Christ Church Washington D.C.

Our sermon text is Ephesians chapter 2, beginning in verse 1, hear the word of the Lord. And you he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all

Once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up together and made us sit together

In the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest anyone should boast, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared

The word of the Lord. Let us pray. Our Lord, grant us ears to hear and hearts to obey all that you have revealed in your word through Christ our Lord. Amen. You may be seated.

I bring you greetings from Lynchburg, Virginia, not too far from here where I’ve been pastoring for 25 years. We are a church like yours that was planted by Christchurch so long ago. We also have a couple of church plants going in Virginia. We have one in Richmond and another one in Orange, Virginia, which is just north of Charlottesville. So the CREC churches in

Virginia are growing and we’re thankful for that. My wife was introduced to you, Katie. We’re glad to be here and to worship the Lord with you this morning. I have listened to all the previous sermons on Ephesians that have been delivered to you since your church started. You are being treated with some excellent preachers and in one of the most excellent of New Testament epistles. In these first few sermons…

You have mostly been hearing about what God has done and relatively very little about what you must do as a Christian. This is fitting as the book of Ephesians is cleverly written. The first three chapters are almost all declarative statements

Today you’re going to hear more about who God is and what he has done.

Ephesians 2.8 that I just read. For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.

And as we keep speaking about the glory of God, His kindness, His love for us while we were yet sinners, His mercy in adopting us as vagabond children, His grace that abounds wherever sin abounds, you may slip into the delusion that we are teaching that God does not care what we do.

We call that antinomianism, no need for God’s law. Or this might even slide into universalism, the belief that in the end all men are saved and go to heaven when they die. While preaching the great grace of God may cause some to accuse us of antinomianism, we do not teach this, nor does the Bible.

Because God has so graciously saved us, it ought to elicit in us a deep love for Him that seeks to please Him and do all His holy will. That is, when God works into us by grace, He expects us to work out into the world by that same grace. The Ephesians were delivered from worldliness by God’s grace. They responded

The Ephesians get another mention in Revelation. They are there commended, but in danger. They are meticulous in their law keeping. It says that you too are opposed to the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which was a sexual perverse

My grandson’s grandfather. We’re sort of all related in the CREC. That’s one thing you figure out the further you get into it. It’s okay. The relations are distant. Ben talked a lot about being in him. We are in him. All the blessings that we have are in Christ. And here we are raised from him and he has now ascended into the heavenlies at the right hand of the Father. And we are there with him.

This is who he is. This is who you are in him. And because of his immense grace to us, then we are to go and declare this to the world. What are we to declare? We are to declare that Jesus Christ is the ruler of the world. The unbelieving Jews in the first century did not like this. And then the unbelieving Gentiles in Ephesus didn’t like it either. I’m currently preaching through Acts, and as Paul says,

And this becomes a threat. It’s a threat to the world. Initially, it was a threat to the Jewish system, maintaining their way of life and worship and control. And yet something grander, God was bringing to the world. And then later on, particularly in Ephesus, and this is where I’m right at in the book of Acts now, it becomes a threat to the Gentile world. You recall there is the place where Baal

Paul preaches and all these people are converted. It says, oh, Asia hears the gospel from his preaching in Ephesus. That was near Asia at that time. And it was there that they bring all of their books on the occult and witchcraft and they burned them.

And then it creates this riot and they want to take these people into the Colosseum there and persecute them as they shout, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. So all of a sudden now the gospel of the kingdom of God is not just a threat to the religious way of life, but it’s actually a threat to the entire culture and it’s culturally threatened.

The practical outworking Ephesians, it blesses us in our marriages and raising our kids in the work that we’re called to do. Fathers raising their children, don’t provoke your children to wrath and the relationship between people who run businesses and those who work for them. All these kind of things are a blessing to the culture around us. And so we see these are all the glorious things that God is doing.

Title of this sermon, Dead Men Walking. Going to have to watch my time. Having just preached through Acts and studying Ephesians, there’s a lot here and there’s a lot in Ephesians, so we’ll try to make our way through. You guys have all day, don’t you? My mother had very few jokes. One of the jokes she had is when we’d go by a cemetery, she would say, how many dead people are in that cemetery?

And we learned pretty soon the answer was all of them. And it was her one joke. It wasn’t very funny. But it was true. And all of the people there were dead. And as we think about being alive in Christ, we realize that there’s one sense in which all of us in this room are dead men. You say, well, I’m not dead. I can breathe. My heart is beating. True. But you need to understand that your heart is beating.

The fact that your heart is beating is not what makes you alive. What makes you alive is Jesus Christ’s heart beating in you. Well, you might say, then Christ’s heart is beating in me. I’m a believer. And if that is true, then it is true because you were dead in your sins, but he has quickened you and made you alive. But maybe there are those in whom only a natural sinful heart beats.

This is a way to understand the truth of this scripture on September 21st, 2018. I myself was once dead and am now alive. I had a massive heart attack, went into cardiac arrest. My heart stopped. I stopped breathing and I was laying on the floor dead. And what could I do at that time to bring myself back?

He’s not expected to come out of the tomb in order to embrace Jesus, in order to be made alive. This is what we call regeneration. When God calls to you and he gives you a new heart and he makes you alive, then you respond to him. It’s unilateral, it’s on his part. Now we do believe, we do have to walk in belief. That’s the latter part of Ephesians. God calls us to do a lot of things, but we do them all out of gratitude and love.

That’s why the message to the Ephesian church is so damning in Revelations. Don’t you remember what God did? Are you responding to him with his great love and gratitude that makes you want to live out the life that he has given you? Well, let’s make our way through Ephesians here and make a few comments from the passage.

Opening verse, you hath he quickened who are dead. Dead is dead. Dead is not sick.

I’m going to go through this quickly. There’s four essential conditions of mankind. I think I got these out of R.C. Sproul book. And the first one is we are in the creation, the pre-fallen man is able to sin and able not to sin. He was created perfect in righteousness, holiness, and with dominion over the creatures. And he had the ability to not sin. And yet he chose sin.

And then we have regenerate man, those of us who exist in a state of grace. Again, I think Ben Merkel talked about this, how much we are in need of God’s grace. Because even the good that we do is still tainted by our fallen nature. It doesn’t measure up to some level of perfection. And yet God receives us as he receives his son. He receives our works as good works because of his grace, not because they are perfect.

So we’re able to not sin, and there are certain sins that God expects us to have completely put behind us. And some of those are listed in Ephesians and Corinthians. Corinthians talks about sexual immorality among you that is not even to be named among the Gentiles. So fornication and then perverseness within the sexual world, drunkenness, orgies, those kinds of things.

And other things in the Ten Commandments, of course, that we’re to leave behind. Falsehoods, stealing, things of those sorts. And then there’s the final state that we will exist in, which is unable to sin. And that only occurs when we get our resurrected bodies. Jesus is the only one.

Welcome to my lecture, Welcome to my lecture, Welcome to my lecture, Welcome to my lecture,

So we believe in God’s rules, God’s law. We’re not antinomian. Also, he says that people who do these things do not have an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of

God, there’s no room for universalism. There is a real judgment. Hellfire is a reality in the scriptures and Jesus was one of the most hellfire preachers in the Bible. That’s something that ought to be ever before us so that we do not lose our first love and fall into these kinds of sins and drift away from Christ. Because

Recall, it’s not just fleshly sins. We sometimes think of those things, fornication or drunkenness, various kinds of lusts we think of as the chief sins. But he talks about the sins of the flesh and of the mind, keeping in mind Paul’s journey and his missionary journeys.

He was in Galatia and Thessalonica and those areas, and then he went around and came down through Athens and preached there. There is the place where you’d find the sins of the mind. Where would you find that now? Oh, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, any local even university.

The place where they pursue various things because they’re new and they see themselves as the elite people who understand the way the world really works. And that’s part of fleshiness. That’s the sense of the mind. And also, then he makes his way into Corinth. And Corinth was known as a debauched, sexual, perverse place. So this is sort of the backdrop of what Paul was dealing with. And he says…

So what did we do to earn God’s favor? What did I do laying on the ground to get myself up? Nothing. It was merely the love of God to make us alive and draw us to himself. God the Father is rich in mercy. Some people have real issues with the fatherhood of God.

Sometimes it’s because your own father was not a good father. Either he was indulgent, too indulgent, and you could do nothing wrong, or he was too

I’m now a grandfather. The Bible doesn’t say that God is a grandfather. But as a grandfather, I believe I’m coming into a better understanding of the pleasure of God in his children. As a grandfather, you don’t have the tension of having to do all the discipline and everything. Especially if your children, like my children are, they’re in the Lord. They’re doing a good job raising their kids. And I can look at my grandchildren and just be pleased with them.

That’s how our Father in heaven is when he looks at us. Why? Back to the in him. He looks at you and he sees his son. And of his son, he says, listen to him. This is the one in whom I am well pleased. The Father is pleased with his children. That’s why it’s so glorious when we get together here at the end of our service around the Lord’s table.

As his family and our father is not like maybe your father was or maybe like I was sometimes too demanded of the rules. Let’s get everything right and get in order. No, it’s this time of joy and pleasure because we’ve been brought to the father in the name of the son. By grace, are you saved? And not of your own?

Jesus is raised and seated. This means he is alive. And it also means that Jesus is in the seat of authority. He is seated as a king over all the heavens and over all the earth. Sometimes Christians believe that Jesus lives.

Jesus could immediately demand all his enemies be executed or submit to him. If it were not foreign to his character, he has the power and authority to act like a totalitarian military dictator. But he does not do so. He empowers his church to conquer the world through the foolishness of preaching. This is what transformed the world.

Some guy up in the pulpit proclaiming the glory of Christ to the world, and it brings the world to its knees. It brings Ephesus to an uproar, and people burn their books, and they submit to the Lord Jesus, and it transforms the world. Now, it takes time. That was almost 2,000 years ago, and here we are.

It fits and starts, it seems, sometime, but the kingdom of God is doing just fine. It’s growing and it’s expanding and will continue to do so until every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord. So this should help us.

To understand how the church is to act, for we are also seated with Jesus ruling heaven and earth. That’s part of it that we sometimes forget. He’s ruling, but he’s made us his vice regents to rule with him.

Recall the previous sermon again of Mr. Merkel. We are in him. If we’re in Christ, then we dwell where he dwells. He is seated at the right hand of the Father, ruling over heaven and earth, and we are participants in that rule. We are heralds that declare that Jesus is king, and we are the ones who are called to disciple the world in Jesus’ name, bringing them to the waters of baptism, discipling them,

According to the Great Commission. That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace.

In his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus, in the ages to come, well, the years to come, the times to come, the age of the church as it grows and expands throughout the world, the age that we’re in now, and even a more glorious age after the resurrection where all the universe, really, not just the world, the universe,

It’s over the top. Back to learning what our father’s like. I hope your father was like that. Probably wasn’t. Can’t be this glorious and this gracious. Just over the top grace. Over the top grace.

Kindness. Wherever sin abounded, wherever disobedience abounded, He spoke to it. And where there was confession of sin and repentance, there was this hyperbolic grace that exceeded anything that you could ever imagine. That’s what God the Father is like. That’s what it means to be in Christ. What does that produce? Gratitude.

And love, and this is because it’s all gift. The famous verse, we probably could have spent the whole time on verse 8, grace you are saved through faith, not of yourselves. Of course, Presbyterians love that verse, right? And not of works, lest any man should boast. But what is the beginning, middle, and end of this? It’s what God is doing. He’s exceedingly gracious and kind to us beyond anything else.

God has worked it all out before us, beforehand. He’s called us into these works that He created, it says, even before the world began. What kind of work did God do for us? Well, He called us to Himself. He changed the direction of our lives. We have a new orientation away from self and towards our Savior.

Of course, God calls us to a new way of living in Jesus. A man who is dead but is now alive has to breathe, but the life is from Jesus. The breath is from Jesus. It is all God’s work from first to last. So what is our response? What should this cause us to do? The only thing I can think of that is eminently appropriate is gratitude.

God truly is awesome. And when we consider all that he has done to us, in us, through us, in Jesus Christ, we simply gape in awestruck wonder. And then we wake up from this wonder and we’re filled up with gratitude. No place for pride in gratitude, just humble reflection on God’s glory. Let us pray.

O Lord our God, you have made us alive in Jesus Christ. We thank you for calling us, saving us, and granting us your Holy Spirit. Empower us to walk according to your will, doing those good works that you have prepared for us before the world began. Grant that we would love you with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves. We do this in the name of your son Jesus Christ,

And by the power of your Holy Spirit, an amen.

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