Totally Depraved, Unconditionally Saved

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.

The Opening Text and the Glory of Ephesians 2

Well, with our Bibles turned to Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 1, let's turn our attention there and read verses 1 through 7. Paul writes, But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, 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 toward us in Christ.

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 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. We've seen him give thanks for all the saints. We have seen him recount his prayers and petitions on their behalf.

And now as we come to chapter 2, if you can picture this with me for a moment, Paul is taking us into the power plant of the epistle to the Ephesians, to the nuclear reactor, as it were, of his epistle.

And as he swings the door wide open for all of us to see, we're able to behold what I think is the blazing center of this exceptional letter. And that is the unmerited, undeserved, unparalleled grace of God extended to unworthy sinners.

The centerpiece of this letter is God's grace to the undeserving. And framed against the backdrop of sinful humanity, Paul shows us the radiant grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ. By this point in his ministry, we can be sure that Paul has already been well acquainted with brothers like Luke the physician.

If you know anything about Paul and Luke's relationship, Luke was one of Paul's travel companions. 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 Luke recounted in one of his gospels, or in his gospel, excuse me.

In Luke chapter 7, we read about this exchange that happened. You can turn there with me. An exchange that our Lord had with a sinful woman, with a self-righteous Pharisee, and with his disciples. One day our Lord received an invitation to come to the home of a Pharisee named Simon.

You can find this in Luke chapter 7. I'm going to begin in verse 41. And there he was invited to sit and recline at the table for dinner. And while in the home of this Pharisee, a sinful woman came who began to wash our Lord Jesus Christ's feet with her hair, anointing them and kissing them.

And this Pharisee, we're told, was aghast that Jesus would allow such a sinful woman to touch him. And to teach them all a lesson, our Lord shared a parable and then taught a principle that informs, 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 Lord Jesus said in verse 41 this parable, a certain money lender had two debtors. One owed 500 denarii and the other 50. When they could not pay, he canceled the debt of both.

Now which of them will love him more? Simon the Pharisee answered, the one I suppose for whom he canceled the larger debt. And he, that is Jesus, said to him, you have judged rightly. 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. 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. Therefore I tell you her sins, which are many, are forgiven. For she loved much, but he who is forgiven loves little. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Paul wants us to see, brethren, that we have been forgiven much and then in turn that we would respond by loving our triune 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 Lord Jesus Christ.

So as we do, let's look at the lengths to which we have been forgiven in Christ. My first point, if you're following along in the outline, is the extent of our radical depravity. Brethren, the extent of our radical depravity.

The Radical, Universal, Comprehensive, Satanic, and Destructive Nature of Human Depravity

In verse 1, Paul says,. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. After concluding this grand, lofty, this soaring introduction into chapter 1, in chapter 1, Paul begins chapter 2 in verse 1 with perhaps the most sobering sentence in the entire Bible.

He writes,. And you were dead. 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. As Paul seeks to remind the Ephesians of who they were before the Lord saved them, he paints the bleakest possible picture of fallen humanity that the human mind can conceive of.

And Paul is not speaking in any uncertain terms. When God saves a man through Christ, we need to understand this. This must become evident in our Christian experience, in our Christian testimony. 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. 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. 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. And what's more, God has not opened, had not God opened our eyes, we would have been perfectly content to remain there.

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. 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. 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 Augustinian doctrine.

Meaning that it did not come from Augustine. It is not a Calvinistic doctrine. It is not primarily from John Calvin. But it is a Pauline and it is a biblical doctrine. 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.

Before Christ rescued us, our depravity was radical. We'll look at these each. Radical, universal, comprehensive, satanic and destructive. 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.

Our depravity was radical in every meaning of that word. 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. Paul says here that we were spiritually dead in our sins.

I like what one reformer says here in his commentary. 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.

But we are not at liberty to set aside the declarations of our Lord and of the Apostle Paul. He does not simply mean that we were in danger of death. But he declares that it was real and present death.

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. 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.

I came across a news story this week. Sometimes when you are preparing for a sermon, you have an idea in your mind, and you think, I wonder if there is a story that corresponds to this. Certainly, there has to be a story that corresponds to this.

And of course there was. A story from 2007. There was a 33-year-old man. Kids, you might appreciate this. It is a little bit grim, but you might appreciate it. A 33-year-old Venezuelan man named Carlos Camejo, who was killed in a car crash.

Or at least that is 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. 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.

And when his family came to identify him at the morgue, they found him on a gurney in the hallway, alive. I am 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?

Because he was responsive. Meanwhile, dead men do not respond. 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.

If it is, in Scripture, it is a Pauline doctrine and not a Christian doctrine. But our Lord Jesus Christ, in John 6, verse 44, said,. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent him draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 2, Paul says,. The natural person, in verse 14, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them. And brethren, such was our condition before the Lord saved us, that we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

But Paul also intimates here that our depravity was more than that. It was not only radical, but it was universal. Notice in verse 1, he says,. And you, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins. And then, hopping over to verse 3, he says,.

And among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh. And then at the end of verse 3, that the children of wrath include, Paul says, the rest of mankind. Paul appears to be doing this. He is casting a wide net to include the Ephesian Gentiles, to include all of the Jews, and to include all of humanity, so that the reader would understand that this sinful condition includes all people.

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. There is not one person in this room who has not, at one time, been beset by this kind of pervasive sinfulness.

There is none righteous. Paul says in Romans 3,. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good. Not even one. I'm reminded of a story by Andrew Bonar.

If anyone's read the diary of Robert Murray McShane, or the autobiography of Robert Murray McShane, that was written by Andrew Bonar. He was having an interaction with a woman who claimed that she was, at least for an extensive period of time, without sin.

And he said, Really? Without sin entirely? She said, Yes, absolutely. He said, You must be very proud of that. To which she said, Indeed I am. Brethren, this is a description of all of us, without exception.

All of us are sinners in need of God's grace. But our depravity is more than that. Still, it is radical, it is pervasive, and it is universal, and it is comprehensive. 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.

Like a catastrophic oil spill in a once vibrant coral reef, if you can picture that, on every plant. 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.

We can see this by Paul's use of these words in verse 2. He says, the sins in which you once walked. Or in verse 3, how we all once lived, existed in the passions of our flesh. Or at the end of verse 3, we were by nature children of wrath.

Now, does this mean to walk, to live, to be by nature, comprehensively sinful? When we understand the context, when we understand the history, the utilization of these words, the answer is absolutely yes.

The Jews in the first century, they would refer to the laws of conduct as using the Hebrew word halakha, which means walking. And the Jews understood that to keep the Jewish law, to keep the Jewish traditions, was to walk in righteousness.

That's why in Mark chapter 7 and verse 5, when the Pharisees saw the disciples, how they were conducting themselves, they said to Jesus, they are not walking according to the traditions.

Halakha.

In Jewish terms, then, walking in trespasses and sins had to do with the whole direction of one's life. To walk in sin was to conduct the whole of your life in an ecosystem of rebellion against God. 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.

One commentator says that it shows that this lostness is not a passing error. It wasn't, oh, I've sinned once. It's not the lacking of education, which we see oftentimes in Marxist ideology. They just need to be educated.

It's not in low social position, like critical theory might suppose, but it is a life-dominating force which no one can escape on his own. And we see this in Genesis chapter 6 and verse 5, just before the Lord destroyed the whole earth with a flood.

Genesis 6 -5, the Lord saw the wickedness of man, and he saw that that wickedness of man was what? That it was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only continually evil.

Brethren, our sin was radical, universal, comprehensive, and our sinfulness was satanic. 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, it could be easy for us to think that sin is a light matter.

Well, Shane, I'm only human. We all sin. But brethren, if I can reel it back for a moment, sin is completely, absolutely, entirely evil. 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.

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. 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. 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?

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. There was that incredibly large temple to Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

There were the demon possessed, and the seven sons of Sceva being chased around. There were the stockpiles of occult books. 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.

In first century Ephesus, and in the surrounding ancient world, the broader culture believed in demons. 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.

For instance, many people in first century Ephesus would believe that the open air was filled with demons. 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.

The air was thick with malevolent demonic spirits. And this was not some small cult belief. Five centuries even before Christ. Pythagoras, if anyone remembers your junior high math. 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, right, you might recall that.

That Pythagoras is quoted as saying, the whole air is full of spirits. 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.

Similarly, Philo, a first century Jewish philosopher said, there are spirits flying everywhere through the air. The air is the house of the disembodied spirits. And so what 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.

They can picture it in their minds. And this image, if we picture it just a moment ago, this room being filled entirely with demons, is altogether repulsive. When we walked in our sins, in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and we're children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

It was not some benign lifestyle. As if to say that we lived in a place of moral neutrality. Moral neutrality is a myth. A secular society is a myth. It will either be God word or godless. 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 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. What Christ said about the Pharisees, in John chapter 8 and verse 44, was true of us.

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. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.

When he lies, he speaks out of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies. I don't know if you have ever experienced this, ever thought about this. I know for me, as an unbeliever, I didn't want to tell lies.

I didn't want to be a liar. And yet, every time I opened my mouth, it seems lies were pouring forth. Self-aggrandizing lies to glorify myself. Self-preserving lies to cover my tracks. And I'm sure many of you can think the same of your own experience.

Why was it? Because we served the father of lies and in keeping with his character and with ours. We served him zealously without so much as a second thought. But Paul also mentions here that our depravity was destructive.

Verse 3 refers to our former status as children. If you are in Christ this afternoon, you are still a child. 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.

We lived under, abiding under, the just wrath of God for our sins. Even though there was a Savior for these sins, we saw no need for that Savior. We were prepared to go it alone. And our happy trajectory was the lake of fire.

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. 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, I'm not sure, and said, we do not want you to make, to talk as plainly as you do against sin.

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. Some might even say this about this sermon. Why? Why are you speaking 30 minutes, almost, about sin?

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. 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. And holding this strychnine in his hands, he showed the emphatic warning label on the outside of the bottle, poison. This is poison, it is deadly.

And Howard held out that deadly bottle and said to the man, I see what you want me to do. You want me to take this bottle and you want me to change the label. 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? The milder you make the label, the more dangerous you make the poison.

We must confess that many of us have put a milder label on our sins. And it is not labeled poison. Maybe it is labeled toxic or it will make you sick. 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. The devil will tell us that if we take in this sin, we will not surely die. But as surely as he is a liar, so our death is assured in sin.

An eternal death. And it leads to the wrath of God. We have a number of newlyweds, soon to be newlyweds, coming. And you are thinking about where you are going to live. 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. Brethren, because of sin, apart from Christ, hell is our forever home. Separated from God for all of an eternity. Thomas Watson says, As thus it is in hell, they would die but they cannot.

The wicked shall be always dying but never dead. The smoke of the furnace ascends forever and ever. 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.

And brethren, what do we deserve? What will God do to sinners such as us? Such rebels? Brethren, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to save us. Verse 4. You have heard me say it before. That word, but. Some of the most precious, liberating and soul-enlivening truths of the Bible follow this word, but.

I don't know if you caught it when I read Romans chapter 5. But Christ, but God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace, you have been saved. And raised us up with Him. And seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. 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.

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. This is my second point. The dimensions of Christ's saving work.

The Great Love and Rich Mercy of God in Salvation

But God. Two of the most beautiful words in Scripture.

But God.

But God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us. The principal motive of God's saving work. The principal motive of the but God in Ephesians 2 .4 is this. The great love with which He has loved us.

One very skilled Bible translator said it could be translated the abundant love. The exceeding love. 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.

And I wish to make much of that great love now. As true as it is that we deserve hell. God's word does not stop there. Every word from the mouth of God proves true. And what does verse 4 say? Even in spite of our unworthiness.

Even in spite of our unloveliness. In spite of our satanic former lives. Even in spite of our present failures which God knew before the ages began. God has great love for the believer. And God has great love for you.

But we do not believe this.

Do we?

I'm reminded of what our brother Paul Washer once said. I think I've said this before. He says, I've given God countless reasons not to love me. None of them have been strong enough to change Him yet.

We feel so unlovely.

Don't we?

We feel so undeserving. I almost didn't have to preach the first half of this sermon. I could have just said, Brothers, sisters, you are dead. And you deserve hell, don't you? And we could have said, Amen.

Moving on to verse 4.

But God,.

In Christ, God the Father takes delight in you. No one needs to convince Him to love you. No one needs to twist His arm or bend His will. He who has always been God. Who knows the beginning from the end.

Has eternally loved you. Unconditionally loved you. Loved you individually. Even as I was driving here, my children were sitting in the car. Sometimes they see me dictate last minute ideas that come to my mind.

And sitting there with my kids, thinking about how 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?

Such a thought is enough to make a sane man's heart break. Why would we think any less of our Heavenly Father? Why would we attribute such fickleness to God?

To our God?

To our Father? Do you see it in the passage, brothers and sisters, that the Lord God, He loves you. It is in accord with His character. This is not new. This is not a doctrine just of the New Testament, but of the Old as well.

Turn with me to Exodus 34, in verse 6. Exodus 34, in verse 6. The Lord passing before Moses. Passed before him and proclaimed, The 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.

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. Steadfast love to whom? To you, Christian. Or Paul's prayer, if we jump back to Ephesians.

Ephesians 3, verse 17. There are two prayers in the epistle to the Ephesians and the second prayer is not like the first. 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.

3, verse 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. 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.

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. And like many of us, I assume, I presume, he was inclined to wonder often and doubt God's love for him.

And Janeway wrote a letter to him that I would commend to you this counsel. He said, Oh, stand still and wonder. You have heard me say before that God loves you. 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. Oh, stand still and wonder. Behold and admire his love. Consider what you can discover in this precious Jesus. Here is a sea of love. 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. 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. You know, theoretically, that God loves you. But cast yourselves into that love. Don't merely acknowledge it.

Admire it from the shore. But jump in and receive 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. 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. 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.

Such a thought betrays your lack of understanding of God. But he loves all of us as if there were only one of us. More than that, we have been made alive with Christ. God has never and we should take great comfort in this God has never saved a living man once.

But he saves dead men.

All day,.

Every day and he will until he comes. 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. And our God has not left us dead in our trespasses and sins.

I spoke about this unfeeling, unresponding, alienated death from God. 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, God has given us new life.

He has washed us through regeneration and we have been born again. In John 1, 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.

And dear Christian, we are now not only loved by God, we have been made new by that God. And my counsel, my exhortation to you is do not be conformed then to that former manner of life that you once lived.

How many of us still find ourselves living, drifting over as if we were still dead? Spending our time the way we did when we were dead. Spending our money the way we did when we were dead. Walking and talking and living like spiritually dead men.

Who among us, if you can picture 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 Lord were to give you life in that moment, who among us would pop our heads out of the casket and say, the 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. 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?

It is impossible to kill a dead man except in the life of a spiritually dead man who is crucified in Christ. 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 Father, we too might walk in newness of life. And this will change our whole lives. My children will come home from school sometimes and say, I was talking to this young man or this young woman.