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Oct 24, 2010

The Great Exchange

Passage: Ephesians 2:1-10

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Postcards from the Front: A Wartime Romance

Category: Ephesians

Keywords: grace, mercy, love, change-points, spiritual death

Summary:

Life is filled with change points. None is bigger than the change from being alienated from God and becoming a child of God. Going from spiritual death to eternal life is life's greatest change. This passage looks at how great that change is and how much the love, mercy and grace of God has blessed us and should shape us.

Detail:

 

The Great Exchange

#6 in the series “Postcards from the Front:  A Wartime Romance”

October 24, 2010—Ephesians 2:1-10

The longer you live, the greater the possibility that life will hand you some very dramatic, wondrously surprising, horribly devastating changes.  Think about the major change points of your life.  (If you’re younger, this may be more difficult.  But you still have probably had some significant “changes-points”.) 

  • Preschool-to-Kindergarten
  • Grade school to junior high
  • Freshman to Senior
  • Poor student to good student
  • Orphan to adopted
  • Resident of one city/country to resident of another
  • Single to married…or married to single
  • College to your career
  • Employed to unemployed
  • Healthy to sick
  • Poverty to wealth…or wealth to financially struggling
  • Full house to empty home
  • Happy days to deep sorrow

ACTION:  Write out 3 descriptive phrases of what you were like before the change happened…and 3 descriptive words/phrases for what was different after the change-point.

CONNECT:  Share briefly your chosen “change-point” and 1-2 of your descriptions of before-and-after. 

 Last week we finished Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1 for a whole city-church of believers.  If you were with us, you remember that he was praying for 3 particular things:

  • Spiritual vision to see the hope to which God has called us.
  • Spiritual vision to see the inheritance God has left us in the saints/church.
  • Spiritual vision to understand the power we have as believers by nature of being “in Christ”. 

Today, in chapter 2, coming off of that grand description of Christ’s power, Paul is moved by the Holy Spirit to draw our attention to the massive change-point every believer in Christ has gone through.  He’s going to talk about our life and nature before we met Christ and he is going to talk about what our life can be after that most-important change-point in the world—finding life in Christ. 

Before we open this text, I would like you to take a little self-assessment on what you believe about human nature.  As with any area of life, there are thousands of ideas out there (and in our own heads too) about the fundamental nature of mankind.  This one is multiple choice:

      Which of the following statements best describes what YOU believe about human nature?

  1. Human nature is basically good.  Given the right environment and opportunities, people will usually do what is good, moral and right.
  2. Human nature is a mixture of good and evil. Sometimes people will do what is good, moral and right while other times they may to what is evil, wrong and immoral.  Whether one chooses good or evil is the decision of the individual. 
  3. Human nature is basically bad.  Unrestrained, people will usually do what is selfish, immoral or wrong.  People must be taught and/or convinced to do what is loving and good by external authorities (parents, teachers, laws, police, etc.)

Now, answer those same questions for what you think the majority of your friends at school or work or in the neighborhood think. 

O.K.  Keep your answers to yourself for now.  (I don’t want any fights breaking out over how good we are. J)  Let’s read God’s take on the first chapter of every human being’s autobiography. 

Ephesians 2:1-3

1As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.

Paul isn’t playing favorites here.  He’s describing the condition of every human being apart from a transforming work of Jesus Christ.  From the spiritual standpoint, this is the first chapter of the autobiography of every single one of us.  It’s not a very pretty picture either.  Notice the descriptive terms:

  • Dead
  • Following the ways of this world
  • Following the ruler of the kingdom of the air
  • Disobedient
  • Gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature
  • Following our sinful nature’s desires and thoughts
  • Objects of wrath

That’s kind of ugly, right?  Not exactly the future you want for your grandkids! 

God’s first description of us is as “dead in your transgressions and sins.”  Paul didn’t say we were “dead in your body” or “dead in the head.”  He’s talking about our spirit, our spiritual condition, that part of our human being that relates to God and the spiritual realities of life, be they demons or angels. 

      I’ve never found death pretty.  I don’t care if you are 95 years old, when you die, you don’t get more handsome.  I’ve always found both the process of death and the product of death to be ugly.  If you’ve been around someone dying of old age or some disease, you have probably had to endure that horrible “death rattle” of their labored, tortured breathing…until they breath their last and die.  Their skin color and facial expressions are not usually something very attractive.  And after they take their last breath, their body grows gray, tallow and cold.  There are no more warm embraces, no more loving kisses that come from a corpse.

What can dead bodies do?  All they do is decompose.  All they do is begin to smell.  All they do is lie there or sit there, immobile, incapable of doing anything. 

ILL:  Jeremy Bentham, the father of the philosophy of utilitarianism, died 178 years ago in 1832.  But you can still see the old man in the Anatomical Museum of University College Hospital, Gower Street, London.  When he died, he gave orders that his entire estate be given to the Hospital for use in discection on the condition that his skeleton, hands and head be preserved and placed in attendance at all the hospital’s board meetings.  This was duly carried out, as you can see from this photo.  His own head actually sits at his feet, being replaced on his skeleton with a wax likeness, but those are his clothes covering the skeleton. 

      For years, Bentham’s dead corpse was wheeled up to the Hospital board table and the chairman would say, “Jeremy Bentham, present but not voting.”  No kidding!


      By telling us that we were “dead in our transgressions and sins,” Paul is trying to help us grasp in graphic measure what our spiritual condition was before Jesus encountered us. Spiritually speaking, before anyone encounters the resurrected Jesus, they are in a spiritually dead state.  

      What can dead spirits do?  Smell bad…look bad…rot!  In terms of spiritual life, can dead spirits give life to themselves?  Can they do enough “spiritual CPR” on themselves to cause meaningful spiritual life?  Can they grab the paddles of some spiritual defribulator and shock themselves into spiritual life?  NO!  They are dead!  Dead people don’t have the capacity to bring themselves to life.  Spiritually speaking, we all enter this world a still-born.  And still-born babies cannot resuscitate themselves     

But our condition is really worse than that.  In terms of people, what is worse than a corpse, a dead body?   The only thing I can think of that is worse than a dead body is an animated dead body…a walking dead person…a zombie, right? 

      Zombies, thank God, don’t exist.  But that hasn’t kept authors and screen writers from trying to scare the beegeebies out of us with zombie books and movies.  There is something horrible about a putrefying, bloody, brain-sucking dead body moving around as if it were alive…especially when it can’t be killed “again”. 

But that is also how God describes this spiritually dead state we are in before encountering Christ.  We’re not just “dead in our transgressions and sins.” Before encountering Christ, we “used to live” in those transgressions and sins.  We are…or were, apart from Christ…the “walking dead” of the spiritual world.  Our own spirits were “rotting” and “putrid.”  We all were “spiritual zombies,” unable to bring ourselves back to life…and unable to change the spiritually decaying nature of our life. 

Does this mess with your understanding of human nature?  Does this mean that no human being apart from Christ can do anything morally right or good?  No.  Billions of people every day make good, moral choices that bring blessing and benefit to others.  But those same people also make many choices that are selfish, hurtful and even harmful for others and themselves.  They may think they are doing the most loving and selfless thing for someone else.  But they don’t have spiritual life in the only source of true life, Jesus Christ.

The great Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards, put it this way.  He said that the problem is not with the will or volition of a person, since the will is simply the mind of someone choosing what the mind deems best.  The problem is with the person’s moral nature, their spiritual condition, which is opposed to God.  The problem is with our sinful “motives” that flow from our corrupt nature.  Edwards believed that our will is always free; in other words, we always choose what we judge to be best in a given situation. But the problem is that we, apart from a work of God in us, almost always judge wrongly. 

      We think, for instance, that God’s way is undesirable…or that God himself is something he is not.  We think that idolatry of self or some other competing person or “god” in our life is where we will find life.  We think that money or fame or sex or pleasure or lack of suffering is where we will find life.  So we seek after those things we think will bring us that kind of life.  In doing so, we judge wrongly what is best…and end up choosing wrongly what is inferior to God. 

It is passages like this from which we get the Calvinistic theology of “total depravity.”  Total depravity doesn’t mean everyone is as bad as they can possibly be.  There is always room for “de-provement.” Nor does it mean that people don’t do some morally good and right things. 

      What it does mean is that every part of our human person is tainted by sin.  Before our Creator, we are spiritually dead to such a degree that we cannot produce spiritual life that commends us in any way to God.  We cannot clean up our spiritually dead corpse so that God says, “Wow.  You’re beautiful.  I’m drawn to you.  You’ve done a wonderful job of making yourself spiritually alive, resurrected, vibrant.” 

      That’s why the Scriptures state that all our best efforts to be spiritually acceptable to God are nothing but “filthy rags.” 

  • Is. 64:6—“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”
  • Philippians 3:8—Having listed all his impressive religious accomplishments before becoming a Christ-follower, Paul says this.  “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  8)What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9) and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”   

Paul goes on to tell us that this spiritually zombie state we were all born into operates in 3 distinctive and equally enslaving realms in our lives:

  1. Through “the world”—Vs. 2 says we were dead in our sins “In which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world.”
  2. 2.      Through “the devil”— Paul goes right on and says we were dead in sin because we followed “the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” 
  3. Through “the flesh/sinful nature”—In vs. 3 he says, “All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.” 

We don’t really have time to talk about each of these three areas of spiritual slavery.  But we’re all very familiar with them.  If you are a follower of Jesus, you battle them every single day of your life. 

1.)    “The world” is what we battle in our present cultural and social value system that is hostile to God.  Just watch TV or tell me what our culture values today and 9 times out of 10 it will be opposite of what God values or calls “right” or “good.”

2.)    “The ruler of the kingdom of the air” (or the demonic realm) incites and deceives us into disobedience to God’s law.  His tools are the same every century—lying, twisting the truth, getting us to doubt God’s word and follow lies about ourselves and life. 

3.)    “The flesh/sinful nature” is that part of our fallen nature that tries to pull us away from God. 

Trying to figure out whether it’s the world, the flesh or the devil that’s leading us into sin may not be terribly helpful.  Take, for example, the little girl who was disciplined by her mother for kicking her brother in the shins and then pulling his hair.  “Tasha,” her mother said, “why did you let the Devil make you kick your little brother and pull his hair?”  To which she answered, “The Devil made me kick him, but pulling his hair was my idea!” J

      The net effect is all the same—our sinful and spiritually dead condition made us ALL, as vs. 3b says, “by nature objects of wrath.”

ILL:  This past week, our city was treated to a visit by the Westboro Baptist Church picketers of Topeka, Kansas.  (By the way, my wife reminded me that 3 of their 5 target sites—Ferris, Whitworth and Moody NW—our family either attends or teaches at!)  These misguided folks have it right when they understand that God does and will judge wickedness.  But they’re totally wrong when they maintain that God “hates” soldiers and homosexuals and any number of other “sinners” in our culture.  I challenge you to find God “hating” anyone.  He hates the evil deeds of people, but not the person. 

      And he is a God who exercises his wrath towards people who refuse to turn from their sin.  The Apostle John wrote in John 3:36, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him."

      Don’t confuse God’s wrath with human anger.  It isn’t selfish or capricious.  God doesn’t fly off the handle and whack people in a celestial rage.  God’s anger is measured, slow to come and flows out of his justice. 

      What kind of a god would he be if the injustices and atrocities of human beings did not move him?  Our modern culture (which is so often angry itself) supposedly has no room for a “God of wrath.”  Really?  A god who doesn’t get angry bothers me even more.  What kind of a god doesn’t rise to ultimately judge rape or murder or torture or slavery?  Even our corrupted sense of justice feels anger when someone (particularly someone we love) suffers evil at the hands of others.  How much more our God of uncorrupted pure, righteous and holy justice? 

Which brings us to my favorite part of this passage—vs. 4—“…But…God….”  I’m SO glad for those 2 little words “but God.”  Rather than simply leaving us in the despicable and damnable place of being the targets of God’s holy wrath against sin, God did something else.  He didn’t just direct his perfect justice against our sin at Jesus on the cross.  He didn’t just pour out his white-hot holiness on Christ who took the sin of the world on himself on the cross.  That Jesus would substitute his sinless soul and body for the sins of the whole world is miracle enough. 

It didn’t stop there.  Paul begins to tick off the heights to which God has brought us from the depths of being dead sinners. 

4But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions….

If you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you’ve already experienced one resurrection—the resurrection of your dead spirit to life. 

When did it happen?  He did it even before you responded to his grace.  He “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions….”  Guess that pretty well rules out any sort of involvement on my part that somehow might have made my salvation something I had a hand in (other than simply receiving it as a gift).  So first God “made us alive.”

      Vs. 6 gives the next great miracle God did for us in Christ.  “And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus….”  Have you ever been seated next to someone important at some public function?  Neither have I. J 

ILL:  The closest I’ve gotten to something like that was to be invited to eat with Dr. Joseph Stowell, then President of Moody Bible Institute, in his private dining room at the college in Chicago one day.  If I remember correctly, I made a total fool of myself and later felt compelled to go apologize for something I had said.  L  So much for being seated next to important people. 

So what is God trying to communicate to us with this statement that God has “seated us with [Christ] in the heavenly realms.” 

  • What does it say to you if you receive an invitation to dine with the President of the United States? 
  • What does it say if you are asked to be there when he signs some important legislation?
  • Paul is telling us that God has already invited us to the nearest seat in His house by virtue of being “in Christ.”  The past tense verb here indicates that we have already been made to sit with God in Christ.  That’s our position right now as far as God is concerned.  This is no temporary seat of power, no mere Buckingham Palace or White House.  This is the most important place in the universe!  God’s throne! 
  • This amazing, unbelievable truth speaks of the authority we have by being united with Christ.  His throne is one of authority.  And we are extensions of Christ’s presence and authority in this world. 
  • But it speaks of something else, I think.  Remember the story in John’s Gospel, chapter 13, where the disciples are with Jesus for the Last Supper?  John is reclining at the table right next to Jesus.  In fact, at one point, John leans back against Jesus and asks him who it is who will betray.  Being seated with Christ is obviously a place of intimacy where God opens his heart to his children. 

WHY has God done all this for us?  Why has he done such amazing things for people so undeserving as us?

      To answer that question, Paul points to several things about the nature of God himself. 

  • In vs. 4, he points us to “his great love for us” (not “little love”.)
  • Then he proceeds to tell us it is because we serve a God who is “rich in mercy” (not “poor” or “miserly”).
  • To those two traits of God (that should consume weeks of sermons), Paul then adds one further quality that really becomes the focus of this amazing outpouring of God upon us. 

Vs. 5b—“…--it is by grace you have been saved.”  Jump to vss. 8 & 9 for the continuation of these grace-statements. 

—“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast.”

When is the last time you experienced grace?  For that matter, do we really even know what grace is?  [Ask for definitions of grace.]

My definition of grace = The best blessings of God poured out on those who deserve God’s worst judgment. 

  • Whatever grace is, it is totally undeserved.  Trace the roots of the Greek word for “grace” (charis) and you will find a verb that means “to rejoice” or “to be glad.”  Grace-filled people and churches will be some of the happiest people and places in the world.
  • Grace means that we are people of favor in the presence of the most amazing Being ever.
  • Grace means that God has determined to bless us despite our weaknesses, messes and inadequacies.
  • Grace means God has chosen us for the most important and exalted purposes in the universe. 
  • Grace means God has paid our debt when we could not even understand how deeply in debt we were.
  • Grace means he has given us a gift beyond value—life with Him—and that any attempt on our part to “purchase” or “earn” that gift is truly an insult. ILL:  Imagine being invited to dine with Bill Gates at a dinner at which the most important business and political leaders of the world have been invited. It’s held at the finest hotel in Seattle in a massive and ornate ballroom. Not only is the dinner on Bill; he has even ordered a suit/dress just for you, complete with shoes, socks, jewelry, the works.  Would it even cross your mind to, as you are shaking his hand as you leave that night, thanking him for an amazing evening of generous hospitality, to press a nickel into his hand saying, “I’d like to help you with the cost of tonight’s dinner”???  That would be an insult, would it not?  At best, you would be considered crazy.  What you and I can contribute to a dinner like that is truly nothing.  To even try is to insult the generosity of the host. 
  • Grace means we are ALL on level ground before the cross of Christ.  ILL:  Yancey’s story of Chicago mother drug addict prostituting her daughter.

ILL:  Philip Yancey in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace, relates a modern-day story similar to one of my favorite stories in the Gospels about grace.  The Gospels record the parable of the great banquet where guests were invited well in advance by the king to a wedding feast.  But when the time came for the celebration, they all made excuses as to why they could not come.  So the king sent his servants into the highways and byways, into the alleys and dead-ends of the city, to invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame and the country-bumpkins. Here’s the modern-day account that occurred in the Boston Globe in June 1990. 

      “Accompanied by her fiancé, a woman went to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Boston to order the dinner for their wedding reception.  The bride and groom pored over the menu, made selections of china and silver, and pointed to pictures of the flower arrangements they liked.  They both had expensive tastes, and the bill came to over $13,000.  After leaving a check for half that amount as a down payment, the couple went home to flip through books of wedding announcements. 

      The day the announcements were supposed to ht the mailbox, the potential groom got cold feet.  “I’m just not sure,” he said.  “It’s a big commitment.  Let’s think about this a little longer.” 

      When his angry fiancée returned to the Hyatt to cancel the banquet, the Events Manager could not have been more understanding.  “The same thing happened to me, Honey,” she said, and told the story of her own broken engagement.  But about the refund, she had bad news.  “The contract is binding.  You’re only entitled to thirteen hundred dollars back.  You have two options:  to forfeit the rest of the down payment, or go ahead with the banquet.  I’m sorry.  Really, I am.”

      It seemed crazy, but the more the jilted bride thought about it, the more she liked the idea of going ahead with the party—not a wedding banquet, mind you, but a big blowout.  Ten years before, this same woman had been living in a homeless shelter.  She had got back on her feet, found a good job, and set aside a sizable nest egg.  Now she had the wild notion of using her savings to treat the down-and-outs of Boston to a night on the town.

      And so it was that in June of 1990 the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Boston hosted a party such as it had never seen before.  The hostess changed the menu to boneless chicken—“in honor of the groom,” she said—and sent invitations to rescue missions and homeless shelters.  That warm summer night, people who were used to peeling half-gnawed pizza off the cardboard dined instead on chicken cordon bleu.  Hyatt waiters in tuxedos served hors d’oeuvres to senior citizens propped up by crutches and aluminum walkers.  Bag ladies, vagrants, and addicts took one night off from the hard life on the sidewalks outside and instead sipped champagne, ate chocolate wedding cake, and danced to big-band melodies late into the night.

Don’t you love grace…undeserved, joyous, satisfying, free!???

CONNECT:  Choose one of the following questions to share about in your small group today:

  • In what area or issue of your life do you feel like you need to understand, feel and embrace the grace of God more? 
  • Have you had an experience where you needed grace from God's people and felt like you got something else instead? 
  • Who in your life has God spoken to you about that needs to experience more grace from you?
  • Instead of the misguided signs displayed this week by the Westboro Baptist Church people around town, what message about God's grace would you put on a sign for people to read?

COMMUNION:  In a moment we will all have an opportunity to receive a symbol of God’s grace.  We’ve all been invited.  He paid the horrible cost so that we might enjoy this amazing eternal connection with God. 

      By taking these elements, you are agreeing with God about your sin, about your absolute unworthiness, about your deadness apart from Christ, and about God’s gift of grace that can simply be received, not earned. 

We’re all here today because our God is rich in mercy.  We’re here because of His great love for us.  Where here by grace, not works, so none of us can boast. 

      And some day, in “the ages to come,” at that great wedding banquet in heaven, God will point to us and say to all the hosts of heaven, “there is the preeminent example of my “incomparable riches of my grace expressed in my kindness…in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7).