Transformed by grace

Ephesians 2: 1–10

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 08 Jul, 2007

JOHN NEWTON wrote the hymn, Amazing Grace, because he had experienced God’s grace in lifting him from a life of sin and darkness into a life of love and light.

If we don’t have a similar experience, we haven’t yet discovered what the gospel is about, because it is grace and faith from beginning to end.

Last week, we looked at the giving of the Law to the Israelites through Moses.

If there is anything that we associate with bondage, it is law. Yet, as we saw last Sunday, the law was given as an act of grace by God who had already called and appointed the Israelites before they ever knew about the law. In his sovereign grace, he picked them up and placed them in the centre of his love, and gave them laws so that it would go better for them in the land God would give to them.

Today I want to look at how grace itself, intervenes in our lives and fractures the link we too often see between law–keeping and acceptance by God.

Perhaps we can see it in the life of Moses.

You know the story. It’s in Genesis. The Israelites went into Egypt to flee from a drought, and had flourished there.

Eventually the Egyptians felt swamped by these Semites, who looked so different, and had peculiar practices. I’ve seen the same thing here in Marrickville. There’s always someone complaining about Asians or Lebanese or whomever. They are never happy.

I pass three Asian women most mornings on my way to work. Two are Chinese, one is a Filipina. They all wave or call out, “Have a good day!” or “Hello!” One of them, I think that “Hello!” is all the English she has. There’s an elderly grandfather: I think he’s Cambodian — he doesn’t speak English, either. All four are nice people, and I enjoy seeing them. But one of our neighbours, who was a nice chap himself, used to get really tense and angry when he saw them going up and down the road, and muttered that they should go back where they came from. He didn’t understand grace all that much.

The Egyptians were like that, at least the rulers were. They felt usurped by the newcomers.

So there was a pogrom against the Israelites. The midwives were ordered to murder all newborn boy babies at birth.

But you know how it went. The midwives made excuses, and the Israelite mothers did all they could to protect their babies.

One mother put her baby into a waterproof basket, and he was taken out by a princess and raised in the court,

What a picture! Moses deserved death under Egyptian law, just because he was a boy baby.

Despite the law, he was taken from the water and exalted to the palace. There was nothing he could do, nothing he had done, to deserve such favour. But favour was lavished on him because a princess saw him and chose him and took him to herself in love.

I want us to look at this exposition of grace today and understand how much God loves us, to reach out to us in love and lift us to himself through Jesus our Lord.

The passage in Ephesians has three major divisions:

• Dead in sin
• Alive in Christ
• Doing good.

And those three divisions must be seen in that sequence. If you don’t, you get a false gospel, a distorted gospel. It won’t work.

Dead in sin.
Just about all promoting or selling involves a three part sequence: Things were bad at the start, I did something effective and I gained rewards.

And that is exactly how the gospel message begins: things were bad at the start.

A lot of the old evangelistic methodology began so negatively that a new approach was really necessary, and some evangelists moved to saying how much God loves everyone, and what good plans he has for us. The idea was to atttact people with the delights of the Kingdom rather than fear of hell.

That is alright as long as you go on to talk about how sin has separated us from God, and the best evangelists do.

We can’t begin to grasp the concepts of the gospel without understanding our own plight.

Paul writes,

^{Eph 2:1} As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,

² in 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.

³ All 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 deserving of wrath.

It is a statement of the hopeless and lost condition of all humankind in our natural state. Apart from Jesus Christ, we are dead, we are trapped in transgressions and sins, we are squeezed into the world’s mould, we are in satan’s grip, in bondage to our sinful nature and deserving God’s judgmental anger.

That will do for a start.

To be dead, in a theological sense, means that we are unresponsive to God.

Do you think it is in our own hands whether or not we respond to him? Ultimately, any response we make is only possible when the Holy Spirit awakens a response within us.

Christians: never judge people for not responding. Instead, cry out to God, that his Spirit will continue to strive with them! Their salvation does not depend on their efforts, but on God’s gracious and saving action.

Until that time, we are trapped by our sins. We need to develop a self–awareness which comes through the gospel.

I was talking to a rather clever man some time back about the gospel. I tried to explain repentance and conversion, but he just could not get it. Something in him rejected the idea of repentance. He grasped the idea of making restitution for specific failings, but there was no sense that he was a sinner. And consequently he had no grasp of the idea of conversion. He could see that he might commit himself to a particular task or set of tasks to serve Jesus, but he could not admit to the idea of surrender to Jesus for whatever purpose he might have.

That’s the kind of thing we mean when we say that, apart from the awakening power of the Holy Spirit, we are dead in sin. He was absolutely resistant. I talked to him; Peter Dixon talked to him; I have no doubt that others did, too; but it was all nonsense to him.

Is it too terrifying to consider that we might be exposed, that we must nakedly follow a naked Christ, as John Chrysostomos put it? Our whole being screams out against confessing, “I am a sinner, and I need salvation!”

And, whilever we resist, whilever we refuse to turn, we are bound by transgressions, by sins, by the Prince of the kingdom of the air.

That is what the Bible means when it says that we are dead in sin.

If you think back to the story of Adam and Eve, it’s the same idea. God says to the couple not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because, when they do it, they will die.

It is not physical death, primarily, but spiritual death. Their responsiveness has gone. They know what good and evil are, only because they have experienced evil.

In Adam, all die.

Apart from Christ we are dead.

Alive in Christ
Unlike the salesman or the promoter, we don’t go through that, “Look at the good things I have done” stage.

There are many self–help gurus around, and some of them make quite sensible suggestions. Stephen Covey talks about the seven habits of highly effective people; Norman Vincent Peal talked about how to win friends and influence people.

All of these things are good, but they always have illustrations like,

Of course, it works.

But being nice doesn’t help you when you are nostril deep in water and going under for the third time. Being nice doesn’t persuade a ravenous lion not to eat you.

What works for getting a promotion at work isn’t necessarily a guide to what pleases God, who sees the heart and doesn’t look on the outside.

God’s word says,

^{Eph 2:4} But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy,

⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.

⁶ And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,

⁷ in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—

⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.

Here it is: God totally skips the “What I did” part, because you can see here, it is

...not by works, so that no one can boast.

I was talking to a friend about listening skills, and said I had taken a course. I thought further and said, “I think a lot of people in that course gained a lot more than I did, but I know I gained something.”

Some members of that course were way ahead before we had even started. But I am glad for what I did gain from it.

Every one of us starts anything in life from a different starting point, because every one of us is different. When I qualified as a Town Planner, I used sometimes to look at one of the girls who graduated at the same time, and she was such a specialist! I used to think badly of myself by comparison. And she is now a University lecturer, and I would never have made it as a lecturer in Town Planning.

But we had both started at different places, and both finished at different places, even though we followed much the same course.

And I came to realise that that was OK. I was a better generalist than she was, and the world needs generalists as well as specialists.

In the same way, some of us are more skilled at life than others. Where I fail and where you fail will overlap, but it will always be different. Where you do well and where I do well will overlap, but it will be different. You will do much better in some things than I do.

And that’s the whole problem with works–righteousness. None of us is anywhere near perfect, some of us show up better than others, but who are we to boast of what is a product of our families, our environments, our opportunities? The Bible accurately says,

There is none righteous, not one.

God has acted in grace towards you and me. He took the initiative: it is not something we have achieved. We didn’t cause God in any way to reach out towards us through Jesus. He did it in a love already in place before the foundation of the world.

You he made alive!

Those are the words of God’s grace. We, who were dead, have been made alive, made responsive to God through the love of Jesus and the impulse of his Holy Spirit,

Doing Good
It is only once we have dealt with being dead in sin and then alive to God through faith in Jesus that we can put doing good into its correct perspective.

We are not saved by doing good. We don’t even score points with God for doing good. As I said last week, the main point of the law is that doing things God’s way works, and not doing things God’s way leads to disaster.

But there is a final message in this passage,

We have read,

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—

^{Eph 2:9} not by works, so that no one can boast.

There is a last point:

^{Eph 2:10} For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

It is a great mistake to think that, because our good works don’t save us, therefore they are not important.

Quite to the contrary: if things go better for us if we live according to God’s will, things will go amazingly better for the entire world if we all make a point of doing positive good.

In the law we read last week about avoiding wrongdoing — about not killing, not stealing, not worshipping idols, and so on.

Here we see God’s purpose: to release you and me to do all kinds of good.

Jesus healed people who were hopeless in their sickness and disabilities. He encouraged those who had given up. He partied with the people society threw away, and showed them that he still loved them.

That is what it is like to do the works that God has prepared in advance for you and me. Just remember that Jesus also died for the sick, the disabled, the discouraged and the discarded: he died for you and for me.

Conclusion
The moment we put our trust in Jesus, he sets us free from judgment and death. We who were dead, he made alive.

It has nothing to do with our achievements, because it is all through the amazing, ever–giving grace of God.

 But, once we stop trying to get on the right side of God through the good we do, immediately we start to be free to do the good works we were created for.

I observed a conversation the other day where one of the participants was determined to prove himself right. He didn’t have a clue about what was happening to the other person, because, each time the other person spoke, he was too busy thinking up what to say next.

He proved his point, but so what?

If he had turned off his desire to win and given his full attention to the other person, I am sure there could have been a much more satisfactory result.

Doing good to please God is me–focused, and is sin.

Doing good because we are free is other–focused, and does the world good.

If you haven’t begun to experience God’s transforming grace, today is the day to begin!

Come to Jesus and find life! AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)