Life and Death

God's Word. Today's Old Testament reading will be in Ezekiel 37 verses 1 through 14 and that's on page 724 in the pew

Bible. The hand of the

Lord was upon me and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley.

It was full of bones and he led me around. Among them and behold there were very many on the surface of the valley and behold they were very dry.

And he said to me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered,

O Lord God, you know. Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them,

O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, behold

I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live and I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath into you and you shall live and you shall know know that I am the

Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded and I prophesied and there was a sound and behold a rattling and the bones came together bone to its bone and I looked and behold there were sinews on them and flesh had come upon them and skin had covered them but there was no breath in them.

Then he said to me, prophecy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the

Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me and the breath came into them and they lived and stood on their feet.

An exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.

Behold, they say, our bones are dried up and our hope is lost. We are indeed cut off.

Therefore prophecy and say to them, thus the Lord God, behold,

I will open your graves and raise you from your graves. O my people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel and you shall know that I am

Lord. When I open your graves and I praise you from your graves,

O my people, I will put my spirit within you and you shall live and I will place you in your own land.

Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I've spoken and I will do it, declares the

Lord. The New Testament reading today is in Romans 13 verses 8 through 14.

That can be found on page 948 of your pew Bibles. O know in anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Besides this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.

The night is far gone, the day is at hand, so then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the

Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. Please remain standing.

Well good morning. That singing really blessed my heart this morning.

I thank you for your ministry to me, through your ministry to each other, for glorifying Christ who's worthy.

I pray that you would open, or I ask that you would open your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 2 please. To Ephesians chapter 2.

We are now in the second chapter, so I'll read our next section here.

Ephesians chapter 2 verses 1 through 10. The Apostle Paul writes, this is the word of the

Lord, 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 the 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, and that's 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 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, and this is not your own doing, rather it is the gift of God, and it's 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. Let us pray. Oh God in heaven, your word has opened up to us and it's a fabulous truth of the state we were in before our

Savior rescued us. God in heaven, we lived a life of death. Lord, we we lived a life in disobedience to you, and we were convinced that this was our life indeed, because of the

Prince of the power of the air whom we followed. What a kind Savior we have, that he's rescued his people, those who call upon the name of the

Lord. He's rescued us from this death and he's brought us into life. Indeed by grace we are saved through faith, and we see that through Christ we truly receive all spiritual blessings which needs to result in worship in our hearts.

Oh God in heaven, I pray that our our hearts would be tuned to your mercies of grace, and that would be our delight to hear your word.

Lord, I pray that you'd be with me as I declare your word, so that together we would grow after the image of Jesus by his mercies and grace found in the gospel.

So I praise you and thank you. In Jesus' name, amen. I oftentimes have a lot of hate for Disney and what they've become, and so I wanted to start off this morning by speaking highly of Disney.

And that is not today's Disney, the one that's gotten taken over by monsters, but rather it is the

Disney of old. The Disney that used to tell the same story over and over again, but it was a blessed story. It was a good story.

You know that story of the woman being in distress, right? She's weak and helpless and she needed help, and that strong man came and rescued her in the last hour, in the last moment, and rescued her and brought her into a better estate.

That was the story of everything. It was a beautiful story, and we never grew tired of it. It didn't need to change, but sadly behold, we get the movies that we get now.

But this is a classic story that repeats itself, because I think it's a story that we see in Scripture.

Now we see in Scripture of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were a bride in distress.

We were in a terrible situation, and death was certainly surrounding and in us and everywhere around.

But yet Christ, our handsome and powerful husband, came and rescued us from this estate.

And I think Paul really is telling this classic story, but he did it in reverse order. If you remember, he started off chapter 1, which there's no chapter breaks when he wrote this, but chapter 1 it was all about all the spiritual blessings that we have in Christ Jesus.

Everything that we have coming forth from Christ, that he's brought us to, the spiritual blessing of union with God through him.

And he started off with that estate that our bride has brought us to, but now he's kind of reverse order.

In chapter 2, verse 1, moving on into verse 2 and 3, he talks about that state, the position we were in when we weren't his bride.

And he says, you were dead. Now when you see that in chapter 2, verse 1, and you were dead, now notice his past tense and he's talking to the bride of Christ.

And he says, at one time you were not experiencing all the spiritual blessings found in Jesus. You remember in chapter 1, verse 3,

Paul didn't forget about that as he writes chapter 2. Remember chapter 1, verse 3, blessed be

God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, and then he lists it off and we're all raptured in worship.

Praise God for Christ who has brought us this. Now he goes back and he says, you remember though, at one time you were dead.

You were dead. You didn't have spiritual blessings. Death here is the opposite of all spiritual blessings.

And it's really important for us as we see that part of making it from pie in the sky to at home in our hearts is that we remember the positions we once were before Christ rescued us at that 11th hour.

And we don't remember it, and I think sometimes as Christians we can kind of boast about how wicked we were, and we can have fun stories and we laugh about it.

That's not what we should do here. What we should do is we should remember the state that we are in because over the whole story,

Christ gets glorified in how he brought us out from that state into a new one.

You've got to know this, that we'll never forget the state that we were once in. It was all made that way on purpose so Christ would come and say, look at me,

I'm awesome. And we would remember that, behold that, and all spiritual blessings would be even more at home in our heart.

So I want to encourage you as we're looking at verses 1 through 3, and that's what we'll focus on today, we are to remember the state we were in before Christ found us.

And we are to then celebrate the one who has rescued us from that state that he found us in.

And that state of being was that we were dead. Before I go there though,

I want to use an analogy. I'm not a biologist nor a son of a biologist, but I'm gonna try to use one of the human body, and I hope it works.

I want you as we consider what it means to be dead, again, it's one of those theological things that we can read that, see that, but if we had to describe it, we really don't know how to describe it.

And so as we look through it, I want to not take it for granted and really what does it mean to be in this state of deadness.

And I want to use the analogy of the human body. You got just the actual human body, you have what we see, but there's things going on behind the scenes that make it the human body.

And with that analogy, I want to remember the human body, I want to remember the blood that flows throughout the body, and the heart that pumps the blood.

And together that makes up, you know, not the only thing, but nevertheless a vital portion part of what makes a human body a human body.

You got the body, the blood that flows, you got the heart that pumps the blood. And here

I want to look at the framework or the essence or the human body part, and that is you were dead. That's what we see, deadness.

That is the state we were in overall. It is the product, the end product that is visible. So what does it mean that you were dead?

Now we can't say physical death because we still have our hearts beating. So Paul must not mean a physical death.

You were physically dead, but then you were made alive or physically alive in Christ. So we have to have a theological underpinning of what does it mean that we were dead.

Well I think as we see, we go to Genesis, we'll get a picture of this that's going to help us know what our dead state was so again we can celebrate the one who has rescued us from that dead state.

Look at Genesis 2. Remember, Genesis 2 .16, we're familiar with this, most of us anyway.

Whenever Adam was placed in the garden to keep it, and the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you shall, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.

From the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. So surely what

Paul's talking about, you were dead, is connected with this original command given by our father Adam, that he was to obey

God and have life. Disobedience would bring death. But again, we still need to define what does that death mean?

Because if you look in chapter 5, verse 5, yes, verse 5, we see that we all know the story, he ate the fruit, and so therefore the promise death came.

But if we notice, thus all the days that Adam lived were, that's a lot of years. And then he died, says 930.

Then he died. So surely that that punishment was found then, 930 years, but what about that period before that?

What, did death come before that? The answer is yes. If we look, and if we want to define that, it's not so much laid out in terms that we know just from reading it of itself, but we can kind of have an understanding through all of Scripture in our mind as we read chapter 3, verse 8.

You remember what happened to Adam after, or whenever he sinned? They heard,

Adam and Eve, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the

Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the understanding there is that in the garden,

Adam and Eve enjoyed sweet fellowship with God. They enjoyed sweet fellowship, and in fact it sounds like there was a time in the day where God would specifically come to walk with Adam and Eve, and they would enjoy walking with the

Father, or with the Son, probably, with Jesus Christ. But nevertheless, let's not get too carried away in the intricate details, but nevertheless it is a fellowship or an enjoyment of God in the garden.

But what happens is that Adam now was feeling guilty, shame, he wanted to run from the presence of God, and it wasn't just a one -way street where Adam was trying to run.

God kicks him out, and we see at the end of this chapter, verse 24,

God drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed a cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

So it's a two -way street. Adam didn't want to be with God, and God kicked Adam out of his presence.

That is spiritual death. You see the physical death came hundreds of years later, but initially we see the spiritual death of a lack of fellowship with God in the physical realm.

And now we are getting closer to what Paul has in mind when he says, you were dead. He's not talking so much about physical death, although that's associated with it, but he's talking about a spiritual death that Adam encountered after his sin.

Deadness here is a lack of every spiritual blessing from the

Father in enjoying Him. Now why do I say it that way? Because chapter 1, blessed be the

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

And deadness here is a complete lack of every spiritual blessing that we have in Christ, a complete lack of companionship that we can have with God through Christ, a complete lack of relationship with Him.

We are spiritually separated. This is the death coming into view that Paul has in mind.

You see, God delayed physical death.

He could have just struck down Adam and that'd be it, and he'd be rightful to do it after a sin.

But God delays it. He delays physical death so we would experience a spiritual death in light of our physical life.

Let me say that one more time. God delayed physical death so we would experience a spiritual death in light of our physical life.

This is the cursed state that all the beauties of the physical blessings that we have at our disposal would be used without spiritual blessings to enjoy it.

That we would have our life in this physical life, but we wouldn't know how to enjoy it in light of the spiritual blessings of Christ.

In fact, we would have this life separated from enjoyment through it with God. That is the cursed state.

That is spiritual death. And the reason why God has ordained it to be this way is it was a perfect scenario for us to be rescued by our

Savior. That we would be living in the land of the living as zombies, as dead people, because we did not know how to use the blessings to the honor and glory of his name.

And this is the state that we are in outside of Christ, and this is the state that Christ has found us in, and this is the state that Christ, it was his delight to rescue us from.

That we would have our physical frame, but yet not know how to use it in spiritual blessings or worship to our

God and King. So then, going back to our analogy, the human body, the essence, the situation, the sum of the whole is spiritual death.

But what's the blood flow that makes that happen? Well, he goes on to say in Ephesians 2, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.

So that's like the blood flow, the things that gives it that essence, that body life is, and ironically it's death here, and that is trespasses and sins in which we once walked.

And the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, that's the blood flow, the lifeblood of our spiritual death.

Now, if you remember in our rescued state of chapter 1, where we are blessed with every spiritual blessing, you remember in verse 4, look at what he says, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be what?

Holy and blameless before him. I think that has to do with our objective state, reality, but also our habit or our walk in life would be blameless.

And so I think here is the contrast, right? That our state of death, the blood flow was instead of holiness and blamelessness and walking righteously, this is one in which we walk in trespasses and sins.

Trespasses and sins. Trespasses is being where you don't belong, right?

We all say, you know, don't trespass, right? Do not trespass. It's being where you don't belong. Sins is, if you get to the root of the definition, is missing the mark.

You're missing the mark. Now, even those two definitions, what does it come to mind? Well, there is a standard from someone that we don't live up to.

In other words, life isn't just simply doing whatever feels good to us, but there is simply, there is a standard that's imposed upon us by our higher power that we, in our natural state, trespass or we go where we don't belong and we miss the mark of that higher standard.

And I don't want you thinking, so the blood flow is transgressing or sinning against this

God, denoting an authority that we don't measure up to, and I don't want you then to think that I'll just, in order to not be dead,

I just got to do this, that, and the other or don't do this, that, and the other and I'll be fine. If the blood flow that makes spiritual death happen is our trespasses and sins, then

I'll just do this, that, and the other. I'll be okay. This is called legalism and this is actually wickedness to God.

Why? Why is it? Why is that the case? Because it goes deeper than simply just what you do. If you look at Matthew 22,

Jesus gets to this. Look at Matthew 22, 34.

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.

Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law? I remember we're talking about sins and trespasses, right, and authority, doing stuff that is missing the mark or being in the wrong place or not in the proper area.

So he says, what is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus said to him, you shall love the

Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

This is a great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And so on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

And so I think we're getting to the heart of what it means to be sinners, what it means to be transgressors.

It's that it's not even, although it's involved of doing things that are bad or not doing things that we should, but it goes to the heart of the matter that we are to do everything we do out of love and devotion to our

God. And anytime we don't do what we do out of a sheer gratitude and love for our

God and it's separated from that great commandment of the law, it is actually in the realm of transgressions and sins.

So this isn't a blood flow of sins and transgressions. So if we just simply just do the things of the law, we'll be okay and we won't be spiritually dead anymore.

Because really if we look at the heart of the law that we miss the mark on, it is that we would do all that we do in this physical life with all the physical blessings as an act of gratitude and love to our

God. And that is something we miss the mark on. You can do certain laws, but if you're not doing it for love, for God, it is just death.

And it kind of reminded me of you can force a child to eat peas, but you can't force them to like it.

And so we can try to do laws, but God says not only are you to do the laws, but you're to like it.

You are to love it. You're to cherish it. And just think about how hard it is whenever you have your certain likes and your dislikes, your loves and your hates, how hard is it for you to go from loving something to hating something on a whim?

Very difficult, isn't it? Something needs to happen within you, doesn't it? And this is exactly the state of death that we're in.

The blood flow. It's transgressions and sins, but don't you dare think it's something that, well, I just got to turn it on and off.

No. It is something that you need to do that's deep within you that, beloved, without the aid of Christ our

Rescuer, you have no hope at all. This is the blood flow of our death, that we would be transgressors, that we'd be sinners.

So the spiritual death flowing with sin, and what pumps, if I can use that language, that death, what's the heart that pumps the blood to that death?

Well, look what he, we're gonna, we're gonna go to three here to get this full picture, but we're gonna go back to two, don't worry.

But look at three. He says, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.

So that is really the heartbeat or the heart that pumps the sin poison that leads to our death, is that we have wayward passions and desires.

Instead of what Paul says in verse 3, blessed be God, with all the affections that come forth from blessed be

God, right, not just a paper thing that's written on paper, but really coming from the heart of Paul that we should all have, blessed be

God, the worship that's found there, the affections that's found there for our God and Savior. Instead of that, we have wayward passions and desires.

We have passions of the flesh, desires of the body and mind.

See, we got to be careful that we don't think, that we don't start thinking that passions and desires are bad of themselves.

They're not. God has given them to us so we can enjoy Him in worship. They're actually good things.

It's only bad when you isolate them from glorifying God. You get what I'm saying? That passions and desires that we know, it becomes bad when they're isolated from that purpose of glorifying

God. When they are no longer in that realm, that's when they become passions and desires of the flesh.

There's nothing better, and you know the feeling of being able to gratify your desires, isn't it?

You desire something strongly and you can gratify it. There's nothing better than that. That's a God -given thing, you know that, right?

But it becomes a curse when those desires and passions are not affections for our

God. And instead they are for the physical realm, isolated from our

God. That's when they become curses. That's when they become spiritual death. That's when we are in the realm of the dead.

And notice he says of the mind too. Desires of the body and the mind. As creatures made in God's image, our life is found in putting our minds on how to glorify

God best in my day today. Your mind should be filled with how it is my delight to glorify my

God today. It's like a strategic thing, right? What does my day look like today? What do I got going on? And oh Lord, how can

I bless you and glorify you in it, right? That's your mind put in, not isolated from God, but on God.

But what happens whenever we're in the passions of the flesh and the desires of the body and the mind?

What happens? What is our mind consumed with? Not how can I glorify God with these things that's in my life today, but how can

I just how can I fulfill my animalistic desires? Our mind is consumed with things that are isolated from God.

So again, notice that the heart, the thing that pumps the sin, is a deeper, innate, or in us, desire and passion that is wayward.

And since it's wayward, it pumps transgressions and sins throughout our frame, which creates this dead situation we're in.

Now let's go back to verse 2. Notice he says, following, right?

In which he once walked, following the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sense of disobedience.

Notice he says following, and there's a community aspect we're following the world, and there is a leader aspect, we're following a leader in our dead state.

Now if you remember, if we go back to the contrast of chapter 1, I think the contrast is really there and found in verse 15.

You notice, remember what he says in this rescued state that we're in, in Christ? He says, for this reason, because I've heard of your faith in the

Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, you notice the difference there? Instead of following the prince of power of the air, we follow

Jesus in our faith, right? Instead of following the world and having community with the world, we are following what?

The love of the saints. We're following the saints. We're with the saints. And so notice that great contrast of our dead state.

We're made for community. We are communal people. We need to be with one another.

Look at the person who's isolated from everyone. They're dead even while they live. And a cursed state, a cursed position that we can be in is that our community is either going to propel us forward to greater obedience and life in Jesus, or love for the saints, or our community is going to bring us further down the path of death or disobedience to God.

And in our cursed state without Christ, we follow the world. We follow the community that will only bring us into greater disobedience, greater sin.

That's something to ask yourself. Is my community that I'm involved with, is it facilitating life or death in me? Is it actively putting my mind on the things of God?

Because I think one way we can look at it is, I remember coming to Christ myself and I stopped going to parties and stuff like that, and I thought, well

I'm good. But then the question I started to ask myself is, but in the community of the saints, are they actively pursuing righteousness?

Right? They might not be the bar type and all that kind of stuff, but is the community actually actively pursuing

Christ and righteousness? Because this is a blessed state that Jesus brings us into, but the death state is following the world, which brings about further death.

But notice there's something else that we're following that is a leader. Look what he says, following, in verse 2, following the prince of the power of the air.

Satan is the prince that leads the world in death or disobedience. So if we go back to our analogy, okay,

I don't have this in my notes right here, so bear with me. So you have the spiritual death, right, which is our position outside of God, right?

And then you have the blood flow, which is transgressions and sins. Then you have the heart that pumps it, which is our wayward desires, and you have someone holding our heart in this hand.

It's either gonna be Satan or Christ. And here we see the following, the prince of the power of the air, the cursed state that we're in is

Satan holding our hearts in our hand, which causes our, which leads our emotions astray, our desires astray, which leads us to transgressions, spiritual death.

This is the cursed state of man. But I want you to notice this isn't like something that's happening outside of God's control, okay?

Because we can just naturally fall into this thinking that it's like, you know, like this is all happening outside of God's will or power.

But notice what Satan is called here. He's called a prince. You see that? If you have different translations, it might be ruler.

But nevertheless, that Greek word, it has a meaning of a lesser ruler. It denotes a, there's a ruler above him, and he's just a lesser ruler given authority.

I think you know probably where I'm getting at here. Who's the authority or who's the power or who's the authority over this prince that has given him this authority?

Well let's look. Let's look at Luke 4, 5 through 7. We'll see this. And there's a, there's a greater purpose why

I'm highlighting this. Look at Luke chapter 4.

This is kind of unique to the Gospel of Luke. He mentions this in verse 5.

Remember, this is the temptation of Jesus, which that's not obviously unique just to the Gospel of Luke, but something that he says which is fascinating.

In Luke 4, verse 5, the devil took Jesus up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, in verse 6, and said to him, to you

I will give you all this authority and their glory, for it has been been delivered to me and I give it to whom

I will. So there is this understanding that even Satan understands that this power, authority that he has as the prince of the power of the air, earth, has been given to him from on high.

And you look at Job 1. We don't need to go there, but Job 1. It's a very fascinating tale. We see a spiritual reality going on there in which

Job, or in the book of Job, Satan goes up to God in heaven to more or less receive his marching orders, right?

And so there's that very, you know, controversial statement, but I think it's true that the devil is

God's devil. The point is is that God unleashes his wrath in sinners, on sinners, right, to be in this cursed state, but he does it in a very particular way.

He raises up Satan for this purpose, to be the leader over the dead state, so that it's in a very particular way.

Why? So we would be in this situation of there is no hope for me, so then all of a sudden we look up and see our

Lord Jesus Christ. We got to understand, oh I think I'm jumping ahead here, spiritual death is not just God not giving us spiritual blessings, but also giving us his wrath.

You understand that? It's not like he just cuts off spiritual blessings that we see in chapter 1, but he still has given us stuff, but it is his wrath, his predetermined particular way.

This is why in verse 3, notice what we're called in chapter 2, verse 3, we are by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

This is God's predetermined plan of how his wrath was going to look, so it looked like a specific way so Christ would come and look like the perfect Savior.

So we are spiritually dead without Christ. That's our person, that's our framework, that's our essence.

The blood flow of sins and transgressions, the pumped, how the blood is pumped is wayward passions and desires, and it's all held in the hand of the

Prince of the power of the air. This is our most sorry state until God adopts us through Christ and blesses us again by faith through grace, which is what he goes on to with that word, but God, so that it goes from Satan holding our heart to Christ holding our hearts in his blessed hand, and what our heart pumps is godly affections, not wayward affections, and the blood flowing is one of holiness and blamelessness, not transgressions and sins, in which that is our spiritual life.

You see that God has set up the ultimate contrast in Satan and our death in him so that Christ would be set up as the ultimate

Savior, and there's that timeless truth that you don't quite understand something until you see its contrast, and this is what

God has set up in the realm of his wrath being placed on us, the great contrast of being in the hand of Satan.

That doesn't mean we're a victim, although we are in some capacity, but we are an active agent in our wayward desires, but it's all set up in that particular way so that Christ would be then set up as the great contrast, so we would understand him more in eternity, that he is our great rescuer at the 11th hour.

It would create affections in our hearts of all spiritual blessing flowing forth from us. Oh, praise God for our rescuer.

So I want to conclude with a couple points in light of this death and the life offered in Jesus.

Unbelievers, there are those among you in us, with us. I'm mainly preaching to the saints, but I'm not so foolish to think that there are unbelievers amongst us, and what

I mean by unbelievers are those who are living in unrepentant sin. Even if they claim Christ, they're living in unrepentant sin, they've been living in sin, and they have no desire to get out of it.

Unbelievers, whether you claim Christ or you don't, the call of the gospel is not just to repent or turn away from your sin.

That's not the call of the gospel, and if you ever give the gospel out as a saint to someone and you simply just say repent or turn from your sins, then you put a period after that, that is not the gospel.

So unbeliever, know that the call of the gospel is not simply to repent of your sins or turn away from it, because if that's all it is, all you will do is just fill it up with this legalism, because your wayward desires and emotions and purposes and everything are not fixed.

No, the call of the gospel is to repent, turn away from sin, but believe upon Jesus Christ, because it's only through his work that not only does he cleanse you from your sin, but he gives you a new heart that we read about in Ezekiel 37.

A heart with new affections, no longer for the things of the world isolated from God, but rather they come in happy harmony.

So your mind is set on righteousness. Oh, how can I use this day as a day of gratitude for my

God, for he has rescued me in Jesus. He changes your whole heart, and he gives you new passions and desires, no longer for the foolish things that are bringing you to your death, but to life.

The call of the gospel, beloved unbeliever, is to repent or turn away from your sins and look to Jesus as Lord and Savior, for he has a power to save and can save you in the eleventh hour.

Believers, those who have done this, those who have spiritual life,

I want you to know that your spiritual life is not an absence of deathly passions.

Your spiritual life is not an absence of wayward desires. Jesus still keeps that in you to some degree.

So don't think for a moment that, okay, if this is death and this is life, new desires, new everything, I just got to wait upon Jesus to give me new desires and then

I can live blamelessly or righteously. That's not the life laid out for the believer in this already not yet time of our life.

No, the spiritual life is not an absence of deadly passions, but rather godly affections that transcends deathly passions.

In other words, your battle over the sin that you know leads to death, it involves that, yes,

I want that sin. That desire is still there, but there is another desire that has been planted in you by Christ that transcends that deathly passion.

That, oh, I desire to do that, but there is a greater affection in my heart that I shall go to that. So it's not a matter of, oh, all those desires are going to go away.

No, Jesus likes to conquer those things and the greatest way he displays his conquering power is by keeping those physical or deadly passions and saying, and watch how your affections for me transcends that.

And it's an interesting way of life that as you do that, you recognize the deadly passion, you recognize it's in there, but then you have a greater passion and desire to glorify

Christ for what he's done, you'll start seeing that deadly passion and desire dwindle and dwindle and dwindle.

And so like a young man and his sexual passions, that's not gonna go away.

It's initially to think that, oh, I just go away tomorrow. It's not going to. That's not the purpose. The purpose is that there would be a greater desire to honor

Christ that transcended and I will obey Christ in light of that greater affection for him.

This is the way we battle sin in accordance with life that Christ has offered and it gives us a greater victory throughout our sanctification.

So like a classic story, we are all, have been, or were, or are right now, we were all at one point in our natural state or like a woman in distress, right?

There's no hope. That's it. Not just victims, although there's a victim aspect, but even active players.

We are in this state of deadness and we need help. This is the particular wrath of God that he's placed on us as children of wrath outside of Christ.

This is the particular expression that he has ordained it to look like so that then our Savior would look all the more beautiful and all the more strong and all the more glorious as he rescues us from this deadly state.

Who, instead of our death, he brings life. Instead of our trespasses and sins, he brings holiness and blamelessness to perfection.

Instead of wayward passions, he brings godly affections and worship. Instead of our heart being held in the hand of the devil, our hearts are held in the love of our husband, our hero,

Jesus Christ, our Lord. Let's worship him for this great work he has done for us.

Father in heaven, I thank you that we were once dead in our sins. Lord, we had no desire for you.

Instead, we had desire for our own vain pursuits.

And sometimes, God, in our dead state, we could dress up those vain pursuits like they look holy or something, but we know that we cannot disguise it to you.

Lord, you see everything. So Lord, I can't help but to ask you that those who are before me who are still in that dead state,

I pray God that you would reveal their sin to them. I pray that even further than that, you would reveal what pumps that sin, what makes that life flow or that death flow, and that is wayward desires that they cannot fix of their own.

So that would cause them to then look at the Savior of the world, the only one who can change our wayward passions and desires.

And for those who have believed upon Jesus, repented and believed upon him, for the saints, the blessed saints that are before me, oh may you encourage them that they would remember the state that they once were in, and they would remember the glorious state that you brought us to by your work on the cross and your resurrection, that you have saved us from this death and given us life, that you have given us new desires.

That doesn't mean our wayward desires are gone, but there is a transcendency here that we can follow the power of Christ because of his great work.

I pray that this might encourage the saints as they remember the life they had and the one that you brought them to, and it would encourage them for further righteousness as they rely upon Jesus to do battle against this sin, because we know the end of that sin is death.

Thank you for this state. Thank you for Christ, and may we glorify him with all that is within us today.