The Text: Ephesians 2:1–10
And you he made alive, when you were dead through 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 these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind; and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and 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 because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Introduction: Three Questions
There are three questions that trouble the minds of every thinking man and woman. The first is: what is wrong with the world? You need only read one newspaper or hear one news bulletin to be sure that something is desperately wrong. Many answers are proposed — ignorance, poverty, oppression, the wrong political system. But think a little more deeply and you arrive at the second question: what is wrong with the people in the world? For you quickly conclude that that is where the problem lies. And if you think still more carefully, you reach the most disturbing question of all: what is wrong with me — since I am one of the people in the world that has gone wrong?
John Wesley had a favourite maxim he often quoted: know your disease, know your cure. When something is wrong with your body, a doctor does three things: diagnosis — examine the symptoms and find their cause; prognosis — determine how serious the condition is and where it is heading; and prescription — say what treatment will bring relief. This passage in Ephesians 2 does exactly that for the human condition.
Diagnosis: The Disease of Sin (Verses 1–3)
The Symptom: Spiritual Death
The chief symptom of sin is death — spiritual death. A person may be living it up, spending money, travelling the world, doing exciting things — and yet as far as God is concerned, they are a corpse. It is this spiritual deadness that explains why you can try to talk to someone about God and they are simply not interested. Mention almost anything else and their eyes light up; mention Jesus Christ and you feel you have committed a social blunder. There is a deadness there, no spark of response.
A corpse has recognisable characteristics: it is cold — no warmth of worship; hard — not soft and tender; prone — it does not stand or walk; and above all it has decay in it, corruption that will lead to perishing. In the parable of the prodigal son, while the young man was away in the far country, while the world would say he was really living it up, his father said: this my son was dead. Dead? Yes — as far as God was concerned, God had no more response from that man than you would get from a corpse.
When you try to share the good news and meet this deadness, do not be too hard on people for failing to respond. They are dead and they cannot respond. The more important question is: did you pray before you spoke to them that God would give them a little life? Because unless he does, they are incapable of responding.
Three Sources of Infection
Paul identifies three sources from which this disease of sin enters a life. The trouble is that all of us have been in direct contact with all three.
The World. We were born into a world already infected with this disease. We breathed it in. We lived among people who had it. The world in which we live is spiritually dead, and we became dead by coming into it. Added to that is the powerful pressure to conform — to fit into the world in which we have been born. Watch young people and see the pressure on them to conform to their peers, to blend in. That pressure is terribly strong and very hard to resist. None of us has been able to resist it fully.
The Devil.Paul names the second source with a remarkable title: the prince of the power of the air. As much as to say that the devil’s domain is the very atmosphere. As long as you breathe the air, you are within his dominion. People wonder who is really behind the chaos of the world — why evil is so well organised, so international, so powerful. The answer Paul gives is the prince of the power of the air. Jesus called him the prince of this world; Paul elsewhere calls him the god of this world. We are born not only into an infected environment but into a kingdom ruled by someone whose entire ambition is to make us sin — and he is more subtle and powerful than we are.
The Flesh. The third source is what Paul calls the flesh — which in the Bible means not just the physical body but everything we inherited when we were born: body and brain together. The problem is not only our environment outside us or the devil outside us, but cravings and desires and ideas within us. Self-will appears remarkably early: even before a baby can talk, the first clear word is often no. We are not only struggling with an infected world and an enemy without, but with nature within.
The Prognosis: Children of Wrath
Can we say this is a general condition, that everyone has their faults, and it will clear up of itself? Paul’s prognosis is starkly different: you have a killer disease. Without radical treatment, you are a dead man, and will be dead forever through it.
His phrase is children of wrath — meaning that because of what we are, we stand under the dark thundercloud of God’s anger. God does not show this fully at the moment, but he shows it in one way: when men give God up, he gives men up and says, do what you want and see what happens. He takes the brakes off. But the Bible speaks of a coming day of wrath — a day when everyone will experience God’s anger for having sinned, more severely than anything we have yet seen. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the book opens with a man weighed down by a great burden, wandering outside a city and crying: what shall I do? He knows the city will be destroyed and he will face God in his anger. A man called Mr. Evangelist meets him and hands him a scrap of paper with these words: flee from the wrath to come. That is the beginning of the Christian life — when you realise that the prognosis is wrath and you need the disease dealt with.
You cannot understand the light until you have seen the darkness clearly. The gospel is bad news before it is good news. And the good news is only as good as the bad news is bad.
Prescription: But God... (Verses 4–10)
The Most Important Word
The turning point of the whole passage — and of the whole human story — is a single word of three letters: but. But God, who is rich in mercy. It is as if a doctor said: I am very sorry, you have something very serious. But there is now a cure. And that but would mean everything. But? Did he say but? The prescription follows.
In Mercy
The character of the cure is life — as the character of the disease is death. You has he made alive when you were dead. That is the good news: spiritually dead people can be made alive. It is a miracle of resurrection. You will never save a man by education, reformation, politics, or science, because all these approaches assume the man is alive. But he is dead. Only God can raise the dead. He did it with Jesus; he has done it with us. And when it happens, you begin to see things you never saw before, hear God speaking where before there was silence, and talk to him as someone you actually know.
God is rich in mercy — meaning he loves to give people what they do not deserve. That is what mercy is: getting what you have not earned and have no right to expect. If God had only justice, none of us has a chance. But God being rich in mercy, he loves to help the undeserving.
By Grace
The second word is grace — and someone has called this the most offensive thing in the Christian gospel. By grace means that you will never obtain the cure through anything you do or have done. This offends the natural human instinct deeply. In Britain there has long been a strand of thinking — traceable to the fifth-century teacher Pelagius — that if you do good, you will get to heaven. You hear it at most secular funerals: if ever anybody deserved to get there, he did. But if we did good deeds every day of our lives, it would not get us one inch nearer heaven. That is what grace means.
Grace means two things simultaneously: the good deeds you have done cannot help you to be cured, and the bad deeds you have done need not hinder you from being cured. And that means — most offensive of all to those who have tried hard to be good — that a thoroughly bad character can get to heaven by grace. A dying thief on a cross can step into glory. Why should he have salvation when I have tried to live decently all my life? That reaction is the pride that grace is designed to demolish.
God will not have anyone in heaven saying, I got here under my own steam. Nor will he have anyone saying, I half saved myself and God forgave the rest. Boasting is the fundamental sin of pride, and God says: I will not have it. You all come on the same basis. I bring you. I save you. I give it to you. That is what cures pride in a Christian fellowship — we all know deep down that none of us is better than another and none of us has any more right to be here than anyone else. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
Through Faith
A gift has to be received. You cannot give a gift to someone who will not take it. The only thing you contribute to your salvation is to stretch out a hand and take it. And that is faith. We are not saved by faith — faith cannot save you. We are saved by grace, through faith: believing that it is for you and taking it. And even that is not entirely of yourself — even your faith is a gift of God. Because a corpse cannot have faith. It was God who gave you the capacity to reach out and receive salvation. It is all of him, from beginning to end.
For Good Works (Verse 10)
If Paul stopped at grace and faith, a dangerous conclusion would follow: that since good deeds are not needed before salvation, they are not needed afterwards either. Some have always jumped to that conclusion — as long as I believe, it does not matter how I live. But that is not what God intended.
Verse 10 adds the vital fourth word: for. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works. You are not saved by good deeds, but you are saved for good deeds. The difference is everything. No longer do I do good in order to get to heaven. I do good because I am going to heaven. I start living down here the kind of life I will be living up there.
There are two important differences between a believer’s good deeds and an unbeliever’s. First: we are his workmanship. The good deed springs from a person whom God has already worked on. He has done a good work in us, so that we can do good works for others. An unbeliever can also do good deeds — Jesus acknowledged this — but without allowing God to remake their life first, those deeds ultimately benefit others while leaving the doer no better off before God.
Second: God has prepared specific good works for each of us beforehand. A Christian asks first, what good deed does God want me to do? Not every good idea is necessarily his plan for you. And the one good deed he most wants you to do for someone else — the one that requires you to be a Christian before you can do it — is to tell them about Jesus. You could not do that before you believed. Now you can.
Conclusion: Dead or Alive
A line runs straight through the human race from this passage. There is no spectrum of different shades, no gradation, no in-between. There are only two categories of people in the whole world: dead and alive. You were dead in trespasses and sins, or he has made you alive. You are either a sinner or saved. Either outside of Christ, living in the air over which the devil holds dominion, or sitting in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. There is nothing in between. And every person is either one or the other: either dead with a killer disease that will one day bring them under the wrath of God, or alive and created for good works, already seated in the heavenly places where their body will one day join their spirit.
Closing Prayer
Father, you could not have said it any more clearly. Your Word makes it utterly plain. We thank you that so many of us know this life in Christ. But if there should be even one person in this service who couldn’t give a testimony to what Jesus has done — if there is one person here who is still cold and hard, and your Word has not yet touched them — Lord, quicken them, make them alive, help them to respond to your love, and save them. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
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© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu