|
Return to 'Recent Sermons' | |
In its simplest terms this bit of Ephesians says :
You are dead even though you think you are alive!
You could be alive even when you have died!
So the question is which one are you? How do you move from being the living dead to the dying to eternal life? What does it mean to be made alive in Christ?
The letter to the Ephesians uses the expression ‘in Christ’ many times. The first half of the letter is an exposition of what this expression means. We have already considered the Spiritual blessing of being in Christ, the Spiritual down payment of the Holy Spirit we have in Christ, what it means to have a spiritual knowledge in Christ.
And there are lots more to come! Make sure you read the letter through sometime. You will realise that it is not meant to arrive in chunks but thrills us with the glory of God’s salvation in Christ and then moves on to say what result this should have in our everyday living. The reason to break it into chunks is so that we can slow down a bit and take it all in.
We begin today with
The Human
condition:
1As for you, you were dead in your
transgressions and sins,
Remember we are not talking about physical death but spiritual death. Transgression and sin bring spiritual death. If you are not ‘in Christ’ this morning you may be fitter and healthier with a long life expectancy but you are dead in your relationship with God; dead from the point of view of eternity. You have crossed the line with God you have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and in fulfilment of his word in Genesis3: 3 ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’
You have touched evil and you have died. C.S.Lewis described the earth as the silent planet. It is out of contact with the rest of the spiritual realm.
Secondly Paul describes us as
followers of the ways of the world
2 in
which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of
the ruler of the kingdom of the air,
Peer pressure is immense. And in our modern media driven society we are brain-washed into the acceptable thinking of the day. Your world view is controlled by media magnates who decide what stories are to be headlined and whose reputation is to be destroyed.
You happily tell me that Jesus is the truth. But you begin a discussion by assuming that the paper you read or the BBC is telling the truth. Make up your mind! Nowhere is that more obvious than in the reaction to the North Africa/Middle East revolutions. We assume that toppling a despot is good. But nobody is telling what is replacing the old regime.
You spend your money driven by an advertising culture that convinces you that this cream will make you look younger and that is worth spending your money on. That deodorant makes you more sexy as if that is important, that your car takes you into a new fantasy world, even though you use it to get the shopping from Sainsbury’s. What difference does HD or 3D mean to your TV viewing? Your iPod carries enough music for thousands of hours of music and films. You don’t need to get out of your chair for weeks! Get a life! This world’s way never satisfies. This world is the walking dead. Follow Jesus , he is the way, the truth and the life.
the spirit who is now at work in those who are
disobedient.
We are rather willing victims of the spirit of this world. The tempter is insistent and persistent. From the start he challenged God’s way and he still does. In sexual relationships, relationships with our neighbours, in work relationships, in attitudes to life itself, in our relationship with God, we find ourselves enslaved. That slavery is most obvious in the way we go about
3All
of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our
sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.
Our modern libertarian society has few restraints. We have a real problem with obesity, struggle to limit the damage of binge drinking, an epidemic of Venereal Diseases, we are overwhelmed by messed up relationships which go for family life these days because we like to think we can gratify any craving we have. Fasting, self discipline and self denial are considered the province of extremists.
But this is because we do not face up to the fact that we are
Objects of wrath.
Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.
Even we like to ignore this. If you don’t like the idea of God’s wrath, don’t read the gospels. Jesus was in the habit of talking about hell and punishment. He had to be. He was the Truth. He came to rescue us from the wrath of God.
So lets move on to
The rescue
package:
.It Starts with God
4 But because of his great love for us,
God, who is rich in mercy,
He is love, he is rich in mercy. That is why his wrath is even more terrifying. God is not mocked. His love and mercy are vast. To reject it is to reject the universe’s single most important emotion. God’s love to you. To understand God’s love look at Jesus. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.(John 3:16). Here we are
dead made alive.
5 made us alive with Christ even when we were
dead in transgressions -- it is by grace you have been saved.
There is a scary horror-film like prophecy in Ezekial 37 that portrays this:
1 The hand of the LORD was on me, and he
brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley;
it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I
saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3
He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone
know.”
4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these
bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! 5 This
is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath[a] enter you, and you will come to life. 6
I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with
skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know
that I am the LORD.’”
7 So I prophesied as I was commanded.
And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones
came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh
appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the
breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD
says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they
may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath
entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
It is by grace you are saved. You cannot do it yourself, because you are dead. How does God do it? He uses the same power that he did in raising Jesus from the dead.
6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated
us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,
This verse is almost a repeat of verse 20:
That power is the same as the
mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead
and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,
Now the significance of being in Christ becomes plain. If you are ‘in Christ’ then what happened to Jesus happens to you! In Christ you the spiritually dead come alive. The stone is rolled away and you are resurrected to eternal life ‘in (or with) Christ’. But notice that if you are ‘in Christ’ then you are not only in heaven but seated as he is in the heavenly realms. Christian, stop and contemplate that. You are fit to sit at the right hand of God. Not because of what you have done but because God is rich in mercy and has saved you by grace. You may feel the least fit, the worst example, the unloved and unfit, but when God steps into your life, you are not only resurrected but made fit to be in the centre of the universe.
God seated us! That phrase carries a number of connotations. First, In a day when chairs were rare and expensive, only the guest of honour sat. The rest stood or reclined. You are given a place of honour.
Second, seated is a posture of rest. God has completed his work of salvation and you now enter into the rest. You can read more about that in Hebrews 4.
Why does God do this?
7 in
order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his
grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
God is going to spend eternity revelling in the fact that he saved you! When You ask God what his grace is like he will pick you up and say, “like this.” You are the demonstration of what God thinks is important. He is going to enjoy your company because he gave his Son so that you might live with him. Enjoy his presence this morning. Open your heart to the one who has given you new life. You can only offer him what he has given you already. The rest is rags and rubbish. Let go of the pain and the damage that sin has caused in your life and receive his grace. He has placed you in the middle of heaven and said this is what I enjoy doing. Jesus is the centre. You are in Christ.
But lets be quite clear how you get to this place of privilege and joy.
8 For
it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this not from
yourselves, it is the gift of God -- 9 not by works, so that no-one can boast.
This is a fuller expression of the phrase in verse 5. It is as if Paul has this on his mind and it comes out early in verse 5 and fully here. It is our gospel. Look at this photo. This building was constructed in 1952 but a work was going on before that. Joyce Bowerman can tell of the White House where a Sunday School met in 1935 but from 1941 – 70 years ago – a group of Christians met here. Look at the notice Board. The grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be preached here and has been for 70 years. And we preach it today.
Salvation is by grace. God makes it possible in Christ Jesus. faith is required but even that is given by God. The Holy Spirit is at work in your life bringing about repentance and faith. You become a work of God, an example of the riches of his grace.
10 For we are God's workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Purpose Driven Life:
The key to our life from now on to eternity is that we are crafted by God, saved by grace, made alive in Christ to do good works. Faith by itself, if it not accompanied by action, God says is dead (James 2:17).
When you were saved God had a plan. A plan unique to you designed to enable God to express his grace through you to the world and the heavenly realms. We have a destiny now and for eternity. The life you live now you live by faith, trusting that his plan will bring about good in the world around you. God does not save the world by UN style operations but one-by-one as we gossip the good News and walk the talk in our lives. If the heading reminds of the book ‘Purpose Driven Life’, it would be a good time to find it and perhaps use this Lent, 40 days to remind you of the purpose God created you in Christ Jesus.
Return to top