Introduction1 And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, 2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, 3 among whom also we conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that or of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
(Ephesians 2:1-10)
What a wonderful experience it is to be saved by the grace of God! Look back upon your life before Christ came to you, and then look at your life now in Christ. My hope and prayer this morning is for you to be able to see that the gross error of your past has been replaced with the passion to know the Lord and his righteousness and the pursuit to walk worthy of Him who called you out from the grave!
And if, this morning, Christ knows you not, it is my heart’s desire that through my words, He comes and performs the miracle of quickening to you as He has to me—that you may know the Lord and the riches of his mercy and the assurance of eternal life.
In the passage of Scripture I have selected, we have a clear picture of what must take place for the soul to be converted to Christ.
Exposition
What Christians Were and What the Lost Are
It is commonplace in evangelical churches to hear the quotation of verses 8 and 9 of Ephesians 2. The words are powerful and clear for those of us who are alive: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, lest anyone should boast.” However, these verses are often isolated out of the context to a point that they convey the wrong idea. When these verses are scrutinized in the context of Ephesians 1 and 2, they become much more powerful and clear. The necessity of grace—our need of grace—becomes as clear as the waters of the Caribbean.
In the Scriptures, the unbelieving world is often referred to as “the perishing” as they are in 1 Corinthians 1:18, in which Paul claims: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” I want you to understand something: those who know not Christ and believe not in the message of the cross are more than just perishing. They are dead. They are perishing, but only in the sense that perishable foods sour or spoil, or in the sense that a dead corpse corrodes and decays back into dust. These are nonetheless corpses: with no spiritual breath and life. It is interesting that the Greek work pneumos is used to refer both to spirit and breath, for the lost and unbelieving have no spiritual breath! They are dead: dead as body in a casket, dead as the cadavers studied by students of medicine, dead as the road kill on the side of the highway.
As the perishing world is, so were we who are now alive in Christ. We were also once dead. The passage tells us that “we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” We were then no different than those who are now dead without Christ. We were in rebellion, sowing the perishing seeds of corruption and sin. Our hearts and minds were opposed to God, at war with Him, and resisting Him at every opportunity.
Our lives before Christ smelled as rotten in the nostrils of God as a carcass withering away in the sun. Do I have your attention?
Let me further clarify.
Not all dead bodies look alike. Some are clearly dead. There are bodies that are mangled and dismembered when they encounter harsh ends like that of an auto accident or a depraved murder. Some are left out in the elements, and begin to decompose, rot and decay, like those in the battlefields of war. However others are not as clearly dead: such as those who have just died of sudden, quiet heart attack, or those who have been kept and preserved for a funeral.
Regardless of their appearance—they are all dead.
So are those who are perishing: Some seek to win God’s approval by abiding to a code of ethics. They are admirable men and women, respected in the word for some reason or another. Nonetheless, if they know not Christ, they are dead. However, others lead lives enslaved to alcohol and sexual immorality, murder or slander. These are no more—or less—dead than the former. A sinner of small trespasses is as dead as a sinner of gross perversion. As the late Charles Spurgeon noted, the lost and ruined—those who have not been touched by the grace of God—are nothing more than corpses without graves.
How Conversion Takes Place
When Paul reveals the nature of those who lie in the death and corruption of sin, he means it. This is no mere analogy: those without Christ are spiritually dead. In spiritual matters—including the gospel—they are deaf, blind, and numb. They cannot smell or taste of the wretchedness of their current state.
When a man physically dies, he has no power to raise himself from the grave. Likewise the lost man, spiritually dead in his trespasses, cannot raise himself from his condition. He cannot breathe spiritual life into himself. This is important to understand: Man, in his natural state, has no spiritual ability. He cannot desire to please God, much less actually please Him. He cannot be convinced to be saved by clever words from a sermon or by emotional intimidation. As the physically dead man cannot will himself to life, the spiritually dead man cannot even will himself to be saved unto eternal life! He is by nature a child of wrath, dead in sin, and in desperate need of reconciliation unto God—a reconciliation he cannot accomplish!
Church, hear me on this. There is no evangelism program that will win souls by its own power! There is not one preacher who has effected the salvation of any man’s soul by his own words! Nothing of man can cause the soul to be born again—to be resurrected unto eternal life. This is why prayer is important, because when we pray for the salvation of the souls of men, we are asking God, the sovereign life giver, to cause them to be saved. This is exactly the business that God is in: quickening the souls of men so that they will come to Christ.
Evangelism without prayer is like a guitar with no strings. Without the strings, the guitar is unable to make a melody. Likewise when the church fails to sustain her evangelism efforts with prayer, she cannot expect souls to be saved. If I preach the gospel to a group of people without praying, it would be better to preach to a graveyard! It is not as if God can’t save men without our prayer, it is that He usually won’t!
It is only by the power of God that men are saved! Listen to the Scripture: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive (or quickened us) together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” In verse five, Paul attributes the rebirth and regeneration of man’s soul to God’s grace. In order for us to respond to the gospel call, we must be quickened—we must be made alive.
In preparation for this sermon, I noticed something that I have never noticed before. In the Greek, the word translated in verse 6 as “raised us up together” is a form of the word commonly associated elsewhere in Scripture with God raising Christ from the dead, the only difference is the prefix “sun”—meaning “with.” When God quickens the soul of man, bringing him from death unto life, He does so by the power of Christ’s resurrection! I understood that Christ’s resurrection demonstrated Christ’s conquering of the grave. I understood that Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of our coming physical resurrection, the proof that our hope has reason. However, I never connected the resurrection of Christ to the spiritual resurrection of our souls. On the cross, God made Christ “who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in [Jesus Christ].” The guilt of our sin with its corruption and death was laid upon the shoulders of Christ at Calvary. Bearing the wrath of God in the flames of hell for eternity is the outcome of man’s spiritual death. That same wrath was released upon Jesus on the cross, and on that day Jesus died as a man both physically and spiritually. God then quickened Him from the grave, both spiritually and physically, and that power of resurrection takes place every time a soul is saved!
Every soul that is saved is a miracle of resurrection! Men do not have power to perform miracles, only God. Yet we so often rob God of his glory when He calls someone unto himself through our ministry efforts! Each and every time that God uses us to bring someone to conversion we should give all the glory to God! He the only one who has the power to make alive the hearts of men so that they do come when called in the proclamation of the gospel!
Now we come to verses 8 and 9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, lest anyone should boast.” Connect these verses to the ones that precede it. God’s grace—his unmerited, undeserved, and unsolicited favor—has saved us through faith. Earlier, Paul said we were quickened by that same grace. Can a man believe when he has not been quickened? If man, in his natural and sinful state, cannot understand any spiritual message of God, and if the gospel is a spiritual message (which it surely is), then the answer is no! Hence the reason Paul says, after he mentions salvation by grace through faith, “and that not of yourselves.” When we came to trust Christ, we did not do so by our own power, but by the enabling of the Holy Spirit. Even our faith is a gift, hence the phrase “it is the gift of God; not by works.” “The gift of God” refers back to everything up to this point, even before this verse: the quickening, the grace, and the faith. There is no work, no merit, no attribute of man that caused his salvation; all of it is of God.
The last phrase is most important, “lest anyone should boast.” Some translations say “so that no one can boast.” Tell me, if a man has within his own power to believe in Christ, does he not have reason to boast in himself? If tell you that I believed Christ out of my own choice, then I am telling you that I am not as spiritually darkened as the others. There was something about me that effected my salvation. Is this grace? If I said such a thing, then I contradict what the Bible teaches about men. How could I be any less dead than the rest? Either I am dead or I am not! If I am, then Christ must come and quicken me, for I cannot will to come to Christ!
The quickening of God is what causes belief in men. It is not the contrary. My faith is the result of God’s quickening of my soul, not its prerequisite. If I must believe in order to be born again, then salvation is not wholly of God’s grace and doing and I do have reason to boast—for I had more sense as a lost man and I was less spiritually hardened than many others. However, if I were unable to come to Christ because of the corruption of sin and Christ must come and do a work in me in order for me to believe, the salvation is wholly of God’s grace and I cannot boast in myself, I can only in Christ.
The Result of Conversion
So often we stop at verse 9. We will not do so this morning. Verse 10 reads, “For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” At this point I must step on some toes—perhaps stomp on some feet.
Because of this verse, I fear many who sit in pews every Sunday morning may be dead—and they do not know it. Friday night, my wife and I went to watch M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Lady in the Water. As I watched this movie, and as I was thinking of this text, I remembered one of M. Night Shyamalan’s earlier films: The Sixth Sense. In this movie, a child is able to see the ghosts of dead men and women, and he whispers to Bruce Willis’s character, “I see dead people, and the worst thing is, they don’t even know they are dead!”
Folks, I see dead people sitting on the pews of churches—and they don’t even know they are dead. I know they are dead because their lives show no evidence of God’s grace. They name the name of Christ, but act worse than the average unbeliever. They think of only themselves. Profanity commonly crosses their lips. They continually give in to the lusts of the flesh, and they have no desire to come to church and find any excuse not to.
We are not saved by works, but we are saved unto works which God has ordained for us to accomplish. Those who claim to be Christ’s and show no evidence of change in their lives only make a mockery of the power of God’s grace! If their souls have been resurrected from death, how can they show no signs of life?
There is a reason why Paul’s conversion is so powerful: He was a persecutor of Christians before Christ came to him! When word came to the churches of his conversion, the churches praised God for his grace because they knew only He could accomplish such a thing. Did Paul go on persecuting the church after his conversion?
Likewise, when we observe the conversion of those who were once vile men and women, sexually immoral, alcoholics, drug addicts, and even murderers, we give glory to God for his grace when we the change in their lives! Do they continue as they were before? No! They may struggle with ghosts from the past, but God grants them power by his quickening over the lusts of the flesh.
Men and women, I want you to survey your lives this morning. On judgment day, when God asks you as to why He should let you into heaven, several, if not many of you, may say, “I was lead by a preacher to pray a prayer once.” God in return will only tell you this: “Your trust is not in my Son, but in a prayer you prayed—a mere work of words you made with your tongue.” You prayed this prayer expecting to use it as a magic feather, and went on living your live as you did before, having no change. That is not what the quickening power of God accomplishes.
When God quickens you, you do not come merely to receive a “get out of jail free” card! When God makes you alive, alive you are! Changed you are! There should always be a desire for more of God, and sin should become a loathsome thing. So many have prayed a prayer having no conviction of sin; such a prayer accomplished nothing at all. When God makes you alive, the wretched, rotten stench of your sin is the first thing you notice. It horrors you and you begin to despise it. It causes you great pain to continue in it. The most miserable men on earth are Christians who have fallen into sin—and if you lead a life of sin and it bothers you not, you may be dead!
Call of Invitation
If you realize that you are one of the ones who are dead, and if that pains you and you want to live, then Christ working in your heart. Wait not this morning, delay no longer! Run to Christ and He will embrace you in His great love and save you from the death of your sin forever!
My hope this morning is not that you come to Christ of your own willing, but that Christ comes to you and conquers the grave of your heart, and if that so happens, then He will give you no opportunity to resist.
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