Holy God. Your sin will come in immediate contact with the holiness and righteousness of God. And you will feel as if you were in fire for an eternity. The Bible talks about hell in many very vivid images. The body being on fire forever, being eaten by maggots forever. I don't think that does it justice. Whenever we, in our sin and our offensiveness, approach God and actually face him, come into immediate contact with him, we will be consumed, our souls feeling like they're on fire. The therefore isn't there because of God's grace. We're condemned. We're dead. We should face an eternity of wrath. But instead, God makes us alive. God gives us life. God, and then Paul gives us three descriptions, who's rich in mercy, who's great in love. Even we were dead. He made us alive together in Christ. So there's your outside help. We're not able to save ourselves. We are dead. We can't respond to God on our own. But God makes us alive. Let's first look at these three descriptions of God. The God who makes us alive. He is rich in mercy because of his great love, even when we were dead in our transgressions. There's a building up here. He's rich in his mercy because of the greatness of his love, even when we were sinners. See, there's nothing in us that makes God love us. There's nothing about us that causes God to say, I'm going to show grace to this one. It's all in God. It's His choice to show mercy. It's His choice to give grace. The most powerful part of this is verse 5. Even when we were dead in our trespasses, He shows us His rich mercy Because of his great love, he has made us alive in Christ, even while we were still sinners. We can see this vividly in salvation, if we think about Christ. He makes us alive in Christ by sending Christ to die for us, even while we were nailing the nails in the cross, hands and feet. Christ is committed to dying for us. He's committed to loving us. While we spit and mock upon the God who saves us, he's still committed to saving us. Even while we ignore him and hate him with our words, our thoughts and our deeds, he is still committed to loving us. His love doesn't depend upon us. His love flows out of the richness of his own nature. This is how he is both just and justifies. God is good. He is just. He must punish every sin. And the sin of our own actions, our own words, our own thoughts, they will either be punished on us, which will be just, or they will be punished in Christ, which is just. When God punishes our sin in Christ, He is both just because he's punished the sin, but then he's also the justifier. He declares us innocent because Christ has died on our behalf. This is our God, he is worthy of our worship. He has sought to love us when we were unlovely, he has made us alive when we were dead. If you're not a Christian this morning. What God is ultimately doing is calling his creatures, calling men and women back to worship. He's calling us back to himself, and he's calling us back to himself by coming and seeking and finding and saving us. What he's calling you back to is worship, and your first true act of worship is to see your need of him and depend upon Christ for your salvation. Do you see your sin? That is a gift of God. Do you see God as your Savior in Jesus Christ? Do you see your need for Christ? Then don't leave here without talking to someone about it. Find forgiveness by trusting Christ. Trust Him who conquered your sin. The second thing we see when God gives us life is that The God who raised Christ from the grave gives us life. Let's look at verses 6 and 7. Let me go back to verse 4. I'll begin with the entirety of the passage, because Paul takes a little break here in the middle. I'm going to get back to that. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, he made us alive together with Christ. and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus." Now, there's a phrase here that we need to recognize and appreciate. We are alive together with Christ. He has raised us up with Him. He has seated us in the place in Christ. It is in Christ that He will show us the immeasurable riches. It is through Christ that we are saved. It is only in our relationship with Christ. God's mercy and love and grace, those aren't abstract ideas that just float around. They're completely and entirely tied to the Son, to Jesus Christ. There is no love apart from the sun. There is no grace apart from the sun. We only know mercy in the sun. God only calls us back through his son. The only way we can be reconciled to God is by believing in Christ. That is how he revives us. That's how he demonstrates to us his love. The son who died in our place, He is now risen and his life is ours. His righteousness, his goodness is now ours. As Paul says in Romans 8, if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. When Christ rose from the grave, He promised that He would send His Spirit, and that Spirit applies His life to us. That means the righteousness that we lack, the righteousness that we need, it's ours because Christ gives us His. The righteousness we need is given to us through the Spirit, and it's Christ's righteousness. Notice also it says, Gives us the place in Christ. He raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. We have assurance steadfast anchor. That is where our hope is. And they said last week. Where Christ is, that's where we are. As close as the son is to the father today, that's how close we can be. We can enjoy the grace of God only in Christ and we can enjoy it fully and completely. It's ours to enter boldly into and enjoy. Again, we must see that his grace, his love and his mercy are tied to Christ. Now, go back to the end of verse five in the midst of Paul declaring the greatness of God's life and the greatness of God's mercy, he just takes this short break just to say he has to say it by grace, you have been saved. By grace, he can't help himself, but to just stop and make sure, you know, it's by grace that you have been saved. We see later that it is the gift of God. Grace is a gift. It's a free gift. And there's two ways I want us to think about this gift. First, it's God's gift to give freely. This goes back to the fact that there's nothing in us that makes God give us the gift. It's a gift completely unearned. It's a gift that we don't deserve. It's by God's own free choice that he gives us the gift. We must be careful in how we approach God's grace. It's not ours for the taking. It's his for the giving. And he gives generously, he gives abundantly. He gives us his own son. Second, grace is free to receive. What we must do is believe that it's truly grace. We must believe that it's not our works. We must believe in the grace that is ours if we believe in Christ, his death and his resurrection. We didn't earn it. We simply receive it. One last thing, we need to focus in on grace. It's not cheap grace. The grace that saves us led Christ to die on the cross for us. It was purchased by the precious blood of the Lamb. It's not cheap grace. It's not cheap grace in how it's afforded to us by God. And it's not to be received as cheap grace. When we believe in Jesus Christ, as Kathy's testimony so clearly stated, we trust Him as our Savior and our Lord. We give Him our life. When we see that He purchased us with His blood, He now owns us. Because he's renewing us to be worshipers once again. Grace isn't something we accept casually. No, we count the cost and we see that it costs Christ his life. We seek to take up our own cross. Finally, the fourth point today. God gives us purpose. Again, we were dead. He created us for worship. He's renewing us to be worshipers again. Look at verse seven, so that in the coming of the ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. Verse eight, 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 work, 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. As Paul continues to remind us, it's by grace, not by works. He ends by pointing out you're saved by grace for good works. Christians, we're not just saved by grace so we can sin more. We're not saved by grace so that we can sin more boldly and more proudly and so that we know God forgives us. No, we're not. We're saved by grace for the purpose of now being God's workmanship. To begin worshiping again. It's not by works that we are saved, but we are saved by grace for the purpose of works. We are saved by faith alone, but that faith is never alone, Martin Luther says. That faith leads to works. It means we repent of sin. It means we we see sinning when God reveals that sin means we trust Christ. That's how we grow in that grace. That's how we grow in understanding God's grace all the more. The more he reveals our sin, the more we see how abundant his grace is. We seek him by living according to his word and his plan. Some brief applications. Friends, find your assurance in grace. If you're wrestling with assurance of salvation, do not seek assurance in how strong your faith is. Seek assurance in how powerful the grace of God is. See the great love with which He has loved us. See the richness of His mercy. See that His love, His grace, His power is able to save you. If you're wrestling with assurance, look to the cross and the power of Christ and the life that is risen at the right hand of the Father. Don't look to the weakness of your own faith. It's the quality of God's grace that saves us, not the quality of our faith. Secondly, friends, we need to grow in the grace of God. We should not be satisfied with an insincere faith that does not trust God in his grace. We must have faith that he is able to care for us, to keep us, keep us. We must have faith that we will grow in his grace. Faith seeking his saving grace is a growing faith. It should not be stagnant. It should seek to grow. And finally, friends, we rejoice. If we know the grace of God, we can do nothing but rejoice. We can do nothing but worship the great God of grace, the God who has given us His Son, the God who has given us His Spirit, the God who has given us life when we were dead. He revives us. He keeps us. He even renews us and gives us a new purpose to worship Him. Let's praise the God of grace. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we thank you that you have interrupted our sin. You changed the course of our destiny. You moved us from being dead to making us alive in Christ. We thank you that Christ is ours and all that He has has been given to us. Teach us. Teach us to trust in that grace. Teach us to live according to that grace. Teach us to walk in that grace so that we are obedient to you. We live our lives for you. Teach us to rejoice always in what you have done for us. We praise you, our great God, for your grace. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.