But God...
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· 1 viewSalvation by grace through faith
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Happy Easter everyone! The Lord has risen and He has risen indeed! Our text for this Resurrection Sunday comes from Ephesians 2, which outlines the core beliefs of our saving faith in Jesus Christ. These are some of the most important verses found in the Scriptures and they are the Word of the Lord for us today:
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 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.
Body
Body
We know that the word gospel can be literally translated as “good news”. But for us to fully understand the good news of Jesus Chrfist, we also have to understand and accept the bad news prior to His death and resurrection. Just as you can’t fully appeciate a clean bill of health unless you’ve been faced with a serious sickness, you cannot truly receive the gospel unless you know the bad news that it reverses. I don’t know if you are a good news first kind of person or if you just like to get the bad news over with as quickly as possible. I assume most of us like to hear just the good news if possible but as it pertains to the gospel, recognizing the bad news first is critical for true faith in Christ. This is why, when we look at this passage from Ephesians, the apostle Paul gives us two simple points. He begins with bad news that is far worse than you and I can really comprehend, that mankind and the world we live in is bound for utter destruction but God, from the riches of His grace, saves us from that fate and gives us good news that we could ever imagine or dare dream of.
The bad news
The good news
It’s hard to believe that more than a year has passed in our lives since the start of the pandemic. It’s alarming that the world can change so drastically even though the bulk of humanity has spent the last 365 days, indoors and largely isolated from one another. This is a clear reminder that none of us have very much control over our destiny and that our future is not really in our hands. We’ve seen just how quickly the world can slide into chaos, how people can so easily turn on one another, and we saw some of the darkest sides of humanity. But what’s even more frightening is the fact that this isn’t even the worst of humanity. If you just look at the history of the world in the 20th century, it’s filled with World Wars, genocide, mass famines, the destruction of the environment, to name just a few of our problems. The bad news is that we are on a sinking ship and there is no way to fix it.
Maybe you have a more optimistic view of humanity, in the goodness of man, that somehow we can fix the world’s problems together but personally I find it far easier to believe in the prophecies of Christ and the clear record of history that validates everything that He has taught.
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.
What Jesus and Christians throughout history have believed is that the world and all humanity is under the judgement of God. I know that it’s seems so outdated in the 21st century to talk about God’s wrath because all we envision when we hear that word is the caricatures of hell with the devil, a pitchfork inside, a cauldron of fire. But the idea of God’s wrath is far more nuanced than our elementary views of such things. Grown up ideas require mature minds to understand and in the book of Romans, the apostle Paul expands our view of this important theological subject:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
One aspect of God’s wrath, which we might not even consider to be a judgment, is when He simply hands humanity over to the lusts, corruption, and evil that is natrally within our hearts. All mankind is born spiritually dead and because of that fact, we are more than capable of creating hell on our own without the help of God. And if you have moniker of awareness and have seen the condition of the world, you will know that this is the truth. (As Paul writes, that truth is self-evident unless you decide to ignore or supress the truth.) I remember going to the urban ghettoes of Cincinatti one year. One of our sister churches is located in a neighborhood called OTR, which at the time had the highest murder rate in the nation. We spent many hours evangelizing with this track that opened with this question: If you were to die today, would you go to heaven or hell? (It’s so in your face, but the staff at OTR convinced us that this method works in the neighborhood).
So I took my track and approached this young black man and asked him this question and luckily it didn’t really phase him but his answer totally took me by surprise. Can you guess what he said: “This is hell, we are living in it.” In all my years of sharing the gospel, I’ve never heard that reponse before and I tried to think back to all the answers from my apologetics class and I knew that they weren’t relevant. What was I going to say, there is greater wrath to come? All I could manage to do was sit with this young man in his pain and to share with him that there is a God who has come to save us.
Perhaps this is why the poor, the destitute, and the broken are so much more open to the good news of Jesus Christ because they see the bad news and realize their need for a Savior. And the things is no one likes the idea that they need to be saved, to be rescued from this life. And even if we recognize it, we would much rather try to save ourselves than relying on the grace of God. But what the Scriptures teach us is that we have as much hope in saving ourselves as a dead man raising himself to life. The blind cannot lead the blind and the lost cannot rescue those who are lost but that is exactly the madness humanity seems to subscribe to. This is what theologian NT Wright says:
“The question we face today, inside the church but just as much as outside it in our wider Western culture, is whether despite all our blunderings we are still in fact listening for a voice from elsewhere, a guiding voice which will get us out of the mess and back to human and Christian flourishing, or whether we are in fact merely following one another round and round in a circle, convinced we’re doing the right thing but heading for futility and starvation.”
Following the course of this world, allowing the disjointed voices of a broken humanity to guide us is an exercise in futilty and will only take us deeper into the self-imposed judgment of God and it will lead us futher and further away from the only one who can save us. It’s like being on the Titantic and thinking we can save each other without outside help. Can anyone deny the fact that what we experienced as a humanity is exactly what we deserved? We inflicted pain upon pain on one another, anger and hatred came out of the darkest rececces of the human condition and all it took was one small virus.
But this is exactly when God interves, in the darkest of times, God shines His salvation most brightly. Later on in this great chapter, Paul will write that although we were without hope and without God but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. As much as we want to separate ourselves from God, to have nothing to do with Him, because of His great mercy and love, He chose to intervene in our lives by sending His Son to show us a better way, to reverse the curse of sin and to give us the good news of the kingdom.
What makes the good news so good?
1. Made alive together
2. Raised up together
3. Seated on high together
There are three words that Paul creates in the Greek, so to speak, to describe the impact of the gospel on your lives: alive together, raised together, seated together with Christ.
1. We were dead in sin but now we are alive together with Christ. If you’re conversion was a bit more gradual, this change from death to life may not seem as pronounced but the change that occurs in a person’s heart once they have placed their faith in Christ is as startling as Lazarus walking out of the grave after being dead for 3 days. That is the weight of change that happens in those whose faith is genuine. This doesn’t mean that your personality changes or you just become a better person, it means your disposition towards God is radically transformed. Once you were unconcious of His existence, unable to worship and serve Him, and unwilling to follow His path of righteousness. But now, the reality of his existence pierces your conscience, you know that you were created to worship and serve Him, and you sense Him leading you down the narrow path of life.
2. We were restricted to the terms of this earthly life, to live, to die, and to be forgotten but now we have been raised together with Christ. Here Paul is referring to more than just the resurrection. He’s acutally saying, “We have ascended to heaven with the risen Christ.” You’ll notice that grammatically, these are all in the past tense or what Greek grammar calls the aorist tense which refers to an action that has it’s beginnings in the past but continues in the present. At the point of you conversion, Christians are raised to heaven so that we can at this earth from that heavenly perspective. How else can you live this life with an eternal perspective, unless you know that you have been raised to heaven together with Christ.
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.
3. Finally, we are seated together with Christ. It’s like we are sitting on His lap so to speak. But where is Christ currently seated after He ascended to heaven? At the right hand of the Father.
If God would have accomplished just one of these three through the gospel, it would have been gracious enough. But because of the riches of his grace and his great love for us, He took us from destruction, to our resurrection, to our ascension, so that we might be seated next to our Father in heaven. The right hand of God is where we reign with Him, where his authority and power become ours. It’s a place of security and privilege and joy. It’s the seat of victory over the evil of this age. But greater than all these things, it’s the seat closest to our heavenly Father, a place of intimacy and love. An unthinkable place to be for those who were once so far away from God. Against the desperate condition of fallen mankind, we see the loving power of God, to raise the dead to life.
We were the objects of his wrath, but God out of the riches of his grace and his great love for us showed mercy. We were dead in our sin, unable to find the true path to life, but God made us alive in Christ. We were slaves to the corruption and decay of this world, powerless and without honor but God raised us up into the heavens itself and seated us at His right hand, close to His heart. Is there any better news than the Good News of Jesus Christ?
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Conclusion
Conclusion
After all that has happened in the past year, it would seem that putting our hope and trust in mankind requires an exponetially greater amount of faith than putting our hope and trust in the person of Jesus Christ.