Totally Depraved, Unconditionally Saved

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May 12/2024 | Ephesians 2: 1-7 | Expository sermon By Shayne Poirier

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.
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Well, with our Bibles turned to Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 1, let's turn our attention there and read verses 1 through 7.
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Paul writes, But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which
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He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
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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
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He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness toward us in Christ.
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This is God's holy and inerrant word for us today. This afternoon, we're pressing on in our study of Ephesians, and we find ourselves in, if we're scaling the mountains of all the various parts of the world on the various continents, we find ourselves in the highest, one of the highest peaks in the
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Bible, at least as it pertains to gospel truth. As we know, Paul has opened this letter dealing with the spiritual blessings that the church has received in Christ.
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We've seen him give thanks for all the saints. We have seen him recount his prayers and petitions on their behalf.
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And now as we come to chapter 2, if you can picture this with me for a moment,
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Paul is taking us into the power plant of the epistle to the
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Ephesians, to the nuclear reactor, as it were, of his epistle.
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And as he swings the door wide open for all of us to see, we're able to behold what
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I think is the blazing center of this exceptional letter. And that is the unmerited, undeserved, unparalleled grace of God extended to unworthy sinners.
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The centerpiece of this letter is God's grace to the undeserving.
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And framed against the backdrop of sinful humanity, Paul shows us the radiant grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
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By this point in his ministry, we can be sure that Paul has already been well acquainted with brothers like Luke the physician.
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If you know anything about Paul and Luke's relationship, Luke was one of Paul's travel companions.
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He was also the one who authored the book of Acts and the gospel of Luke. And it appears here that Paul was familiar with a principle that only
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Luke recounted in one of his gospels. Or in his gospel, excuse me. In Luke chapter 7, we read about this exchange that happened.
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You can turn there with me. An exchange that our Lord had with a sinful woman, with a self -righteous
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Pharisee, and with his disciples. One day our Lord received an invitation to come to the home of a
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Pharisee named Simon. You can find this in Luke chapter 7. I'm going to begin in verse 41.
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And there he was invited to sit and recline at the table for dinner. And while in the home of this
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Pharisee, a sinful woman came who began to wash our Lord Jesus Christ's feet with her hair, anointing them and kissing them.
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And this Pharisee, we're told, was aghast that Jesus would allow such a sinful woman to touch him.
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And to teach them all a lesson, our Lord shared a parable and then taught a principle that informs,
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I think, what Paul is getting at in Ephesians chapter 2. Sitting in that Pharisee's home with this sinful woman at his feet, our
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Lord Jesus said in verse 41 this parable, a certain money lender had two debtors.
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One owed 500 denarii and the other 50. When they could not pay, he canceled the debt of both.
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Now which of them will love him more? Simon the Pharisee answered, the one
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I suppose for whom he canceled the larger debt. And he, that is Jesus, said to him, you have judged rightly.
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Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman? I entered your house and you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.
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You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.
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Therefore I tell you her sins, which are many, are forgiven. For she loved much, but he who is forgiven loves little.
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Christ lays down a principle here that those who comprehend the massive extent of their sin debt and the lavish forgiveness of those sins in Christ will overflow naturally in their love for him.
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He who is forgiven much will love much. While those who think very little of their sin and subsequently the forgiveness of that sin will love him very little.
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And in Ephesians chapter 2, we find Paul, I think, relying on this principle to prime the affections of his readers, to prime our affections by demonstrating the great extent to which we have been forgiven and redeemed in Jesus Christ.
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In this passage that is before us, believers are meant to rejoice in the surpassing riches of God's grace as we see not only our depravity and our unworthiness, but that contrasted with the glorious dimensions of our salvation in Christ.
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Paul wants us to see, brethren, that we have been forgiven much and then in turn that we would respond by loving our triune
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God much. And so I want to invite you to join me in priming the pumps, if I can say it this way, of our deepest affections by filling our minds with the truth of this, that we have been forgiven much in our
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Lord Jesus Christ. So as we do, let's look at the lengths to which we have been forgiven in Christ.
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My first point, if you're following along in the outline, is the extent of our radical depravity.
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Brethren, the extent of our radical depravity. In verse 1,
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Paul says, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.
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After concluding this grand, lofty, this soaring introduction into chapter 1, in chapter 1,
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Paul begins chapter 2 in verse 1 with perhaps the most sobering sentence in the entire
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Bible. He writes, And you were dead.
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Period. And you were dead. Such is the default position of every man, woman, and child, saint and sinner, in this room and in this world.
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As Paul seeks to remind the Ephesians of who they were before the
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Lord saved them, he paints the bleakest possible picture of fallen humanity that the human mind can conceive of.
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And Paul is not speaking in any uncertain terms. When God saves a man through Christ, we need to understand this.
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This must become evident in our Christian experience, in our Christian testimony.
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That when God saves a man through Christ, He doesn't save him. He doesn't save us from a five -star, all -inclusive resort.
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But He snatches him from a coffin, if you can picture this with me, that is dangling mere feet above the gaping mouth of an eternal hell.
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There we were in bondage to the very enemy of our souls. When we were snatched from his grip with the smell of burning sulfur still on our clothing.
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And what's more, God has not opened, had not God opened our eyes, we would have been perfectly content to remain there.
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And here the Holy Spirit has inspired a single sentence in these three verses that provides an extensive and systematic basis for the doctrine of the total depravity of man.
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That is the doctrine that teaches that sin affects the whole person. So that fallen man can only, it says in our statement of faith, think, judge, speak, work, will and do that which is displeasing to God.
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And let me tell you, as we look into this passage, you'll see this with me, that the doctrine of the total depravity of man is not an
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Augustinian doctrine. Meaning that it did not come from Augustine. It is not a
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Calvinistic doctrine. It is not primarily from John Calvin. But it is a Pauline and it is a biblical doctrine.
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And here Paul unpacks these three verses with such precision of language that we can vividly see the many facets of our own inherited human fallenness.
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Before Christ rescued us, our depravity was radical, we'll look at these each, radical, universal, comprehensive, satanic and destructive.
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And turning our attention to verse 1, I'm going to pull this apart piece by piece so that we can see these five facets of our depravity before we were saved by Christ.
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Our depravity was radical in every meaning of that word.
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What this means is that we were corrupted, brothers and sisters, before we were saved to the very radix, to the very root of our being.
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Paul says here that we were spiritually dead in our sins. I like what one reformer says here in his commentary.
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He says, the papists, speaking about Catholics, who are eager to seize every opportunity of undervaluing the grace of God, say that while we are out of Christ, we are half dead.
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But we are not at liberty to set aside the declarations of our Lord and of the
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Apostle Paul. He does not simply mean that we were in danger of death. But he declares that it was real and present death.
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And spiritual death is nothing else than the alienation of the soul from God. And in this state of alienation from God, spiritually dead men are altogether unresponsive to God.
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In fact, that is one of the defining characteristics of a dead person, is that they do not respond to stimuli, whether good or bad.
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I came across a news story this week. Sometimes when you're preparing for a sermon, you have an idea in your mind, and you think,
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I wonder if there's a story that corresponds to this. Certainly, there has to be a story that corresponds to this.
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And of course there was. A story from 2007. There was a 33 -year -old man.
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Kids, you might appreciate this. It's a little bit grim, but you might appreciate it. A 33 -year -old
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Venezuelan man named Carlos Camejo, who was killed in a car crash.
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Or at least that's what the authorities thought. And when he was taken to the morgue, the medical examiners began to perform the autopsy on him to discover the cause of death.
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And as they cut poor Carlos open, he describes in his own word, despite his serious head injury, when the scalpel dug in and began to move downward, he said the pain was so unbearable that he awoke right then and there on the medical table in the morgue.
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And when his family came to identify him at the morgue, they found him on a gurney in the hallway, alive.
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I'm not sure if he was in his right mind, but alive. And that is because, how did the medical examiners know that he was alive?
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Because he was responsive. Meanwhile, dead men do not respond.
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And this is taught in many places in Scripture. Our Lord Jesus Christ. People sometimes think that the doctrine of total depravity is a doctrine.
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If it is, in Scripture, it's a Pauline doctrine and not a Christian doctrine. But our Lord Jesus Christ, in John 6, verse 44, said,
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No one can come to me unless the Father who sent him draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.
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In 1 Corinthians chapter 2, Paul says, The natural person, in verse 14, does not accept the things of the
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Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them.
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And brethren, such was our condition before the Lord saved us, that we were dead in our trespasses and sins.
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But Paul also intimates here that our depravity was more than that. It was not only radical, but it was universal.
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Notice in verse 1, he says, And you, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins.
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And then hopping over to verse 3, he says, And among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.
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And then at the end of verse 3, that the children of wrath include,
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Paul says, the rest of mankind. Paul appears to be doing this.
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He is casting a wide net to include the Ephesian Gentiles, to include all of the
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Jews, and to include all of humanity, so that the reader would understand that this sinful condition includes all people.
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There is not one person in this room. And if you disagree with me, you're at odds not with me, but with God and of Scripture.
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There is not one person in this room who has not at one time been beset by this kind of pervasive sinfulness.
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There is none righteous. Paul says in Romans 3, No, not one.
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No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless.
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No one does good, not even one. I'm reminded of a story by Andrew Bonar.
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If anyone's read the diary of Robert Murray McShane, or the autobiography of Robert Murray McShane, that was written by Andrew Bonar.
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And he was having an interaction with a woman who claimed that she was, at least for an extensive period of time, without sin.
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And he said, Really? Without sin entirely? She said, Yes, absolutely. He said, You must be very proud of that.
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To which she said, Indeed I am. Brethren, this is a description of all of us, without exception.
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All of us are sinners in need of God's grace. But our depravity is more than that.
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Still, it is radical, it is pervasive, and it is, or universal, and it is comprehensive.
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The language that Paul uses here is meant to convey that there was no part of our lives that was not polluted by the wickedness of indwelling sin.
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Like a catastrophic oil spill in a once vibrant coral reef, if you can picture that, on every plant.
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You pick up every rock, under every rock, in the gills of every fish. We find the black tar of our own iniquity in our lives.
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We can see this by Paul's use of these words in verse 2. He says, the sins in which you once walked.
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Or in verse 3, how we all once lived, existed in the passions of our flesh.
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Or at the end of verse 3, we were by nature children of wrath.
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Now, does this mean to walk, to live, to be by nature, comprehensively sinful?
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When we understand the context, when we understand the history, the utilization of these words, the answer is absolutely yes.
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The Jews in the first century, they would refer to the laws of conduct as, using the
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Hebrew word halakha, which means walking. And the Jews understood that to keep the
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Jewish law, to keep the Jewish traditions, was to walk in righteousness.
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That's why in Mark chapter 7 and verse 5, when the Pharisees saw the disciples and how they were conducting themselves, they said to Jesus, they are not walking according to the traditions.
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Halakha. In Jewish terms, then, walking in trespasses and sins, had to do with the whole direction of one's life.
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To walk in sin was to conduct the whole of your life in an ecosystem of rebellion against God.
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Similarly, to live in sin, we can relate to this a bit more, was to be engulfed in the torrents, the torrent of one's own sinful desires.
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One commentator says that it shows that this lostness is not a passing error.
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It wasn't, oh, I've sinned once. It's not the lacking of education, which we see oftentimes in Marxist ideology.
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They just need to be educated. It's not in low social position, like critical theory might suppose.
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But it is a life -dominating force, which no one can escape on his own.
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And we see this in Genesis chapter 6 and verse 5, just before the Lord destroyed the whole earth with a flood.
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Genesis 6 -5, the Lord saw the wickedness of man. And he saw that that wickedness of man was what?
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That it was great in the earth. And that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only continually evil.
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Brethren, our sin was radical, universal, comprehensive. And our sinfulness was satanic.
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Sin may be common in our world. When we think about sin and how often we sin and how little sin is made of in the world.
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It could be easy for us to think that sin is a light matter. Well, Shane, I'm only human.
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We all sin. But brethren, if I can reel it back for a moment.
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Sin is completely, absolutely, entirely evil.
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And it is of an evil origin. And we must have, as Christians, thick skin and yet a sensitive conscience to sin in our lives.
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Verse 2 tells us that to walk in sin, Ephesians 2 and 2, is to follow the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.
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Now, we can read between the lines here a bit. I think we can read that and say, okay, we're talking about Satan there.
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But what does all of this mean? The prince of the power of the air. Have you ever referred to Satan as the prince of the power of the air?
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Isn't air a good thing? We're all breathing it now, right? Well, last week, you'll remember, we considered the cultural climate in Ephesus.
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There was that incredibly large temple to Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
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There were the demon -possessed and the seven sons of Sceva being chased around. There were the stockpiles of occult books.
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And here Paul is relying on the understanding of the Ephesians, at least as it relates to the powers of darkness, to explain the dire estate of the lost.
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In first century Ephesus and in the surrounding ancient world, the broader culture believed in demons.
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They even had some form of a theology for Satan and other fallen angels. And a lot of it had to do with what was in the air.
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For instance, many people in first century Ephesus would believe that the open air was filled with demons.
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That the air in this room, if you could picture it this way, that the grotesque image that it is would be so full of demons that you could not even fit a pin, if you could enter into the spiritual realm, a pin between them.
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The air was thick with malevolent demonic spirits. And this was not some small cult belief.
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Five centuries even before Christ, Pythagoras, if anyone remembers your junior high math.
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Pythagoras, the same man who gave us the theorem that we still use to discover the length of the missing side in the right triangle, you might recall that.
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That Pythagoras is quoted as saying, the whole air is full of spirits.
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Makes me wonder if Pythagoras ever, with his mathematical mind, calculated the volume of a room to determine how many spirits could be in that room.
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Similarly, Philo, a first century Jewish philosopher said, there are spirits flying everywhere through the air.
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The air is the house of the disembodied spirits. And so what
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Paul is using here is this language that he knows the Ephesians are going to immediately recognize, so that they will have a category for what he is saying.
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They can picture it in their minds. And this image, if we pictured it just a moment ago, this room being filled entirely with demons, is altogether repulsive.
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When we walked in our sins, in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were children of wrath like the rest of mankind, it was not some benign lifestyle.
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As if to say that we lived in a place of moral neutrality. Moral neutrality is a myth.
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A secular society is a myth. It will either be God word or godless.
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But here what Paul is trying to show us is that when we lived in that state of sinfulness, that state of slavery to sin, we were enslaved by and serving the ancient serpent who deceived our first father and mother
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Adam and Eve. We offered up our time and our talents and our treasures and our lives to the roaring lion who was seeking to devour our very souls.
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What Christ said about the Pharisees in John chapter 8 and verse 44 was true of us.
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When he looked at them and he said, you are of your father the devil and your will is to do your father's desire.
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He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.
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When he lies he speaks out of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies.
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I don't know if you have ever experienced this, ever thought about this. I know for me as an unbeliever,
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I didn't want to tell lies. I didn't want to be a liar and yet every time
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I opened my mouth it seems lies were pouring forth. Self -aggrandizing lies to glorify myself.
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Self -preserving lies to cover my tracks. And I'm sure many of you can think the same of your own experience.
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Why was it? Because we served the father of lies and in keeping with his character and with ours.
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We served him zealously without so much as a second thought. But Paul also mentions here that our depravity was destructive.
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Verse 3 refers to our former status as children. If you're in Christ this afternoon, you are still a child.
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You are a child of God. That is who you are. But this has not always been the case. When we were children then, we were children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
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We lived under, abiding under the just wrath of God for our sins.
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Even though there was a savior for these sins, we saw no need for that savior. We were prepared to go it alone.
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And our happy trajectory was the lake of fire. And brethren, while I am trying as hard as I can to paint a picture of just how sinful we were prior to our salvation, prior to our being saved by God, I think it's important just as we look at sin, as we dwell on sin for a time here, to appreciate the absolute deadliness of sin, the true cost of sin, the destructive nature of sin.
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I read about a pastor, Henry Howard, who preached a sermon on sin. And afterward, an officer came to him, one of the elders or deacons,
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I'm not sure, and said, we do not want you to make, to talk as plainly as you do against sin.
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Call it a mistake. Call it an illness. Call it whatever you will, but do not speak, please do not speak so plainly about sin.
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Some might even say this about this sermon. Why? Why are you speaking 30 minutes almost about sin?
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And seeing where the conversation was going, Howard retrieved a bottle and showed it to the man. And it was a bottle of strychnine, if you're familiar with that.
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Now, why would someone have a bottle of strychnine? Well, it was an old pesticide that would be used to take care of small pests.
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And holding this strychnine in his hands, he showed the emphatic warning label on the outside of the bottle, poison.
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This is poison, it is deadly. And Howard held out that deadly bottle and said to the man,
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I see what you want me to do. You want me to take this bottle and you want me to change the label.
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Make it something a little bit more mild. And he said, but I suppose that if I take the label of poison off and put a more mild label, maybe the essence of peppermint, don't you see what will happen?
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The milder you make the label, the more dangerous you make the poison.
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We must confess that many of us have put a milder label on our sins.
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And it is not labeled poison. Maybe it is labeled toxic or it will make you sick.
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But the scriptures teach that it will not just make you sick, it will kill you. That the wages of sin is always, will always, has always been death.
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The devil will tell us that if we take in this sin, we will not surely die.
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But as surely as he is a liar, so our death is assured in sin.
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An eternal death. And it leads to the wrath of God.
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We have a number of newlyweds, soon -to -be newlyweds coming and you're thinking about where you're going to live.
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And some are buying homes. And it makes me think of those early stages when you think you have found the perfect home and you say, this is going to be our forever home.
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Brethren, because of sin, apart from Christ, hell is our forever home.
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Separated from God for all of an eternity. Thomas Watson says, thus it is in hell they would die but they cannot.
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The wicked shall be always dying but never dead. The smoke of the furnace ascends forever and ever.
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Brethren, that is where we come from. This is our hometown. This is who we were from Alpha to Omega in our existence before Christ.
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And brethren, what do we deserve? What will
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God do to sinners such as us? Such rebels?
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Brethren, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to save us.
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Verse 4. You've heard me say it before.
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That word, but. Some of the most precious, liberating, and soul -enlivening truths of the
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Bible follow this word, but. I don't know if you caught it when I read
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Romans chapter 5. But Christ, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which
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He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
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By grace you have been saved and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
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We've looked at length now at the multifaceted aspect of our own depravity, of our own sin, this charred piece of coal with all of its sides.
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And now let us cast that coal aside and take up the precious jewel that is the gospel of Christ and look at the dimensions of Christ's saving work.
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This is my second point. The dimensions of Christ's saving work.
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But God. Two of the most beautiful words in Scripture.
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But God. But God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which
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He loved us. The principal motive of God's saving work.
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The principal motive of the but God in Ephesians 2 .4 is this.
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The great love with which He has loved us. One very skilled
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Bible translator said it could be translated the abundant love. The exceeding love.
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I love to see the repetition. The great love with which He loved. Brethren, you are sitting in this room and if you are in Christ it is because of that great love of God.
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And I wish to make much of that great love now. As true as it is that we deserve hell.
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God's word does not stop there. Every word from the mouth of God proves true.
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And what does verse 4 say? Even in spite of our unworthiness. Even in spite of our unloveliness.
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In spite of our satanic former lives. Even in spite of our present failures which
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God knew before the ages began. God has great love for the believer.
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And God has great love for you. But we do not believe this.
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Do we? I'm reminded of what our brother
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Paul Washer once said. I think I've said this before. He says, I've given God countless reasons not to love me.
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None of them have been strong enough to change him yet. We feel so unlovely, don't we?
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We feel so undeserving. I almost didn't have to preach the first half of this sermon.
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I could have just said, Brothers, sisters, you are dead. And you deserve hell, don't you? And we could have said,
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Amen. Moving on to verse 4. But God, in Christ, God the
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Father takes delight in you. No one needs to convince him to love you.
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No one needs to twist his arm or bend his will. He who has always been
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God, who knows the beginning from the end, has eternally loved you.
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Unconditionally loved you. Loved you individually. Even as I was driving here, my children were sitting in the car.
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Sometimes they see me dictate last minute ideas that come to my mind. And sitting there with my kids, thinking about how
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I desire that my children would know that I love them. I thought, what earthly father would want his children to go about their days wondering if their father truly loves them?
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Such a thought is enough to make a sane man's heart break.
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Why would we think any less of our Heavenly Father? Why would we attribute such fickleness to God, to our
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God, to our Father? Do you see it in the passage, brothers and sisters, that the
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Lord God, he loves you. It is in accord with his character.
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This is not new. This is not a doctrine just of the New Testament, but of the
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Old as well. Turn with me to Exodus 34, in verse 6. Exodus 34, in verse 6.
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The Lord passing before Moses. Passed before him and proclaimed, the
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Lord, the Lord, a God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.
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Here we see a picture both of the justice of God and of the love of God and one who is abounding in steadfast love.
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Steadfast love to whom? To you, Christian. Or Paul's prayer, if we jump back to Ephesians.
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Ephesians chapter 3, in verse 17. There are two prayers in the epistle to the
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Ephesians and the second prayer is not like the first.
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The first we saw that the believer would see what they've been called to. The second prayer is that the believer would see the love that they have in Christ.
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3 .17. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the saints.
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Brethren, all of you in Christ, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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There was a Puritan pastor named John Janeway. He had a friend who experienced all the time perplexing fears about the state of his own soul.
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And like many of us, I assume, I presume, he was inclined to wonder often and doubt
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God's love for him. And Janeway wrote a letter to him that I would commend to you this counsel.
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He said, Oh, stand still and wonder. You have heard me say before that God loves you.
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In some ways, it's a dangerous message because it is over preached in a lot of circles, but I would say in our circle under preached.
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Oh, stand still and wonder. Behold and admire his love.
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Consider what you can discover in this precious Jesus. Here is a sea of love.
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Brothers and sisters, see the sea of love. Cast thyself into it and thou shall be compassed with the height and the depth and the breadth and the length of love and be filled with all the fullness of God.
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Is not this enough? Would you have more? Fling away all except God for God is a sufficient portion and the only proper portion of the souls.
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You know theoretically that God loves you, but cast yourselves into that love.
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Don't merely acknowledge it, admire it from the shore, but jump in and receive
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God's love for you as you pray, as you read your Bible, as you go to church, as you experience the conviction of sin.
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It is a gift of God for you by his love to you. Augustine said on the love of God, God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
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Sometimes we feel like certainly God has limitations too. He doesn't, but we think he does and we think that he cannot love all of us, all perfectly, all at once.
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Such a thought betrays your lack of understanding of God, but he loves all of us as if there were only one of us.
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More than that, we have been made alive with Christ. God has never, and we should take great comfort in this,
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God has never saved a living man once, but he saves dead men all day, every day, and he will until he comes.
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And when we were saved, brethren, we were counted amongst that number, that in that second, in that hour, by God's grace, we were raised to newness of life.
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And our God has not left us dead in our trespasses and sins. I spoke about this unfeeling, unresponding, alienated death from God.
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But that is not the experience of the Christian today. Though we were once dead, walking as spiritual zombies in the service of the devil,
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God has given us new life. He has washed us through regeneration, and we have been born again.
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In John chapter 1 and verse 12, it says, But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of the spirit, but of God.
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Dear Christian, we are now not only loved by God, we have been made new by that God.
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And my counsel, my exhortation to you, is do not be conformed then to that former manner of life that you once lived.
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How many of us still find ourselves living, drifting over as if we were still dead.
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Spending our time the way we did when we were dead. Spending our money the way we did when we were dead.
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Walking and talking and living like spiritually dead men. Who among us, if you can picture this, this amusing idea for a second, who among us, if we were having your funeral, and your casket were here in the center of the room, and the
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Lord were to give you life in that moment, who among us would pop our heads out of the casket and say, the
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Lord has raised me to life. And then close the casket back on ourselves. Such is the outrageous behavior of those who have been raised to newness of life, given a new life, and then go back into the tomb.
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Do you not know that our Lord says, or Paul says, excuse me, in Romans 6 verse 3, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.
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It is impossible to kill a dead man except in the life of a spiritually dead man who is crucified in Christ.
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That in Christ Jesus you were baptized into his death, you were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead, by the glory of the
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Father, we too might walk in newness of life. And this will change our whole lives.
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My children will come home from school sometimes and say, I was talking to this young man or this young woman, they don't use these words, these are dad's words, this kid, another kid at school, and he says he's a
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Christian. But dad, I do not think he's a Christian. Now I'm not trying to raise judgmental children,
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I promise you, I promise you that. But I will ask the question, why, why is it?
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Because he is like everybody else. There's no change. A Christian who has a new life in Christ will be an altogether new person.
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And just as our sin was pervasive, comprehensive, radical, so the transformation of a renewed life is pervasive, comprehensive, and radical.
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And it will change every facet of our lives. George Matheson, who was a
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Scottish pastor, he lived and ministered in the 19th century in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was known as the blind poet preacher.
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I love my escapades into church history, you learn of all these people that you've never heard of before and their glorious Christian lives.
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And despite losing his sight at the age of 17, he devoted his life to preaching the gospel and writing hymns to the praise and glory of God.
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And one of his most well -known hymns is a hymn entitled O love that will not let me go.
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And in it, it writes O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee.
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I give thee back the life I owe that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.
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He preached a God whose love for weary believers was unmatched.
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And one day, he came to a poor woman's home to minister that gospel to her.
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And as he shared the gospel with her, I'm not sure if he was accompanied by someone else, how he knew all of these things being that he was blind, but she lived in a cellar and it was dark and it was dingy and it was dirty and it was stuffy.
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And sharing the gospel with her, he didn't know what became of it, but sharing the gospel, he left, and several months later, he came back looking for her and she was gone.
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The cellar was empty. And eventually tracking her down, he found her living, this time in an attic.
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She was, after all, still poor, but in a modest attic. And when he entered in, it must have been someone else who was with him who saw these things, but her home was bright.
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It was clean. It even had fresh air blowing through the attic. And when
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Matheson asked the woman the reason for this dramatic change, the woman replied,
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Ah, you cannot hear George Matheson preach and live in a cellar. Now what does that mean?
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But the woman had heard this faithful blind pastor preach the life -giving
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Christ of the gospel and the spirit of Christ transformed not only her heart, but her whole life.
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Even the air in her home was different. And so it is with the regenerate
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Christian that we are not dead in our trespasses and sins, but we are alive.
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And the air we breathe, it's not the air of demons, but the fresh, clean air of living as a faithful Christian in the world.
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But more than that, not just saved from spiritual death, not just saved from abiding under God's wrath and unloved by God, but we are saved, as he says, saved from being children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
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It says in Romans 8 -1, Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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Our brother read in Romans chapter 5, turn there with me if you would, how
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Christ himself died for the ungodly. There was a time when our brother
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Steve and I worked together. I don't know if he recalls this, but in our workplaces there was this growing trend where people were attaching quotations to their email signatures.
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And I mean I'm an opportunist and I saw that people were quoting Muhammad Ali and Wayne Gretzky, you miss 100 % of the shots you don't take.
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All of these different cheesy quotes and I thought, I am going to put a quote in there from none other than the
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Apostle Paul. And in my signature it read from Romans chapter 5 and verse 8,
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But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners,
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Christ died for the ungodly. It was the best quote of any email sent in our organization until my boss told me that I needed to change it.
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And I wasn't able to share it as openly then, so I will share it openly now. That while we were still unrighteous, while we were still sinners, while we were still undeserving, while we were the sludge, the oily black tar at the bottom of God's spotless sea,
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Christ died for the ungodly. He saved us from the wrath to come.
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And it was a monergistic salvation. What does that mean, a monergistic salvation?
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Notice with me that every part, every active element of our salvation in verses 4 through 7,
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God is the active party. And we, when
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I looked at it this week in the original language, I marveled that we are spoken of in the passive voice in every instance.
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That God being rich in mercy, because of his love, when we were dead, he made us alive together with Christ.
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By grace you have been saved, passive tense, passive voice, and raised up with him.
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We were raised with him, seated us, he seated us in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
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So that in the coming ages, he might. Our salvation is not synergistic, meaning that we contribute to it, that we offer something of value in it, but it is monergistic, it is mono,
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God does the saving always. Our salvation, as far as it concerns man, is entirely passive.
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When we were dead, he raised us. And our salvation is entirely unconditional, as it pertains to God.
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Though it is fully conditional. But not in the way that we would expect.
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Our salvation is conditioned upon the unmerited love of God for us.
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His sovereign, gracious, wise, and eternal love for his elect.
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And because there is nothing that we could do. This is the key to the city.
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The key that unlocks every door to Christian joy. Because there is nothing that we could do to earn that salvation.
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This means that there is nothing we can do to lose that salvation. So long as we are in Christ, we can be assured that we are saved.
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And we see that we still, we still sin. And yet the great reformation truth,
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Simul Justus et Peccator, simultaneously just and a sinner, is true of us.
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That though we are still being sanctified, we have been perfected for all time through Christ.
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Because Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
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For it is written, everyone who is hanged on a tree, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.
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Brethren, the Lord loves us. The Lord has given us a new life. And the Lord has given us a new standing before him, justified.
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Why? Because Jesus Christ died for the ungodly. And we have union with Christ.
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And raised us up with him. And seated us with him, verse 6, in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
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Isn't it interesting? We're seated in this room. How can it possibly say, in the past tense, that we have been seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus?
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When we understand the way that the language works here, what it means is this.
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It's in the past tense, the aorist tense. It's a past action. And it means absolute certainty.
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It is as good as done. And in another sense, it is happening already.
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R .C. Sproul says that Paul teaches here a union between Christ and those who have come to trust him.
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Union with Christ. So that what is said of the redeemer can also be said of the redeemed.
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And Paul says in Colossians 1, if then you have been raised with Christ, past tense, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
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Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
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When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
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Matthew Henry summarizes it all. He says God's eternal love toward his creatures is the fountain whence all his mercies flow to us.
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And that love of God is great love. And that mercy is rich mercy.
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And every converted sinner is a saved sinner, delivered from sin and wrath.
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The grace that saves us is free, undeserved goodness and favor of God.
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And so having come into this nuclear reactor of Ephesians chapter 2, we see the darkness of our sin.
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We see the glowing beacon that is Christ and his grace toward us.
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And what are we to do with it? Verse 7 tells us the purpose for which
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Christ came to die. It tells us the purpose for which God came to save those who were dead in their trespasses and sins.
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So that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ.
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One commentator says through his endless kindness toward us in Christ, the Father will glorify himself even as he blesses us.
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From the moment of salvation through the ages to come, we will never stop receiving the grace and kindness of God and the whole of heaven will glorify him because of what he has done for us.
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One Puritan said the church will be the trophies of battle on display in the ages to come.
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Now in the Bible's own system, we live in this age and the age to come is the eternal age where we will be with God forever.
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And in that eternal age for all of eternity, for time immemorial, the founder of our salvation, our triune
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God has designed a stunning masterpiece that is to stand alone in his cosmic amphitheater.
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And in the coming ages with the saints and the angels and the heavenly powers in their seats in this amphitheater, our
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Lord God is going to lift the curtain and standing at center stage, we will behold the perfect masterpiece that he has prepared from before the foundation of the world.
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That is the perfect, immutable, abounding kindness of Jesus Christ to the undeserving sinner.
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The immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness to us.
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The great spectacle of the new heavens and the new earth will be
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Christ's love toward the most vile, the most undeserving, and the most beloved creatures of Almighty God.
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And this is the great end of God's eternal plan.
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That with this, to those who have been forgiven much, that much love would be poured out to him.
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Let us love our God with an everlasting love. This is the great plan of the eternal
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God that all will fall before him, casting down their golden crowns before him and there we will worship and love our
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God forever. Brethren, let us not wait until the age to come, but let us love him now.
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Let's pray. Thank you for listening to another sermon from Grace Fellowship Church.
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If you would like to keep up with us, you can find us at Facebook at Grace Fellowship Church or our
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Instagram at Grace Church, Y -E -G, all one word. Finally, you can visit us at our website, graceedmonton .ca