2021-06-27 Testimony of a new Creation

much better it is to be looking at all of your faces instead of just at that camera at the back there it's it's not the best in terms of response when you're out the front here well we continue this morning working our way through the apostle paul's letter to the in ephesus today and we've just hit chapter two uh for those who are joining with us perhaps and haven't been through chapter one we've made it to chapter two so if you'd like to turn to ephesians chapter 2 we're going to start from the first verse there and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you 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 guns 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 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 towards us in christ jesus for by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not your own doing it is the gift of god not a result of works so that no one may boast for we are his workmanship created in christ for good works which god prepared in advance for us to do now most of us tend towards an inflated view of ourselves and an under inflated view of god and paul has already dealt with this under-inflated view of god in chapter one in his description of god in his prayer at the end of chapter one god's power is described as incomparably great he is far above all rule and authority power and dominion and he's above every title that can be given this is how he's described in chapter one in that prayer that pastor glenn let us through last week and now in chapter two he turns his attention to us and our bubble is about to be burst you know statistics suggest that most of us generally think that we're pretty good and that by being good that will earn us a place in heaven and sadly this is a view that is even prevalent among many many christians in a survey conducted by the barna group in the u.s [Music] 46 of christians were expecting eternal salvation because of confession of sin and acceptance of christ as their savior yet a greater amount 52 of christians were holding to a works orientated means of god's acceptance and we think that well maybe we don't fit into that category but all of us find it very hard not to compare ourselves to others and to make a mental tally we look around we see what one person does and what another person does and what we do and although we would say we don't do it most of us do look upon some people more highly than we do others i haven't murdered anyone so that puts me a little bit higher up the tally i tell the truth supports charities you know i might even occasionally take a meal to one of my elderly neighbors most of us come out of our own mental stock take pretty high we think that we're not so bad well having set the bar up here in chapter one for the risen christ paul is about to make a very shocking assessment of our condition without christ christ is up here and then chapter two opens up with and you or in the niv as for you christ is up here as for you you're dead without him and that's the balloon popping that's our over-inflated image of ourselves bursting you're dead without christ there is no good works that you could do that would earn you anything without christ you are dead and we're all familiar with death we know what it means to be dead to be dead is to be completely without life a dead person is powerless they're incapable but before we run off drawing lots of analogies from corpses we need to be certain that this is actually the bible uses this word dead so we're going to look just at a few examples briefly so beginning at the top right of your screen there romans 10 9 says but god raised him from the dead he's talking about christ god raised him from the dead so here the word is teamed up with the the dead becomes a collective noun it's a group of people who share the same fate they're all corpses next picture down matthew 9 24 jesus says the little girl isn't dead she's just asleep clearly there's a corpse in mind here as well there's a body that you can point to that body is not dead just asleep next one down luke 7 12 jesus is in a town called name and as he's approaching the gates of the town he's met by a funeral procession there's a dead person being carried out again there's a body in view there the bible tell the bible uses the word dead it says as he approached the town gate a dead person was being carried out and then finally in john 11 39 jesus arrives arrives in bethany after the death of lazarus and he says take away the stone but martha replies but lord said martha the sister of the dead man by this time there'll be a bad odor for he's been there for four days so here we've got four different examples of where the word dead is used in the bible and all of them have one thing in common in each case there's a body that you can point to so in that case dead means as we understand it dead but there are many many examples in the bible where the word dead is used and there is no body that you can point to so what does it mean there well the pictures on your left there come from luke 15 a very well known story of the prodigal son a man has two sons one of them requests his inheritance early and he leaves town and go leaves the farm and goes off for what the bible describes as high living and here's a great time and he blows the money and eventually the money runs out and he finds himself tending pigs eventually he comes to his senses he returns home and he's welcomed by the father who has been longing for the son to return and he's so happy to see him that he throws a party in the son's honor making brother number two very angry brother number two is the brother who stayed home the brother who didn't ask for his inheritance the brother has continued to work on the farm he's angry his father welcoming the first son home and the father takes him aside and he explains to him this brother of yours was dead and now he's alive again well in that case there was no corpse the brother was very much alive and living the whole time he was alive and living while he was partying and spending all the father's money he was alive and living while he was tending the pigs but while he was in that far country he was as good as dead to the family because he was separated or cut off from them if we look at romans 6 11 and and this particular verse or this concept can be found in a number of places i think galatians and and first or second peter as well the apostle paul describes our condition as dead to sin and by that he doesn't mean that we're like a corpse incapable of sinning because we all know that we we go on sinning but he means that we are now separated from sin or separated from the effects of sin on our eternal future we're no longer bound by sin and then in james 2 26 the term dead is used to describe the kind of faith that is separated from works it doesn't mean there was no faith but it's a kind of useless kind of faith as james describes it it is a faith that is separated from work so a quick summary look at these examples teaches us that when there's a corpse at hand clearly dead means dead as we understand it but when there's not we have to be very careful about how we interpret this word and perhaps the notion of a separateness is a more accurate understanding of this word the brother was separated from the family so he wasn't functioning as a brother should we christians are separated from sin because it no longer has the hold over us that it should and faith separated from works is no longer functioning as faith should so after a very long-winded explanation returning to our passage the primary meaning of being dead in your transgressions and sins would appear to be being separated from god not functioning as one should in relationship with him and the worst part of this state of deadness is that for the most part when we're in that state we're completely unaware of it prodigal son gave no thought to what great humiliation he'd caused the father in asking for that inheritance he gave no thought to the burden of sin that he was carrying while he was spending all that money and having a great time and he gave no thought to the the father or the son or the other brother who were left at home and and the burden that he was causing them it took humiliation and starvation to burst his bubble and to bring him down from that over over-inflated view of himself and to understand his true position and when he does this is what he says father i have sinned against heaven and you i am no longer worthy to be called your son when brought to his knees that was his own self-assessment and it was accurate but it took a personal crisis to get him there you know there was once an indian evangelist and he would preach the gospel enthusiastically and on one of these occasions he was preaching enthusiastically to a loud large crowd and on this particular day he was laboring the point about the burden of sin and a young man in the crowd perhaps in his late teens early twenties he was having none of it and so he started shouting out and interrupting the preacher as he was giving his message he says you talk about this burden of sin i tell you i feel none of it he said and then to add further insult and to further ridicule the preacher he said how heavy is this burden that you're speaking about is it maybe 80 pounds or maybe it's only 10 pounds tell me how heavy is this burden he replied and the preacher replied simply tell me if you laid 400 pounds on a corpse would it feel the load no of course not said the youth because it's dead and the preacher replied that spirit too is dead which feels no load of sin and that's the thing about our true state before god for the most part we feel nothing of it we're like that prodigal son out for a good time blissfully unaware of this great burden of sin bearing down on us and keeping us apart from god now according to a 2017 study again conducted in the u.s only 28 percent of americans recognize that they are sinners and that jesus is the only way to overcome sin the rest of them either don't believe that there is such a thing as sin they don't believe that they themselves are sinners they're quite okay with being sinners or they believe that sin is something that they can work at themselves and deal with without jesus what all of these responses have in common is that they fail to feel that great burden of sin bearing down upon them because they're blissfully unaware of the spiritual danger that they are in these people see their sin as a way of perhaps admitting that they're not perfect which they would probably see is not a bad character trait oh yeah i know i'm not perfect but i don't believe it makes them evil or worthy of any punishment all of us says paul we're once like this how were we once like this remember he's writing this letter here to christians in ephesus we were like this when we were held captive by sin and richard cocon provides a helpful analogy here when he paints verses two and three in terms of three evil prison guards who work together to keep us captive to sin and death and the first of these guards is the world and what this particular guard looks like depends on which part of the world you're living in but in the west paradoxically the world works to keep us captive by holding out the illusion of freedom i'm free to choose my own objects of worship i'm free to choose my own way of god and that can be any way i feel like doesn't have to involve jesus it's an anything goes sort of attitude that puts me at the center and puts me first and we remain captive to this world view until god reveals himself to us in christ the second of these evil captors is the devil whom paul describes as the ruler of the kingdom of the air now you might recall a couple of weeks ago we discussed this notion of the heavenly realms and how important that is in this letter to the ephesian church and the heavenly realms we learned was the spiritual dimension in which god and all the spiritual powers and all the believers exist together well in hebrew thinking the particular part of that dimension in which the devil lives they called the heir and they considered it to be a spiritual sphere between heaven and earth and the devil works in that dimension to keep us captive mainly by telling us lies he lie his lies make us doubt the very existence of god they make us doubt the truth of his word and they feed our over-inflated sense of self by telling us that what we're doing is not really sin murder is sin and rape is sin but the things that we do they're not sin that's what the devil tries to tell us i'm a good person all of us at one stage have been captive to these lies that the devil feeds us the third member of this trio is the flesh or our sinful nature in galatians chapter 5 he spells out what these desires of the flesh might be he lists them as sexual immorality impurity sensuality idolatry sorcery enmity strife jealousy fits of anger rivalries dissension divisions envy drunkenness orgies and things like that these three the world the devil and the flesh they work together and they are so effective at keeping us captive because not only are we unaware of the gravity of our problem and unable to break free from it we actually don't want to because we like it we like feeling that we're master of our own destiny we like indulging ourselves we like whatever attention we can get and we enjoy getting one up on someone else however that might come about and because of these three like everyone else all of us were at one time dead in our transgressions and sins and there are no degrees of dead you can't be more dead than someone else dead is dead you're either dead or you're not and paul says that we're all dead and therefore all deserving of the wrath of god there's a story told of two young friends and they're both about to start work in a new town and they're both in need of accommodation the young guys in their early 20s and to their great surprise the father of a mutual friend a very wealthy businessman is about to go overseas to work for two years and he needs someone to take care of his estate while he's away and this property is so enormous that each of these two friends could have a separate wing of the house and never really have to have much to do with each other and they can hardly believe it when the owner asks for only ten dollars a week for them to stay there and the day arrives for the owner to depart and he calls the two young friends together and he warns them that the place is big and that it'll need a lot of looking after be sure to keep in touch he says respond to my emails but have a great time enjoy the place and so the two friends move in and they take one wing each of the mansion one of them is a party animal night after night the place is full of people coming through and there's mud trapped through the carpet there's drinks spilled on the upholstery and and the carpet there's holes kicked in the walls from the occasional brawl that breaks out pretty soon the west wing is unrecognizable the friend in the east wing he lives a much quieter lifestyle and he keeps the east wing spotless and well maintained eventually two years passes by the west wing is unrecognizable the east wing is still in pretty good condition but to the shock of everyone in town after two years away the owner returns and throws both of them out of the house one of them treated the place like a tip and the other treated it well but the owner when he returned treated them both exactly the same and when asked about this by the townsfolk the owner replied neither of them had made any contact with him in the entire two years that they'd been there neither of them had responded to any of his emails and neither of them had bothered to pay the pittance that he'd asked them for their lodging there and the end result was that the house had been seriously damaged and the owner had been ignored so both of them became objects of his wrath all of us live as tenants in this world because of the extreme generosity of god and some of us make a very obvious mess of our lives others appear to be more clean living and well behaved but whether we're the clean living sort the kind that we would call good or the other kind that revels in our sin if we ignore god we will remain separate from him and we will be objects of his wrath and there is nothing that we can do of our own accord about this we would remain captives to our own sin if it were not for these two most beautiful words in all of the bible the next two words in this passage but god but god being rich in mercy because of the great love with which loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses made us alive together with christ by grace you have been saved but god is motivated not by our goodness or by anything that we could have possibly done but by his own he provided us a way to break free from sin to throw off these three evil captors by sending jesus to pay that ransom for us and die in our place and all we need do is accept his generous gift and unite ourselves with christ through faith and then a remarkable transformation will take place have you ever seen this little plant here it's called the rose of jericho does anyone know it no i didn't either until a couple of years ago when it came across on my desk you couldn't imagine any plant more unlike a rose than this particular rose it's called the rose of jericho but it's totally unrelated to anything we know of as a rose to me when i saw this little plant it was only about this big maybe that big it looked completely dead tied up ball of not much if you squashed it it just kind of was all brittle and would have fallen apart they're not very big these little things they're dry they're brittle when the desert winds blow they pick up and move like a tumbleweed and they blow to another location i could not imagine why anyone would want to buy one of these because it looked completely beyond hope even the greenest of green thumbs would surely not want to waste time with this lost cause of a plant that's what i thought until someone showed me what happens when you put one in water within a space of only a few hours a complete transformation takes place it only takes about two hours and it'll start to look like that and by the next day it'll be completely green and look something like this that for me is a picture of grace separated by god from god by sin we tumble around on this earth and for all intents and purposes we are spiritually dead but united with christ the source of our spiritual nourishment united by faith new life springs from the dead this little plant by the way is from a family of plants known as resurrection plants the little plant has nothing to do with its own transformation without the water it would continue to appear dead and after a number of years it can only survive like that for maybe four or five years at the most eventually its fate would be sealed without water it will eventually die just as our fate would be sealed without jesus jesus for us kicked a winning goal but the whole team gets to celebrate and share in the great prize through faith in christ we share in his death and in his resurrection so we have already been raised up with christ and are already seated with him in the heavenly realms we're right there with jesus our place is secured and if that wasn't good enough the best is yet to come for verse 7 speaks of our future resurrection and glorification now paul's point here is very clear he repeats it no less than five times verse five it is by grace you have been saved verse 8 the beginning of the verse for it is by grace that you have been saved the end of verse 8 this is not from yourselves verse 9. it is not by works verse 10 we are god's workmanship he couldn't be clearer if he tried it has nothing to do with us and everything to do with god in our fallen state we are unable even to recognize our own need for a savior it is god's spirit that convicts us of our own sin and it is christ our savior who does for us what we are unable to do for ourselves and all we need do is to accept his precious gift of salvation for this remarkable transformation to begin and as it does little by little just as that rose of jericho plant was transformed so we too are transformed little by little more into the image of christ and as god's as we are god's workmanship so our lives should bear the image of the one who created us we should bear his mark just like a piece of artwork bears the mark of its creator you can usually tell a picard you know who has painted of the famous painters you can tell their certain style that the paintings bear the mark of the one who created them and so we should expect to see the mark of god in our lives there should be acts of mercy and love and kindness good works that he has prepared ahead of time for us to do so this morning if you are a christian rejoice in just who you are in christ for once you were dead but now a miraculous transformation has happened by grace you are made alive in christ and if you have not yet accepted god's gracious gift of salvation then make today your day to do just that you are no better and no worse no more or less deserving than any other sinner but if you accept paul's description of yourself from verses 1 to 3 of today's passage and will accept god's gift of christ as your savior then everything in those later verses verses 4 to 10 is yours shall we pray father we deserve death and yet you have given life we deserve punishment but you hold out and have given forgiveness we deserve to have you turn your face from us and yet you came near sending jesus to this earth we deserved guilt and shame but you have given glory and honor we deserved hell you have given heaven this is amazing grace thank you father for your amazing grace it makes us want to shout out to anyone who will listen behold behold our god seated on his throne thank you father amen

Channel: Pathway Baptist Church

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Length: 33min 47sec (2027 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021