FBC Morning Light – June 18, 2022

Good morning. Welcome to Saturday morning, and it is really good to be with you.

For those of you who may have been expecting Pastor Bice this morning, let me share this story with you.

I want to take you back to the summer of 1998, and those of you who were baseball fans will remember that there was a a lot of home runs that summer between two people in particular,

Sammy Sosa for the Chicago Cubs, and Mark McGuire from the St.

Louis Cardinals. And well, Mark McGuire had a backup first baseman who would play maybe once every week or two.

His name was John Mabry, and he was quoted as saying something to the effect of, if you went to a baseball game and he was starting in place of Mark McGuire, it was kind of like going to a

Metallica concert and a garage band showed up. And so here

I am, your garage band in place of Pastor Bice this morning, and maybe if the

Lord wills, once a week I will be able to meet with you on Saturday mornings.

And it would be an honor and a privilege, and hopefully, Lord willing,

I'll be more of a blessing than a garage band would be to you. This morning we are reading in Ephesians 2, and I have to admit that Ephesians 2 holds a very special place of meaning to me, as does the entire book of Ephesians.

A good friend of mine had a pastor once who said that Ephesians was the longest book in the

Bible, and what they meant by that, not that it was really the longest, but that there's so much theology packed into Ephesians, and we see so much about how the

Lord goes about the business of saving his people from their sins.

A good friend of mine asked me a question about five or six years ago that was a major turning point in my journey to to, let's call it, reformed theology, and is why a major part of why

I am a member of Faith Baptist Church now. He asked me the following question. He said,

Mike, is salvation like you're drowning in a lake, and God throws you a life preserver, and you have to grab onto the life preserver in order to be saved, or is salvation like you are dead at the bottom of the lake, and you have to reach down, or God has to reach down and give you life and bring you up from the dead, and as I thought about that question,

I realized at that time for most of my Christian life, I presented the gospel as like a life preserver, that God was maybe up there wringing his hands trying to save who he was going to save, and you had to grab on, people had to grab on to the life preserver that God provided.

Ephesians 2, the very beginning of Ephesians 2 has a very different take on that life preserver.

Let me read to you, and it says, and you he made alive, you who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once 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 disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

Okay, a couple of things that are important here to realize, it is God who is the one who is making alive.

It's not you, it's not me. God is the one who must be the one who acts all throughout scripture.

God is the one who is the primary actor throughout scripture. Then I want to point out also that all of these horrible things that we all once were, it was by our nature, by our nature.

That means this is what we would naturally do. No one in their natural state as a human, as a fallen human, would naturally choose

Christ. When you think about what it is to do something by nature, think of a rabbit being placed in a room with a plate of carrots or a plate of steaks.

I mean like sirloins or t -bones or steaks like that.

Well, the rabbit's going to eat the carrots. It's going to leave the steak completely alone because that's its nature.

You think of the nature of an eagle. You wouldn't expect to go scuba diving and see an eagle swimming around in an ocean because that's not what it does.

It flies. It catches fish on the top of the ocean, but it wouldn't go swimming for them.

That's not what eagles do. It's not their nature. Your nature, your fallen nature, my fallen nature, does not choose the gospel on its own, but that gospel is that power of God, and the

Lord does use that gospel to change our lives by changing our nature.

That's the essence of regeneration, to be made alive when we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

Well, I hope this morning this word has been encouraging to you as it has been encouraging to me.

I want to thank the Lord for that friend who asked that faithful question five, six years ago, and it's good to be with you all this morning.

I hope that you have a blessed Saturday, and we look forward to meeting together,

Lord willing, on the Lord's Day tomorrow. May you have a great day. Amen.