Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Oct. 18 sermon from Clifford Baptist Church, 635 Fletcher's Level Road in Amherst. Due to Pastor Jeffrey's absence, the message will be delivered by Brian Clabo with Scriptures from Ephesians.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: I do want to just tell you that I'm grateful for the chance to preach God's Word this morning, so I'll ask you to open up your copy of God's Word to the book of Ephesians. We're going to be in one of my favorite passages in the in chapter 2, looking at verses 1 through 10. Ephesians is written by the Apostle Paul to these believers in Ephesus, to the church.
He's writing to people that have already made the decision to place their faith in Jesus Christ.
And I love this passage because it so comprehensively describes the Gospel message and it reminds these believers of their position without God.
It reminds them where they find themselves with the Lord and how their lives should respond.
And it's a very clear teaching about the impact of our relationship with God on our lives.
There are a lot of other passages that offer similar truths, but this is just a nice condensed bundle here.
This morning I'll be reading from the esv. I encourage you to follow along and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
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 in kindness toward us, Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith.
This is not your own doing. It is a gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
One of the things that I like about this passage is the clarity that it gives the black and white.
What I mean by that is Paul doesn't leave any wiggle room for a gray area between these concepts of we can be dead in our Sins or we can be alive in Christ.
There is no in between.
There's no gray area. There's no wiggle room to say. But I can find a way to slip right between here and have both.
The first thing I want you to see this morning is without God, there is only death.
We remember what sin is at the root of it all. The word sin just. It means we rebel against God. It means we don't act the way God says we should. It means that our hearts are directed away from God.
We rebel, we sin. We act in ways that are not holy as God has called us to be holy sin is anything we do that rejects God or ignores God.
Anything that can be idolatry, that we would look and say, this thing is more important than God.
Anything that that is, that is sin.
This passage says that we are dead in our trespasses and sins.
Doesn't say we're sick, doesn't say we're struggling a little bit.
Doesn't say that we're making it, but maybe things aren't quite good.
Says that we are dead.
It's really important, I think, for us to stop for a moment in this section of this passage and make sure that we really grasp that.
Because there can be a tendency to think, well, I can make this on my own and we'll talk about that a little bit more.
Or a tendency to think that maybe things aren't quite right, but I'm good enough.
But we have to see here is that in our sin, in our rebellion before God, we are dead.
I'm going to phrase this at the risk of the ire of an 11 year old, that we are spiritually cooked. No, Cap, it's important to grasp this.
We look at the rest of verses 2 and 3 and see some of these words and phrases that we're following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the sons of disobedience, living in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Remember, Paul is writing to these believers and he's saying, you were like that and we'll talk about that more a little bit too.
You were like this, expecting this distinction. For believers, it's important for us to remember and see this spiritual death that ever since Eve took the bite of the fruit and ever since Adam followed her and sin entered the world, that's our condition. That's what we're stuck. We are sinful people stuck in that. You can't wake up one morning and say, you know what? I'm not going to sin today because I can be good enough.
We're broken. Sin has entered the world, and that's the condition. And the sin can only lead to one place, and that's death.
Dead. In our trespasses and sins, the wages of sin are death. That's what we deserve and that's what we expect in our life. Living in sin against a holy God.
A lot of ways that people try to pretend like that's not true or try to fight their way through it and say, and try to make things feel right again.
Plenty of counterfeits in the world.
Plenty of things the world will hold up and say, you know what? Maybe things aren't the way you want it to be, but this will fix it.
And I'm telling you, every single one of them is a lie. Except for Jesus.
Earning more money isn't going to get you there. Getting more power isn't going to get you there.
Pursuing a relationship isn't going to get you there.
Looking in the bottom of the bottle or in the thrill of adrenaline is not going to get you there.
Trying to find meaning in social interactions or your ability to influence others is not going to get you there.
And what's ultimately discovered when we try to pursue those is that those do not satisfy.
And the things that claim that they're going to fix things cause more problems and drag us further into the pit.
And so we realize these things have not brought the hope and joy we're looking for. And all that is there at the end is death.
I think it's important, like I said, that we sit here for a moment and be uncomfortable with that and be uncomfortable with the fact that we sit in this spiritual death without Christ.
And for believers, I think we need a little dose of humility to be reminded that we're nothing on our own.
We all have gifts and skills and abilities, but it's not us, it's the power of God in us.
And we've got to step back for a second. And it's good to be reminded that I'm not up here standing before you because I'm good.
In fact, purely the opposite for non believers. If you're here today and you've never decided to follow Jesus, then I think that it's important to sit with this uncomfortableness, because that's how you come to see the need for Jesus.
And that's how you come to say, okay, if I'm really that bad off, if things really are that bad, then what do I do?
And there's only one place to turn, and that's Jesus.
And all of us need to be reminded that we're not good enough on our own. We're not better off than anyone else.
Little dose of humility. That before the Lord, we're all just sinners in desperate need.
Reconciliation to God.
None of us have anything to offer God other than complete rebellion and disobedience.
The song we heard right before this was a great transition.
All I have to bring is a hallelujah.
All I can do before a holy God is turn my heart towards Jesus in faith and say, praise God, because I'm absolutely on my own, unable to do it.
Sometimes our sinful tendency can lead us to think we're the hero in the story.
And we read Scripture and we look and say, oh, I'm Paul, or I'm Saul, or I'm these people. And there might be cases we can learn from them, absolutely. But we have to remember that the hero of the story is Jesus.
And we need to remember and see. We are dead in our trespasses.
We'll talk later about spiritual gifts and purpose, but we remember that it's not us that's doing it. It's the power of God in us, and he gets the glory.
There's a passage in Isaiah that gives this picture. It says, we've all become like one who is unclean, and all of our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
Your version may say all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.
That means the best you can do, the best you can conjure up on your own is like a rag that is in your house that someone looks at and goes, oh my gosh, why is that still here? Throw that away like that type of a. The best we can offer before God is this thing that is not worth keeping around anymore because it's that bad off.
And so that's where we are stuck dead in our sin, our treason against King Jesus.
And unless God does something and intervenes, that's where we are.
Without God, there is only death.
And that is depressing. And that's hard to sit in that, especially as believers, sometimes to remind ourselves that.
But we have to be reminded to be reminded of our need and to see the magnitude of the glory and grace that God offers us.
And in verse four, we have this. But God.
And God steps in and notice that we didn't call God in, we didn't summon God, we didn't reach God's standard enough that he said, okay, well, I guess that's close enough. We'll call it good enough.
God acts and God steps in and intervenes.
Why?
Verse 4.
Being rich in mercy.
Because of the great love with which he loved us.
By grace you have been saved.
Mercy, love and grace. That's it.
You know what mercy and grace are and what the difference is?
Mercy is not getting something you deserve.
Grace is getting something you don't deserve.
So let me give you an example. Let's say I'm driving down 130 past sheets at about 55 miles an hour and Mr. State Trooper pulls me over to tell me the error of my ways.
Him not giving me the ticket that I so rightly deserve is mercy.
Him saying, oh, and by the way, here's $100 from the county because you're a great driver, is grace that I do not deserve.
God gives us both.
He gives us mercy by pulling us up out of the fire.
And he gives us grace by saying, okay, you still don't have to do it on your own.
Christ did it for you.
Why? Because he loves us.
Even when we were dead in our trespasses. Verse 5. He made us alive together with Christ.
I had a seminary professor who talked about it this way. He said, trying to imagine this. And he says, he imagines that all of humanity is running away from God as hard and as fast as they possibly can.
And God reaches out his arm and swoops us like that.
Jesus is the answer. And this is how God brought us out of our despair of death. This is the only way towards the life that satisfies, the only solution.
We have been raised up with him, verse 6, and seated with him in the heavenly places.
Now for a moment, remember, these are believers Paul's writing to.
In verse one, he said you were dead.
And here in verse six again, it's the past tense.
You have been seated.
But wait a minute. I'm still on earth.
I'm not in heaven.
I'm not dead. I'm still alive and kicking on earth. What we realized from this passage is that the spiritual permeates into the physical.
That we can be healthy physically on earth and still be absolutely dead spiritually.
But you can be physically sick while seated with Christ. Spiritually, we have to see and understand that everything we do on earth in the physical affects the spiritual. And these things are interconnected. That everything has spiritual connections and spiritual implications.
The way we make decisions, the way we give, the way we serve, the way we treat people.
All of those things are a reflection of our spiritual condition.
And we're either dead in our trespasses or we're seated with Christ. And you can't have it both ways. If we jump ahead briefly to verse eight, it says there, by grace you have been saved through faith.
This is the reminder that it's by God's grace, but it is through faith.
And there's still a choice.
And even though Jesus died for you, it doesn't mean that you're forced to to follow Him.
This is an individual decision that we have to make to decide whether or not I'm going to surrender my life to Jesus and live for him, or I'm going to continue on my own path.
Years and years ago, it was a lot simpler of a conversation because you would talk to someone and they will have already heard about Jesus. They already kind of understand the concepts. And you could have this conversation and explain and explain faith. And it's a short leap to go from yes, I will, sorry, to go from I don't believe to yes, I will follow Jesus.
But we live in a world that now people don't have that same familiarity. And there's a lot more of a disconnect. And it takes a lot more for people to come to that point.
And it takes conversations and it takes understanding and takes struggle sometimes, but each person has to work through that on their own.
But we know that in Christ's death and resurrection, he took our penalty for us.
And so through his death, our sin has been removed and we can claim his righteousness through his resurrection. We've overcome the grave and we see his ascension to heaven. And we look forward to that day when we stay with God forever in eternity.
And that's the spiritual life that we desperately need.
And in finding that spiritual life is how we end up finding the physical life in earth where we can live in joy and in peace.
We relate to those around us and the things around us and life circumstances. With this true life found in Christ, you can only come from God the Father, by the blood of Jesus the Son.
Without God, there's only death.
Only God can bring true life. And that's the message of the gospel. That's what people have to consider.
And that's the transition from that despair, from the first point of how just bad off we were to how much God has done for us, to raise us up with him.
And the point of decision that we bring people to, asking if they want to accept Christ, if that's something they want to do, if they want to be with Christ, to find their way out.
Verse 7, God shows us that he does this to show us the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us.
His concepts rephrased about mercy and grace.
These things we don't deserve. And God pours out on us lavishly.
But what about right now? What in the physical right now? Remember Paul wrote this letter to the church at Ephesus, and everything's been past tense. These people that have made this decision, they've looking forward to their eternity in heaven. They're living their life on earth.
How do you spend your life? What is your purpose?
And whether you realize it or not, whether you thought about it or not, God gets to define that.
Because when we turn from our ways, we're turning from the sinfulness that it talked about in those first few verses.
We have to turn to something.
And number three, I want you to see this morning, is that only God can define our purpose.
Verses 8 and 9 phrase it a little bit differently, adding a little bit of understanding to it. For by grace you have been saved through faith.
This is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.
And so we want to make sure we understand and we see this clarity here that Paul is saying, you've been saved by grace through. Through faith.
It's not because you managed to earn it. It's not because you were good enough to get it.
You have nothing to boast of. You have nothing to be prideful of.
You're not better than anyone else.
We literally have nothing to be proud of in our own abilities.
We find the salvation by grace, through faith, and we're changed.
And then verse 10.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
So when we accept Christ, we go from death to life, and we find that we have this changed life.
Maybe you can speak of radical changes, maybe it's a smaller change, but either way, somewhere in there is a change where you go from I'm going to live for myself to I'm going to live for the Lord.
It says here in verse 10 that Christ makes you a new creation, specifically referring to us as his workmanship.
There's other passages that phrase it a little bit differently. 2 Corinthians 5, 17.
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.
First Corinthians 6. You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
And it's important for us to distinguish these two different Ways that works are mentioned in this passage.
You have verse nine, that we are saved not as a result of works, but.
And verse 10, we were created in Christ Jesus for good works.
And what I want you to see, I'm going to say this twice.
The way we're reconciled to God, those works, or lack thereof, is different from how we live with God.
The way we're reconciled to God is different from how we live with God. Those that don't have faith in Jesus, we don't expect them to show the works you would expect to see in the life of a believer.
Something about that last night, actually, with someone, you work and you interact with people that are not believers, and they act ways that might make people in the room blush a little bit, but there's no expectation they're going to live that way, that a believer would live, because they haven't chosen to live that way.
And so we have to look at them and not say, you have to get your act straight. We have to look at them and say, do you know what Jesus did for you?
Let them decide who Jesus is first. Let them decide what their response is to Jesus and then say, okay, if you've chosen to accept Jesus, then this is what he says.
I was talking to someone in a coffee shop one time about this, and she was asking questions about matters of personal relationships.
And she said, I just don't know that I can choose to go to church because of what the church says about this topic and this topic.
Topics don't matter.
And what. I looked. I looked at her and said, listen, I think that.
I think you're starting backwards.
I think you need to start with asking yourself, who is Jesus, and is he who he says he was?
Because if Jesus is who he said he was and He's God and He saved us, and you choose to trust him, then it's just a matter of doing what he says.
But if you don't believe that and you're not going to choose that, then who cares what the church says?
You're not showing up to church to be told to act right. Because that's not the point. The point is we're dead in our trespasses and sins and we need Jesus. And we turn to Jesus and then we say, okay, what are these works that you've called me to do?
What are these things that you've said that I should do? What is the holiness you've said you expect of me?
Let me investigate in your word and find the ways that you've called me to be Holy and then be holy.
It's important to distinguish that those are not contradictory. And we have to understand that we are not brought to the Lord by our works, and we're not kept with the Lord by our works either.
And this is what I mean by that. To continue to keep this separation.
If you accept Christ and then start coming to church every Sunday and tithing faithfully and, and serving, and you start to let yourself think, I'm a good Christian, I must be okay, you need to remind yourself of verses one through three.
And we remember that those are things God calls us to do. God calls us to serve, God calls us to love, God calls us to give generously, but that's not how we're kept.
We're not kept secure in the hand of Jesus because we showed up this morning.
We're kept secure in the hand of Jesus because the blood is sufficient and we are saved by grace through faith.
And then out of response to that, we say, I want to go show up to church, or I want to go serve, or I want to give, or I want to support this missions or that.
We start with the faith and that leads us to the works.
And that's the distinction in this verses, how we are saved not as a result of works, but we are created in Christ for good works.
And so in that moment, we give up our right to define what that purpose is and what that looks like.
We can't just follow Christ on the path that we decide, you know, well, God, I'm going to be with you, but as long as I get to do this and get to do this, get to do that, it would be a mistake to look at this and boil this down to a moral code.
It would be a mistake to look at this and say, well, God's called me to just be nice.
Because God's expectations of us are broader and grander and better than that freedom and how we live in holiness with the Lord, how we serve him, we love God, we love our neighbor, we make disciples given us freedom in how we do that and to the world. Yes, a lot of it comes across and how we love comes across as being nice. But sometimes you have to speak truth to someone and say, I know that you think you're doing the right thing, but I want you to see here that if Jesus is who he said he was.
Verses one through three, you're in trouble and you're not as good as you think you are.
And that's uncomfortable.
It's offensive, really.
Someone to go and tell someone that thinks that they're doing just fine in life, that they're not.
The temptation here, as we live in a sinful world, we're still surrounded by brokenness and we are still imperfect, sinful people.
Just because you come to Christ doesn't mean that all of a sudden all your problems go away and you're perfect and, and life is grand.
And so there's a temptation here for the church in general, just worldwide, to say, how can I take the name of Jesus and just stamp it on this thing that I want to do anyway?
Or stamp the name of Jesus on something God has not prepared for you to do.
And a sure fire way to kind of know you're beginning to miss the mark is if those things that you're doing, those things that are most important, the things that you say, this is what my life is about and this is what's most important in my life.
If those things can exist without this passage being true, then you've mixed something up.
If the church can look and say we've got an event that we're going to do, or we've got a purpose, or we've got something that we're going to pursue, or something that we're going to spend immense amounts of time and energy with and we can deal with that, with this passage not being true, we've got a problem.
I'm just going to give you an example. I have sat in a meeting in another life with a group of believers who spent more time in a meeting talking about the color of the walls than any type of ministry. Evangelism, discipleship, anything, brothers and sisters, if that's where you are missing something, because that's not the point.
Let somebody throw some beige on the walls and move on.
It'll be okay.
So I want to try to summarize for you what those works are that God has prepared for us. The challenge of it is that all of us are different.
We all have different skills and abilities.
We all have different gifts.
And so it's not the same for all of us.
We all have different life circumstances.
You can follow God in these works that he's prepared for you. Whether you work in a union job or a white collar office job, or you work outside in construction, or you're in the military, or you're a pastor or whatever, it doesn't matter. You can be in any of those circumstances.
You can be any of those life situations with any family blend or whatever it is that you find yourself in. You can find these works that the Lord has prepared for you I'll try to summarize it as a great commandment. Life working to fulfill the Great Commission, the great Commandment in Matthew 22 to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.
And the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to follow Jesus.
Look, you got to do things like make money. I go to a job tomorrow morning where I'm going to be working on tasks that are not directly accomplishing these purposes.
But I'm in an environment with people who are struggling to understand what life looks like with verses one through three and trying to figure that out. And I have an opportunity to be prepared and available for conversations.
And if you've previously decided to follow Christ, then be encouraged today. Be reminded of how far Christ has brought you to walk out in the world out there where there's brokenness and it's easy to be discouraged by that. It's easy for life to not go the way we want it to go, man. Be encouraged and say, but Christ has saved me and I'm not dead in my sins and you know what? Like, I'll be alright.
Look and see the immeasurable riches of his grace.
Look and see the purposes God's prepared for you that you might walk in them. Let's pray together.
Father, thank you for this opportunity to study your word.
Thank you that we get to be reminded of your grace and your mercy.
Thank you that when things go off the rails in our lives, we can look around and say, you know what?
Christ is still on the throne and I have the most important thing that I need.
Would you remind us of these things and show us these things that we could walk in your purposes this week and show others the love and the grace and the mercy that everyone truly needs these things. We pray in the name of King Jesus. Amen.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Clifford Baptist Church invites you to join us for worship every Sunday morning at 11am for more information about our church, please call our church office at 434-946-0555.
