SERMON: Sola Gratia

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Last week, we began a six week journey down to the roots of our faith. And for months, we've walked through the Book of Proverbs looking for or looking at the fruit of the Christian life, seeing how the fear of God is how we actually have wisdom.

The Five Solas and the Roots of the Christian Life

And wisdom works its way down into our mouths and our marriages and our money and our work. And we saw that the fruit of the Christian life will always tell you something about the root of the Christian life.

As Jesus said, a good tree will not bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. And the reason for that is because a bad tree has a bad root system and always bears bad fruit. So while Proverbs has been looking at the fruit of our faith, in this series, we want to go back and revisit the roots of our faith.

And to do that, we're going to be looking at the five solas, five little Latin phrases that sum up how a guilty sinner is made right with a holy God. Now, last week, we stood with the German monk Martin Luther watching how a terrified little monk in a field found the final and supreme authority that he was looking for, not in a pope, not in a council, not in a relic, but in the Word of God alone, which is sola scriptura.

We saw how in the Word God has truly spoken, how we saw that the Word is God breathed, it's sufficient, it's clear, it's the final authority for everything that we're supposed to believe. And that is the foundation of our faith because before you can even ask, how is a man saved?

You have to settle the question of who has the right to save and who has the right to tell us about it. And that's the question of sola scriptura. Now, this morning, once we've now settled the question of authority, that it's God and His Word who's allowed to speak, not councils and relics and popes, now we get to look at how a sinner is made right with a holy God.

How question is what we're going to talk about this week. How can a wicked man, how can a wicked woman, how can a wicked sinner become right with a holy God? And we're going to answer that question over the next three weeks with sola gratia, sola fide, and solus Christus.

Today we're going to be in sola gratia, which means by grace alone. And to do that, we're going to turn from Germany and Wittenberg and we're going to go down south into Switzerland to the city of Zurich.

Ulrich Zwingli and the Plague in Zurich

And we're going to be in the summer of 1519, two years after Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses on the castle door. And I want to warn you before we go there that Zurich in the summer of 1519 is not a place where you want to be.

Switzerland is beautiful. It's one of the places I want to go see. I love the Alps. I love the idea of a little chateau at the bottom of the Alps and with like wooden clogs or I don't know what they wear.

But that all sounds amazing to me. But 1519 was not amazing in Switzerland. And that's because in 1519, the bubonic plague had come to Zurich on the backs of rats and mice that carried the Black Death on ships from the Mediterranean Sea and then made its way northward into mainland Europe.

The plague, when you caught it, would start with a fever and then it would progress into chills and then swelling in the neck, in the armpits, in the groin, and in the lymph nodes of the body. And then very often within a few days from the swelling, you were being wheeled away from your house on the death cart.

The bells of the city would toll and toll and toll for each new subsequent death until the bell ringers themselves were sick and died. And then the city descended in a kind of deathly quiet. And by some estimates, before the plague was finished in the city of Zurich, a quarter of the city had died, which would have been a staggering number.

Now, imagine for a moment that you're the pastor in that city. Imagine you're the new pastor in that city. You've only been in the office of pastor for about eight months at this point. You've not even had the opportunity yet to buy a house in the city of Zurich.

And so you're traveling in every Sunday to preach. You're traveling in to do home visits. You're traveling in to do all of your duties in a time period where there were no cars, which would have made it especially arduous.

And in addition to this, in 1519, you were worn out by serving for eight months in remote travel back and forth and from preaching through the book of Matthew rigorously by being a commuting pastor, by the rigors of ministry.

So you were worn out and you needed a vacation. And in the glorious month of August in Zurich, which is when Switzerland's not cold, and it was warm and beautiful. Let's imagine that you decided that you were going to take your vacation in the hot springs of Fafach.

I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that right. It was a well-known spa in the mountains in Eastern Switzerland where you could relax and recover. And that day taking long baths was a kind of ordinary medicinal treatment.

Physicians often would prescribe you a prescription of hot baths and for many ailments. And in that way, pastors and scholars and town leaders and anyone who could afford such a thing would go to the baths regularly to relax and to heal and to recuperate.

And I want you to imagine that while you were there trying your best to relax, you've got your phone silenced in 1519 and then word reaches you that the plague, the Black Death, has broken out in Zurich, the town where you ministered, where you were needed back there immediately.

Now, every instinct of our flesh would have said, I'm on vacation. I'm going to silence this alert. I'm going to have the automatic email message say, I'll get back to you when I'm back from the baths.

And yet, Martin, or sorry, Ulrich Zwingli did not do that. He didn't stay up in the beautiful mountain air. He didn't go down into the poisoned air that the Black Death had tainted in the city of Zurich.

He packed his bags and he went down the mountain and he headed straight into the very center of the island where he saw the eye of the hurricane known as the Bubonic Plague. And by the end of September, after home visit, after home visit, after home visit, after prayer at someone's bedside, after preaching in congregations where men and women discovered that they were sick too late and the air that they had all been breathing was infected, after months of this, he contracted the Black Plague as well.

And he lay in his bed burning with a horrific fever. All of his friends expected him to die. Rumors were circulating all throughout the country of Switzerland that he had already died. And somewhere in the middle of all of that sickness, all creaturely hope could have failed Zwingli, but it didn't.

He wrote a simple metrical verse, a hymn on his deathbed. Now, I'd like to read it to you because I think it's epic. Like how based is it that when you're dying, you're going to write a hymn? This is what he wrote.

Help me, O Lord. Oh, sorry. It's in different stanzas. First stanza, stanzas one, sickness. Help me, O Lord, my strength and rock. Low at the door, I hear death's knock. Uplift thine arm once pierced for me that conquered death and set me free.

Yet, if thy voice in life's midday recalls my soul, then I obey. In faith and hope, earth, I resign. Secure for heaven, for I am thine. Second stanza, decline. So it gets worse. My pains increase, haste to console.

For fear and woe seize flesh and soul. Death is at hand and my senses fail. My tongue is numb, now Christ prevail. Lo, Satan strains to snatch his prey. I feel his grasp, must I give way? He harms me not, I fear no loss.

For here I lie beneath my cross. Stanza three, recovery. My God, my Lord, healed by thy hand. Upon the earth once more I stand. Let sin no more rule over me. My mouth shall sing alone to thee. Though now delayed, my hour will come.

Involved perchance in deeper gloom. But let it come with joy. I'll rise and bear my yoke straight to the skies. The hymn of Ulrich Zwingli. And I think it's actually called the Sickness Hymn or the Death Hymn, which is also pretty epic.

Now, Zwingli wrote, you can get a glimpse of his heart. He knew that he had no saint to bargain with. He had no pilgrimage that he could go on. He had no relic that he could that he could view and get some kind of magical benefit from.

He had no good work that he could offer up to God. He had nothing that he could exchange for his life. He was dead to rights. He was simply a dying man in the hands of a sovereign God, calling out for God to do whatever God would will.

Because Zwingli realized that God was the potter and Zwingli was the clay and God could do whatever he wanted with his vessel. And Zwingli knew that God would only ever do good whether Zwingli was broken, whether Zwingli was overcome by death or whether Zwingli was healed.

Now, I tell you this because the plague in Zurich is one of the best pictures that I know of, of the doctrine that we are coming to study this morning, which is called Sola Gratia. Because the Bible does not describe you and I as people who caught a cold.

It doesn't say that we're just a little under the weather. We've got a worst case of the flu this year than last. It doesn't say that we're sick in need of some stronger medicine. The Bible says that we're dead in our trespasses with no hope of recovery.

In a state where we cannot possibly heal ourselves totally dependent upon Almighty God in a way infinitely more so than Zwingli with the bubonic plague. And unless some kind of outside help from God comes, and unless some kind of resurrection occurs, we will have no life.

That, my friends, is what grace is. Grace is the undeserved kindness of God to visit us in the death that we caused to give us the life we did not deserve. Zwingli recognized it. And it's something we must all remember today as well.

Grace Alone and the Reformation Dispute

Now, before we dive in, I do want to say a quick word about the world that Zwingli and Luther and Calvin and Knox were all living in. They lived in a world where there was no such thing as the Protestant church.

They lived in a world where the only church on earth was the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, but they didn't have that. They weren't accessible to that. The only church they had access to was the Church of Rome.

And both had, unfortunately, misunderstood the doctrine of grace. Now, that is to say, Rome didn't reject grace. They believed in grace. Rome still believes in grace to this day. In fact, if you read the Council of Trent, which was Rome's direct official answer to what happened in the Reformation, it condemns any man who says that you can be saved by your own natural strength and merit without grace.

It says that. So the fight of the 16th century that Luther and Butzer and Calvin and Zwingli and all of these men were engaged in was not that the Roman Catholic Church rejected grace. The fight was about the word alone.

Rome said that, yes, we need grace, but the reformers said that grace is sufficient. Rome said that God gives grace to living people who must cooperate with that grace. The reformers said, no, God gives grace to dead people who can't cooperate with anything.

Rome said that grace aids the sick. The reformers said that grace raises the dead. And that's the question that's in front of us this morning. When it comes to our salvation, who makes the decisive move in our salvation?

Who is the one who pursues in salvation? Who is the one who raises in salvation? Who's the one who comes and delivers in salvation? Is it God plus you, or is it God alone? Last week, we looked at God's authority to speak on these matters.

Today, we're actually going to look at how God, through his faithful and true word, accomplishes these things. Is it God plus man, synergism? Or is it God alone, monergism, working without any help? Kind of like a surgeon standing over a dead body.

Ephesians 2 and the Meaning of Grace Alone

How much help do you think that the dead body gives in resurrecting himself? Zero, such as it is with God. So to do that, we're gonna look at a couple things today. We're gonna look at number one. We're gonna look at because the sinner has been left entirely dead in their sin with no ability to do good work, it must be God alone.

Second, because the cure is free grace. There's no room for human boasting. That's our second point. And our third point is because God, once he raises the dead, he ends up raising us for something which is good work.

So it's by God alone where we cannot boast at all for the good works God has called us to do. All of this will be what we see in grace alone. So if you'll turn with me, we're gonna read from Ephesians 2 this morning.

We're gonna be in verses one through 10. We're gonna look at a passage that was instrumental in the life of Ulrich Zwingli, and we're gonna see what it means that God has saved us, how God has saved us, and how it is truly not by our effort, but by grace alone.

So I will begin in Ephesians 2, be in verse one through 10. I'll read it and then we will pray. And you, he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sin in which you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of our flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

But God, who is rich in mercy because of his 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 up together and made us to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace, you have been saved through faith, and that is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Let us pray. Lord, thank you that you have told us exactly how salvation is accomplished, maybe not in the minutia of detail and how every atom of our body that was once dead now is alive in Christ, but you have told us the means by which salvation occurs, and it is not of our effort so that we may not boast.

It was of your efforts so that you may boast, so that you may boast in your exceeding mercy, so that you may boast in your loving kindness, so that you may for eternity sing your own praises about how good and kind you were, that you turned objects of misery and wrath into objects of grace, trophies on your cabinet.

Lord, may we see our life in light of what you've done. May we never become puffed up and prideful to think that we are more than what we are. We exist to bring glory to you. Our salvation is a testimony of your kindness.

We are not so special that you looked at us and said, I'm picking him. We were so pitiful that you had to come and resurrect us. Lord, help us to remember these things and in everything we do give you glory.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Now, a quick word on Ulrich Zwingli. He was born New Year's Day, 1484 in a little town called Wertherhaus up in the Truggenberg Valley of Switzerland. I like to say it with an accent because it makes me feel like I know what I'm saying, but I still don't know if I pronounced that right.

He was born seven weeks after Martin Luther, which I think is fascinating because when God decides to do something huge in history, he often raises up multiple people at the same time. Seven weeks after Martin Luther was born, Ulrich Zwingli was born as well.

Zwingli came from a family of farmers who had some social and economic standing in their community. His uncle was a priest and he saw that his young nephew was bright and sharp. So he paid for him a full ride to go to seminary in Vienna and then in Basel.

And at Basel, he sat under the teaching of a man named Thomas Wittenbach, who told his students actually something that was very dangerous for him to say out loud at that period of time. He taught them that the death of Christ was the only price that was ever paid for the forgiveness of sins.

And that would have been very controversial in a system where the church owns the treasury of merit, where the church has indulgences, where the church offers pilgrimages, where the church says that the death of Christ alone is not sufficient.

You must do Jesus plus Jesus plus Jesus plus. It was a dangerous thing that his teacher said, but Zwingli never forgot it. And after this, he was ordained as a priest and he served for 10 years in the town of Glarus as a chaplain in the battlefields of Italy.

I love Zwingli so much because he's a soldier and I resonate with that. He's a priest and a soldier, which makes him, I just, I love it. I don't agree with everything Zwingli ever said, but I'm like, this guy knows some stuff.

And this situation influenced Zwingli as a chaplain and drove him back to his studies. The seeing his comrades die on the battlefield haunted him and seeing his comrades die for a war that was enriching popes and not actually for the good of his own Swiss people fueled him, sent him back into his studies.

Now that caused him to read a very famous book written by Erasmus. It was not Erasmus' book, it was Erasmus' translation of the Greek New Testament, which was a landmark triumph in all of Christian history because it is the first single volume edition of the Greek New Testament ever produced by Desirius Erasmus.

And it's still used today as one of the chief texts that we study from. And it's a great gift to the church that Erasmus gave. Zwingli astoundingly got his hands on a copy of this, which meant he was very wealthy because at that time no one just owns books like that.

And he did something remarkable with it. Instead of just reading it, he began copying it by hand, beginning with the writings of the letters of St. Paul. And he would write it in Greek by hand, notes in the margin over and over and over until he memorized all of Paul's letters in Greek.

And by doing that, Zwingli was awakened to the true meaning and true love of scripture, that salvation is a free gift of a merciful God, sola gratia, grace alone. And one of the most influential passages for Zwingli was Ephesians chapter two, which we're looking at this morning.

The Sinner Is Dead, So God Alone Gives Life

And the first thing that we need to understand about this passage is that grace alone depends on God. And even more specifically, it depends upon the but God. Paul says this, and you he made alive who were dead and trespasses in their sins.

Now, if you're using the Greek New Testament, I have to warn you here that Paul writes run-on sentences. In seminary, one of the things that my professors did to punish me was they told me to outline, you know, have you ever done sentence outlining?

Most of you haven't. It's like what old people did. But I had to do it as a kid where you subject and verb and verb and object, and Paul will write sentences for 10 verses. So my paper that I had to turn in one day, because at the time I was a poor seminary student and I didn't have the money for a big poster, I had to have pieces of computer paper stapled together in a series so that I could actually diagram Paul's sentence.

This verse is no different. It is an entirely run-on sentence without a single main verb, and it is just stacking and stacking and stacking and stacking ideas on top of each other so that you can kind of miss the main point that Paul was talking about.

But if I were to give you a faithful paraphrase of the text, it would sound something like this. Dear Christians, you were dead in your trespasses. Stop, put a big parentheses there because there's gonna be a lot that comes after that, and it's not going to detract from his main point, but it is going to supplement his main point.

Dear Christian, you were dead in your trespasses and sins. Parentheses. You were dead in those sins that you once lived in. You followed after the course of the world. You were empowered by Satan, who the Spirit is now in work in the sons of God or the sons of disobedience.

And being dead in those sins, we lived among the members of this fallen world and we indulged in the same sinful desires that they did, doing only what our perverted natures that were addicted to death ever wanted.

And this is because of our very nature. All of us have this base identity. We stood under the totalizing wrath of God just as the rest of mankind because we were dead and sin. Parentheses closed. That all is an addendum to the main point.

Now back to the main idea. But God, who is exceedingly rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us even while we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. So what Paul is actually saying, if you were to take away the parentheses, parenthesis is important, it gives us the doctrinal foundation for the statement.

If you were to take it out just for a second, just so that you could focus only on the main argument, this would be what it says. You were dead in your sins, but God made you alive. But God is probably the most incredible two words that have ever been uttered on the pen of a human man.

You were dead, but God. Your sin murdered you, but God. You were enslaved in this fallen world, but God. You were children of wrath and ruin, but God. You thought that nothing could save you, but God.

You thought you were dead in your trespasses, but God. You thought you had no value and no worth, but God. But God! Man, the only reason that this is good news, the only reason that you and I can have hope, the only reason that we can be delivered from this body of death is because you were dead, and God did something while you were dead that you didn't do.

You did nothing. Your soul was dead, decomposing, and stinking. You had no ability, no strength, no giftedness, no sensitivity. You were not more spiritual than your neighbor. You were as helpless as a one-armed man trying to swim across the Pacific.

But worse, you had a stroke in the middle of it. You had an ear infection. You got dizzy, you got vertigo, and then you sunk to the bottom, and it was probably worse than that. But God, but God, in all of you, but God, in all of your circumstance, but God, in everything you brought to the table, which is nothing but a stenching pile of rubbish, but God, who is rich in mercy, who is abundant in loving kindness, worked completely independent of your effort, worked entirely alone on behalf of you to make you alive.

It doesn't say that he helped you become alive. It says God made you alive, which means he did it, not you. In the same way that a flashlight won't shine without the batteries, you can walk up to a flashlight that has no batteries in it, and you can say, shine, old flashlight, and it won't because it's dead.

No matter how many times you even grab it and try to turn it on, where you think, okay, well, maybe if I help this flashlight and I participate with this flashlight, it will come alive. It doesn't, it has no batteries.

It can't get up and walk to the shelf and grab the batteries for itself. It can't put the batteries in itself. It can't say, hey, I have decided that I want to follow you to the batteries. It can't fill out the little card that says, hey, today I accepted batteries into my tube.

Paul says that before Christ, we were dead. No batteries, no life, nothing, until he put that life in us and made us alive and turned it on, and then we shine. Paul says that before Christ, we were slave to three taskmasters.

Imagine that. It's bad enough when you're a slave to one. We were a slave to three. We were slave to the course of this world because we only ever followed after it. We were slaves to Satan, the prince in power of the air.

We were slaves to our own flesh so that in that trifold slavery, we can only ever act in accordance with the very flesh that we were enslaved to. There's a question of free will that comes to play here.

And I wanna say that I agree with it. I think we have free will. I just think our free will is limited to the nature that we possess. Let me give you an example. If I were to say to a fish, let's suppose for a second that fish can talk.

Hey fish, you look really happy in that water right there. I want you to get out and walk with me. And we're gonna go for a little walk so that I can get to know you because I really think that you're interesting.

And about two steps into it, the fish is dead. The fish has freedom to live in water. The fish does not have freedom to live outside of it because it's dead. You and I, when we get into our cars, we have freedom to drive home.

We don't have freedom to fly home like Icarus, Greek mythology. You'll burn too, you'll fall too, you'll go splat. We don't have freedom there. So we can do the things that we have freedom which are consistent with our nature, but what are things that aren't consistent with our nature?

Paul says we're dead. We're dead in our sin. No one can do good, so therefore, what's outside of our nature? Doing good. And what is a good work other than saying, I believe in you, Jesus, that's a good work.

Save me, Jesus, that's a good work. Those are works we have no freedom to accomplish in our sin because we are spiritually dead. We only ever act in a way that satisfies our flesh. Yeah, we can choose what kind of ice cream we want.

We can choose what kind of spouse we have. We can choose what kind of job we have. We can choose what kind of all these other things that are consistent with the nature of death. We cannot choose things that are inconsistent with that or to say it a different way, we cannot choose things that are living.

But God did something. God alone broke the chains. God did something to set us free. God did something to purchase our freedom. God did something to make us alive. But God, we who are by nature children of wrath, but God made us alive.

He made us, he did it. He made us children of light. He gave us a glimpse of heaven and our hearts already here on earth. And understanding this is so important because the Catholic church at the time and all others throughout church history had gotten this fact so terribly wrong.

Let me give you an example from war because Wing Lee was a chaplain in war. And I think that this is a good example. When a medic walks into a mass casualty event, a bomb is dropped and there's a ton of casualties, ton of people who are wounded.

The first thing that he has to do is to begin triaging because not every single person can receive the same care. It's just not possible. He has limited resources, he's limited bandages, he has limited morphine.

So what he does is he goes and he puts a green tag on the casualties that can still walk and who can get themselves to the aid station on their own. And he says, go do good things, go, get out of here.

Then he puts a yellow tag on all of the ones who are hurt badly, but they can hold on. If they could just get a little bit of help, they're probably gonna make it. Then he puts a red tag on the ones who are in really bad need, who are probably not gonna make it, but it's possible.

And then he puts a black tag on the ones who are dead. Now, every medic knows that you don't have time and resources for all of it, so you have to figure out who can I serve, who can I help, who can I save so that I can save the most amount of people with the least amount of resources so that I can help as many people as I can.

That's the plight of the medic in a mass casualty event. Now, using that as an example, there are people in church history who had different opinions on how dead we actually are. For instance, a man named Pelagius in the fifth century, he would have said, you and I have a green tag.

We can kind of walk on our own, we can get ourselves to the med station, we can do the work, we can walk to God and say, God, you know what? In all of my wisdom, I've realized that I think you'd be a good addition to my life.

I've got things figured out pretty well, but I'm walking with a limp. Can you help me? And that's what Pelagius sort of taught salvation was. We have the goodness inside of us, we have the ability inside of us to walk to God, choose him and have him be that completion, that cherry on top, the maraschino goodness on the top of our little whipped cream that makes the whole world better again.

Well, the church condemned him as a heretic for good reason. The second was the yellow tags. By the time you get to the Middle Ages, the Catholic church and their theologians were saying something similar to Pelagius, but not quite as bad.

They were saying that, yeah, we're pretty wounded. Yeah, the human condition is pretty bad off, but if you can just kind of do whatever it is that lies within you, you can reach for God, you can do your penance, you can pay your indulgence and God, will God deny the grace?

Will God deny his grace to you if you're really trying? If you just put the coin in the coffer, will he really deny you? Rome was giving the sinner a yellow tag, arguing that they could not quite get up on their own.

They couldn't walk to the medical tent on their own, but they were still in good enough shape to where they could reach out and grab the Almighty through various works. In Rome's own words at the Council of Trent, it was stated, to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace.

Did you hear what they just said? To convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace. They're a patient lying on the ground who's hurt, but if I'll just cooperate with that medic, I'll be all right.

Well, we say that that is wrong, clearly. Ephesians 2 doesn't place a green tag on you and I. Ephesians 2 doesn't place a yellow tag on you and I. Ephesians 2 doesn't place a red tag on you and I. Ephesians 2 says, they're already dead.

Black tag for you and I. Oh, there's black tag, Lankford. The best thing you can do for him is take his boots and go through his pockets, he's done. But God came to a world that was only filled with carcasses who did not deserve medicine because it wouldn't have worked, who could not be revived in any way other than him performing a resurrection, but God, who was rich in mercy, made us alive again.

He did it, he did it alone. You were KIA and he transferred you out of the concentration camps where you had been gassed and he put you into the ranks of his people where you can now breathe again, where you can now live again and where you could serve him forevermore.

This is why Jesus can say in John 6, 44, no one can come unless the father who sent me draws him. That is so clear, is it not? How many people can come? No one. Well, if you really exegete that Greek word, it means that everybody can come, right?

No one can come to Jesus unless, condition, the father who sent Jesus draws them. And I love that word draw because it sounds like Kenny G is playing in the background and you're being wooed to Jesus.

That is not what that word is. That word actually is no one can come to me unless the father who sent me drags them behind a chariot with their head bouncing against the concrete. That's the word that was used to Paul when he was literally dragged by his ankles out of the city.

Da-da-da, da-da-da, that's his head. Da-da-da, da-da-da. No one can come to Christ unless God rips you, drags you out of your death and yanks you to the Savior because we're that dead we wouldn't have went otherwise.

In the same way, a leopard can't lose its spots. You and I who were reduced to ashes sitting on an urn could not walk again, could not live again, could not sing. I have decided to follow Jesus. You did not walk into that mantle place, that fireplace and hear the urn singing.

It had to be God putting you back together again. It had to be God resurrecting you or you would not come. And why does he do it? Why does God do this? Because of his great love, which he has loved us verse four says.