Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] So growing up, we would go eat with this family from church, which is a totally normal thing to do.
[00:00:06] We'd go to the restaurant. Occasionally, we unfortunately, would go to their house.
[00:00:10] That's not being mean about them. They were great. They're hospitable, they're kind. They loved the Lord. They lived in a funeral home.
[00:00:20] The father was a funeral Director.
[00:00:22] Now I'm 31 years old, and to this day, if a scary movie commercial comes on, I will close my eyes.
[00:00:28] I will keep them closed until I no longer hear scary sounds.
[00:00:33] If my wife travels for work, I will sleep with the lights on, and I will sleep with the TV on.
[00:00:40] Not that I expect my wife to beat up the intruder, but I just would like to see if I'm gonna be alone.
[00:00:48] And I remember often as we would go eat there, I would just remember sitting upstairs and just thinking, oh, my goodness, there's dead bodies downstairs.
[00:00:57] And I remember asking him, hey, how can you be a funeral director?
[00:01:02] And he said, well, the first three letters in funeral are fun.
[00:01:08] That didn't make me feel any better at all. And, in fact, probably made me more uncomfortable.
[00:01:14] But I remember just not being able to get through the meal, just sitting and being like, dead people downstairs, dead people downstairs. What am I supposed to do?
[00:01:23] Well, see, Paul here is describing in Ephesians 2 that we're all the dead people.
[00:01:28] We're all the dead people that I was afraid of.
[00:01:31] And we see that we're spiritually dead. And Paul starts verse one here with and you.
[00:01:40] So he's immediately shifting the focus to us.
[00:01:43] He's showing us that God's grace shows us who we are without Christ. So we get to see who we are without Christ. And the picture's dark.
[00:01:54] Verse one is, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins.
[00:02:00] Now Paul here, while saying, and you, we kind of really.
[00:02:05] He's really talking to the Gentile audience. He is still representative of the Jewish culture of growing up. So he is focusing in saying, and you, as the Gentiles. You should read that today. As. And he's talking to you.
[00:02:19] Don't leave here thinking this is a Jew versus Gentile thing. Paul is addressing us.
[00:02:25] So he immediately says, we're dead in our trespasses and sins.
[00:02:30] So why does he say trespasses and sins?
[00:02:33] Why both?
[00:02:35] Well, see, trespasses are kind of direct infractions just against what God says.
[00:02:41] The Ten Commandments is a good example.
[00:02:44] There are a list of rules. When we break those rules, that sin.
[00:02:48] But our sins that are described is a deeper desire in which we desire to replace God with other things. We worship the creation over the Creator.
[00:02:59] It's our deeper condition. We see this throughout Scripture, which is in Romans 6:23. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[00:03:11] The result of our sin always is death.
[00:03:16] You see, right off the bat, we're one verse in and we're dead, verse two, which is 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.
[00:03:32] So walked here is kind of a Hebrew idiom for, like, move in a particular direction. It's where we're headed.
[00:03:40] And so what Paul is really getting to here is that there's no neutrality.
[00:03:45] And I think specifically in America, we've convinced ourselves that there's some neutral way to be a Christian, that we can just do enough to almost trick God into getting us to heaven.
[00:03:57] We're saying, wow, well, I didn't do any of the really big sins. You know, God, I was faithful, I was kind to my neighbor, I paid my taxes and I moved on. And what Paul is saying is nothing that you do is good enough.
[00:04:12] So there's no neutral way to live as a Christian. There's no way in which we can say, well, God, I kind of got you backed into a corner here because I was just good enough. And it just outweighed my bad. What Paul is saying is we are dead, and everything we're walking in is death. I think the best way to describe this is when you're at the airport. There's that moving sidewalk.
[00:04:35] It's just taking you to the destination. But the faster you walk, the faster you go, well, this world is the airport sidewalk taking us to death.
[00:04:45] But our sin is when we walk, we just lead to more death and more death and more death. And it's taking us there.
[00:04:55] There's no stopping everything we do. It infects our whole being.
[00:05:02] And we see this because Paul says that we're following two things. And following isn't some passive thing here. It is we are pledging our allegiance to.
[00:05:13] We're pledging our allegiance to the course of this world, and we're pledging our allegiance to following Satan, the prince of the power.
[00:05:21] Those two things are connected.
[00:05:24] We can't separate the world from Satan.
[00:05:29] And that's important to remember, because if there is no neutrality, like Paul's saying, then there's nothing that we can do we only have two options? The option is to follow Christ or to reject Christ.
[00:05:41] That's it.
[00:05:43] We don't get this happy medium where we get to survive.
[00:05:46] What Paul is saying is, as you follow the world and pledge allegiance to the world and Satan, you are constantly rejecting Christ.
[00:05:56] And we see this because he moves on the end of verse two to say that the Spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. See, at the end of Ephesians 1, Paul is talking about how Christ has power over all dominion and all authority.
[00:06:11] And so though he has power over the spiritual world and dominion, he's not quite vanquished that world yet. He will when Jesus comes back.
[00:06:21] But as Paul is saying, the Spirit that has worked is still working.
[00:06:27] So we see that there's a spiritual realm to our sin. It's not just some accident.
[00:06:35] Paul's not relenting. Here we go forward in verse three, which is among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind and the and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
[00:06:50] Notice here how we went from and you to we all.
[00:06:55] So he's lumping in the Jewish audience here. Once again, he's talking to all of us.
[00:07:01] We all are in this boat.
[00:07:04] This is our picture. Without Christ, we're by nature children of wrath.
[00:07:11] Wrath here is our destination more than our identity.
[00:07:15] It is where we're headed.
[00:07:18] We are born with the nature of heading towards the wrath of God's judgment.
[00:07:24] There's no escaping it.
[00:07:27] There is no reason for us to not be.
[00:07:31] And we see that it's the desires of the flesh and the mind.
[00:07:35] Not only do we sin, we enjoy sin, we long for sin.
[00:07:42] It impacts us both physically and mental.
[00:07:47] But we feel this, though we can look around and feel our flesh. This is why watching four hours of Netflix is so much easier than reading your Bible for 10 minutes.
[00:08:01] It's why complaining about politics online is just easier than inviting someone to dinner who disagrees with you.
[00:08:09] It's why we have a burning desire to be accepted. Or we are constantly trying to find the thing that will make us satisfied. If I just had kids, it would be better. If I was just married, it would be better.
[00:08:23] If I just wasn't married anymore, it would be better.
[00:08:26] This is the thing that we're constantly searching for.
[00:08:31] We can feel this weight of our sin.
[00:08:34] Our fleshly desires want us to be on the throne, not Christ.
[00:08:40] So so far, we're three verses in.
[00:08:43] There's Zero mention of God.
[00:08:47] We're dead in our trespasses and sin.
[00:08:49] We're walking in more sin.
[00:08:53] We're following the world and being influenced by Satan. And we're children of wrath marching towards our rightful deserved judgment.
[00:09:03] It's dark.
[00:09:06] We should sit here for a moment.
[00:09:11] Oftentimes we're so ready to just get past this, just get to Jesus, get to the happy stuff. But if we don't see our sin, we're going to miss just how bad we are.
[00:09:25] We don't find this by looking inward. We don't go home today and say I'm just so bad, I'm just so sinful. We don't just sit on the edge of our bed and just wallow in our self pity.
[00:09:38] The only way we see our sin is Christ.
[00:09:44] To the extent of which we see Christ for who he is is the extent that we can see how helpless our sin makes us.
[00:09:52] Think about the prophet Isaiah.
[00:09:55] So as he sees the throne room of God, his first reaction is Isaiah 6, 5, which is woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.
[00:10:15] So when Isaiah sees God, he's immediately confronted with his own sin.
[00:10:23] He immediately recognizes he's lost and that he's unclean and on top of that, that the people around him are unclean.
[00:10:31] And I think that what that means by the people around us is I think sometimes we get in these echo chambers of people that agree with us and we just show up and we do the same things. And because we have people that do the things that we do, we just think they're neutral, we think they're fine.
[00:10:47] Well, I respect this person from church and they do it. So who cares?
[00:10:52] What Isaiah is seeing immediately is the people around me are sinful too.
[00:10:57] I can't escape this sin.
[00:11:00] The sobering reality of God's grace allows us to see who we really are.
[00:11:05] It shines brightly into all the dark places of ourselves.
[00:11:13] But there's hope.
[00:11:16] We see the beginning of verse four, the first mention of God but God.
[00:11:24] So we go from and you to the opposite but God.
[00:11:30] This is no longer about you, this is about Christ.
[00:11:36] You can stop adding yourself in here.
[00:11:39] Stick with one through three.
[00:11:44] See, I think the best way to give an example of how we should view this but God, it's a kicking of the door.
[00:11:52] See, when I grew up I played middle school basketball. And by played I mean they Gave me a jersey and I got to go to practice and I got to sit by the coaches during the game.
[00:12:01] And every now and then, if we were down by 100 points, I would go in and it was. It was great. I know that's hard. You guys see me and you're like, how in the world was he not the star basketball player? I've been working through that. You know, it's not easy, but. But here I am. I remember one game, we were down 20 to 30 points. This was not unusual.
[00:12:20] And it was halftime. Our coach was so angry with us, we walked into the locker room. I wasn't upset. I didn't play bad.
[00:12:29] We.
[00:12:30] And. And he's lecturing us about effort and attitude and all these things. And he finally just says, you know what?
[00:12:37] Everybody close your eyes.
[00:12:39] So we closed our eyes and he says, just imagine you're in a field and imagine you're skipping through and the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and bang.
[00:12:52] He slams the clipboard against the metal lockers and shatters it, scaring all of us.
[00:12:59] And that's how we should view the. But God here it has interrupted everything that's happened.
[00:13:06] All the things that Paul just talked about. We can't forget them because they're who we are. But we're past that.
[00:13:13] God has intervened on our behalf.
[00:13:15] The commentary that I read puts that far more graceful than my middle school basketball coach.
[00:13:21] But it says that the grim, plotting, hopeless, long syllable announcement of human lostness, dead in trespasses and sins, children of wrath by nature is shattered by a lightning bolt from heaven, not in judgment, but with intervening mercy and love beyond all reckoning.
[00:13:42] That's beautiful.
[00:13:45] We can't skip over that. But God part in Our Bible verse 4 continues, which is but God being rich in mercy because of the great love in which he loved us.
[00:14:00] But why does God intervene?
[00:14:04] We see two reasons.
[00:14:06] Because he's rich in mercy and he has great love for us.
[00:14:11] Notice that neither of those two are about you.
[00:14:16] There's nothing he saw in you that inspired him to move.
[00:14:21] And that's great news. Because if there was something in us, he saw, what happens when that thing was gone?
[00:14:30] It's an abundance of love, an abundance of mercy. It is the overflow of his character that he reaches in and rescues us from the darkness of verse one through three.
[00:14:44] He presses on with even when we are dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace you've been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.
[00:15:00] So we immediately see that even in our death, because of trespasses, God still moved.
[00:15:08] And what's the result of him intervening?
[00:15:13] He makes us alive together with Christ.
[00:15:16] We just read three verses about how we were dead, we had no hope and completely lost. And, and immediately in verse 4, but God intervenes and now we are alive together with Christ.
[00:15:32] And then you see, by grace you've been saved. Paul goes to expound on this in verses 8 and 9. But it's like he can't contain himself here.
[00:15:42] He has to just say, hey, by the way, it's by grace you've been saved by God's grace. God's grace transforms us. It takes us from death to life.
[00:15:56] But notice we're also raised with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places.
[00:16:04] So everything here is connected to Christ Jesus.
[00:16:08] We see this made us alive together with Christ. He didn't just make us alive and leave.
[00:16:15] We're alive with Christ, raised us up with him, we're raised up with Christ, seated us with him. We're seated with Christ in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.
[00:16:33] It is all connected. We can't separate us in Christ here. And that's for the reason of it's all him. He's the one doing the work.
[00:16:43] He grabbed us.
[00:16:49] But what's the result of being seated with Christ?
[00:16:53] Well, see, we see in verse seven, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.
[00:17:04] You see, Ephesus at the time was a booming metropolis. It was a place that people from all over the ancient world would come.
[00:17:13] There was these temples specifically the temple of Artemis was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
[00:17:20] And they would, in these temples that were dedicated to these gods, they were almost like museums.
[00:17:27] They had gold and weapons and silver, all plundered from the enemies of wars that they fought in the name of this God.
[00:17:36] You'd show up and you'd see the temple of Artemis and you'd go in and it would just be a bunch of relics pointing towards, look at this battle that we won for Artemis or all these things. Paul is using the same language here, but what he's saying is the immeasurable riches of God's grace and kindness in the coming ages is the church.
[00:17:59] This is the place in which the riches of his mercy and kindness we get to see.
[00:18:06] This is the museum that we show up to and see, wow, look what God's done.
[00:18:12] And we see this now and in the ages to come. How kind that we get to see it now.
[00:18:19] Christ could have perfectly been in perfect righteousness to say, you don't get to see it till later.
[00:18:25] But he's saying, look around and see my grace and kindness in the church.
[00:18:33] Think about the trophies here at Ashland that we've seen.
[00:18:38] The missionary scent, the weekly crossing from death to life symbolized in baptism, that we get to celebrate faithful gospel preaching. The trophies of time and effort and energy poured out weekly as adults miss service so they can teach your kids the gospel.
[00:18:59] Meals delivered to celebrate or to mourn.
[00:19:03] The number of times that casseroles have shown up to my house and I have no idea who the people are is more than I can count.
[00:19:10] That is the example of God's rich kindness to us.
[00:19:16] Or when the pipe bursts on Christmas Eve and this place is flooded with water and people just drop what they're doing, show up with shop vacs and 24 hours later we're in the building. The parking lot was nice, Frank, but we're in the building.
[00:19:32] Or think about the text of encouragement. Hey, how are you doing? How can I pray for you?
[00:19:38] Just checking in.
[00:19:42] Or think about the people that park 200 yards away so that you have a closer spot to get into worship. These are trophies.
[00:19:51] We should view this as a museum of trophies of God's kindness that he's given to us.
[00:19:58] Think about the people that show up at your foster child's parent visit to remind you that Christ is king.
[00:20:10] Just think.
[00:20:12] Think about the miracle of where we were in verses one through three.
[00:20:19] And now we're seated with Christ for eternity with a front row seat at the work he's doing.
[00:20:27] But you see, God's grace demands a response as we press on verse 8. For by grace you've been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.
[00:20:46] For by grace we're saved.
[00:20:49] We tend to soften this word and we view it as pity.
[00:20:56] It's not the full picture to view it as pity. Here's why. We aren't some helpless bystander down on their luck.
[00:21:04] We are an enemy of God, active enemy of God.
[00:21:11] We're not the person that is living this life that's not that offensive and that just really can't get going. And Christ sees it and goes, oh, I feel sorry for them.
[00:21:24] What he sees is his enemy.
[00:21:28] This is like if a person had just set their life to take from you or to try to ruin your marriage or to split your family apart, or to take your possessions, get you fired from your job, just relentlessly attacked you.
[00:21:47] And then they're in traffic with a car on the way and you say, oh my goodness, we have to save them.
[00:21:54] That's absurd.
[00:21:58] And we see this in Romans 5, 7 and 8. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die.
[00:22:07] But God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
[00:22:15] We go from enemies to seated with Christ in the heavenly realms.
[00:22:20] But Paul is reiterating here that this is not a result of works.
[00:22:26] He's doing this as a little bit of foreshadowing.
[00:22:30] As we get to verses 9 and 10, we see the works that God's created for us. But Paul wants you to make sure that you understand that none of these works you can do, all of your work is insufficient.
[00:22:46] You see, he's attacking two angles here.
[00:22:51] The Jewish audience has religious customs in which they thought saved them. What to eat, how to dress, how to act, how to walk.
[00:23:00] They thought that these things would save them.
[00:23:05] We do similar things.
[00:23:09] We won't come out and say that we have customs of what we do. But a lot of times we view church attendance as a custom.
[00:23:19] We think, well, I went to church, I only miss for travel ball. Other than that, we're good.
[00:23:27] And what Paul is saying here is there's no amount of church attendance, there's no amount of serving at vbs, there's no amount of serving at kids area that can save you.
[00:23:38] And when we replace ourselves here and our work, Jesus becomes a mascot.
[00:23:45] He becomes this thing that we add on to the end.
[00:23:48] And not only does that hurt our souls, it hurts our witness.
[00:23:56] Paul is saying, so no one can boast. Now, Paul is pretty vocal in scripture that boasting is fine, but only if we're boasting in the Lord.
[00:24:05] These works are of Christ and in Christ. So we can't boast in anything that we do.
[00:24:14] For example, when it's time, when the holidays come around, usually my wife's birthday or Mother's Day, I take the kids on what's called a secret mission. And we go and we don't tell mom where we're going, even though she's told us exactly where to go and what to buy.
[00:24:30] And it's a complete secret.
[00:24:32] And we go to these places and we just happen upon the exact items that she wants.
[00:24:37] And we, Sarah and I, spend our money to Buy them.
[00:24:41] And then we set up these gifts and mom gets to walk in and the kids get to see the joy of mom opening presents.
[00:24:51] How insane would it be if they were arrogantly boasting about those gifts?
[00:24:57] The gifts that were planned out for them, paid for by somebody else.
[00:25:02] Somebody else drove them there.
[00:25:07] They get to experience the joy of the work just like we do. Just like we talked about the immeasurable riches and kindness. This is what we get to enjoy of the works. We get to enjoy the community and the fellowship and the deep rooted friendship. We get that. How kind of the Lord to give us that. But what we do not get is any right to boast about it.
[00:25:32] Paul drives us home further in verse 10.
[00:25:35] For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
[00:25:43] We're his workmanship. We are a result of Jesus work.
[00:25:49] So we went from dead center to workmanship because of Jesus work.
[00:26:00] He's created us for these works.
[00:26:03] He created them beforehand so that we could walk in them. They're already planned out.
[00:26:09] The freedom of that is once again it's not about us. How could we boast in something that was created before us?
[00:26:20] Paul just showed how insufficient our work is right now. He's showing how sufficient Christ's work is his work in us to raise us from death to life.
[00:26:34] We see we must walk in these works that Christ created for us.
[00:26:40] We must have integrity at work regardless of the cost.
[00:26:43] God's grace demands that.
[00:26:45] God's grace demands that we leave our 9 to 5 to come serve at VBS.
[00:26:51] Or we spend our vacation time going to New Orleans or Peru.
[00:26:57] Or we deliver those meals that I talked about to celebrate or mourn with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
[00:27:04] Or we lose sleep as chaperones at youth camp.
[00:27:09] The works that Christ has created for us are here. But we have to be careful because these works are only good because they are in Christ and for Christ when we replace who they're for.
[00:27:28] We're back to verse one through three.
[00:27:30] When we serve at VBS out of obligation.
[00:27:35] Well, I don't know. There's pretty much everybody at Ashland is going to be serving, so I better be there. That's not. That's not what Christ is calling us to.
[00:27:46] Or we complain.
[00:27:48] I'm guilty of this on Saturday night when it's been raining for four days and I know I have parking the next day. Sometimes I'm not super excited about that.
[00:27:57] But what Christ is showing us is that when we do These for Him, that's when they're good works. The second they become our works, they're death. They lead to death. Even these good things that the Lord has prepared can lead to death because we replace ourselves on the throne instead of Christ.
[00:28:18] We must be careful here that we don't. We don't look at this and say, Christ created us for good works. I need to get to work.
[00:28:26] For me, you do need to get to work, but for Christ, that's like, for example, I don't do a great job of this, but when it comes to picking up my laundry, I'm not great.
[00:28:40] And my wife really, really likes when I clean up after myself.
[00:28:45] But how my attitude towards that matters, right? If I just do it because I'm afraid she's going to beat me up, which is kind of true.
[00:28:54] That's not the goal here.
[00:28:56] The goal is that because of the love that we have for one another, we. We want to serve because of the love that Christ has shown us. Our response is to serve. Our response is to not complain. Our response is to walk in the joy of the good works that he's created for us.
[00:29:16] You see, growing up, I was terrified that there were dead people downstairs.
[00:29:23] I was scared to death.
[00:29:25] The reality is, I was the dead person.
[00:29:28] I was the dead person at the table.
[00:29:32] I grew up in church.
[00:29:34] I was baptized at 6. I didn't know what that meant.
[00:29:39] I walked in the good works of going to church weekly.
[00:29:45] I thought there was this neutral way to live life. There's this neutral way where I just kind of do what I want in private or I do what I want Monday through Friday or Monday through Saturday. But when we get to Sunday, Christ is the king.
[00:30:01] But see, when I was 19, I walked into the Baptist campus ministry and a friend of mine named Adam was preaching. He wasn't a friend then. He was just a stranger. But he was preaching on Ephesians 2:1 10.
[00:30:16] And I remember being haunted as I sat there.
[00:30:20] And I remember that the Lord had opened my eyes in a way that I had not experienced. And I was terrified because I had grown up in church. I had preached sermons. I didn't know what to do with this information now that Christ had exposed me for who I am.
[00:30:35] But in his kindness, he rescues me.
[00:30:40] So I'm no longer dead at the table.
[00:30:43] But some of you here today didn't realize you were the dead person.
[00:30:48] Just been walking along.
[00:30:51] You can feel the sin of the world.
[00:30:56] Or more scary, you don't feel it.
[00:30:59] We should beg that the Lord shows us who we are.
[00:31:04] We should beg that by God's grace we can see who we are without Christ.
[00:31:10] We can see who we are because of Christ. How God's grace transforms us.
[00:31:19] You must repent.
[00:31:21] Cry out to the Lord for the new life.
[00:31:24] Trust in his work and not your own.
[00:31:27] Trust in the truth that God's grace transforms our past and secures our future.
[00:31:33] Repent and believe the gospel today.
