Saved by Grace Alone

Ephesians 2:1-10

Drastic times call for drasticmeasures.

In other words, seriousproblems require us to do things that would usually be considered excessive. Considerthe difference between brushing your teeth and getting a root canal. A band-aidor an amputation. Receiving an overdraft charge or filing for bankruptcy. Takinga sick day or leaving your job. Playing paintball or fighting in a war.

The doctrine of salvation (ofGod saving us from sin) is this way. This doctrine (or Bible teaching) portraysan extreme problem that can only be solved by an extreme solution.

Unfortunately, we don’t tend to think about salvation like this. From an intellectual standpoint, we know it’s a life and death situation with eternal ramifications. Yet we often feel and behave as though it’s only a minor dilemma – a speed bump, not a volcano. Yet, here's the fact:

Our sin is so bad we can do nothing to solve it. We must rely upon the grace of God completely.

Is that our mindset? Is that how we’re living today? In Eph 2:1-10, Paul gives the full magnitude of our greatest problem. Then he describes how God solved this problem in an even greater way. Properly understood, this teaching gives us the framework we need to become a Christian and to live the Christian life.

Our sin is not a minortechnicality and our salvation is not just a nice act of God. Both our sin andsalvation are extreme situations. Properly understood, they should leave us inawe and wonder at the sheer greatness and magnitude of God’s grace to us.

To get this framework into ourminds, let’s see what Paul says about the doctrine of salvation. To understandthis doctrine, we first need to:

We must see the severity ofour sin.

Our sin is so severe that weare “dead” from the start. We are not physically dead, we are dead spiritually,which means we are separated from God completely.

We are dead “in our trespassesand sins” (Eph 2:1). Trespass means to “fall down” or “step across theline.” Sin means to “miss the mark.” This is why we are dead to God.

Just as a corpse cannotrespond to social interaction, even from those who loved that person dearly, sowe are born unresponsive to God. This concept is so crucial that Paul repeatsit, saying, “we were dead in trespasses” (Eph 2:5).

We don’t become spirituallydead because we sin; we sin because we’re spiritually dead.

We are not born as good peoplewho just mess up later on. We are born spiritually dead. That’s why we sin. We’reborn in a helpless position, with a sinful nature hardwired to sin.

Our sin is so bad that it isfar more than something we do sometimes on rare occasions. It’s a lifestyle (“inwhich you once walked,” Eph 2:1). The NT frequently uses the action of walkingto refer to daily living. Just as we take one step after another to walk, so wemake one bad decision after another in our daily lives. That’s how we’re born.

Our sin is so bad that it affectseverything we think, say, and do. Though we’re alive physically, mentally, and emotionally,we’re spiritually dead. Just as a corpse cannot see, smell, taste, hear, orfeel anything, even the most acute pain, so we are numb to God.

Without Christ, we’re like spiritualzombies. We go through the motions of human life, but with no meaningfulconnection to God and no eternal purpose. It’s as though we’re stillborn babiesfrom a spiritual perspective. We exist, but in a cold, lifeless, empty way.

In this helpless condition, we’reruled and manipulated by destructive influences.

Three evil forces control usfrom birth: the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The world is one of theseforces, called “the course of this world” (Eph 2:1). This phrase describes theattitudes, views, and values that all spiritually dead people have in common. Wecall this a worldview and it’s an ungodly one. It’s the way we normally thinkapart from God.

At its core, the normal goalsand values of this world are different than God’s goals and values. This isdue, in part, to the influence of another evil force called “the prince of thepower of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience” (Eph2:2).

The devil is thissecond force that controls us in our natural condition. Paul calls him the “prince,”and “the power of the air” is the many demonic beings that answer to him.Together, Satan and his minions “work in the sons of disobedience.” Theyenergize and enable spiritually dead people to resist God and disobey his will,just as Satan did to Adam and Eve in the beginning.

As a result, nonbelievers arenot free to do whatever they please. They are manipulated by satanic beings whocontrol their lives. This hopeless condition was true for all of us before webelieved on Christ, “among whom we all also once conducted ourselves.”

The flesh is a thirdforce that controls us in our natural condition. It is our natural disposition,the way we think and feel naturally. Paul describes this as, “the lusts of ourflesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind” (Eph 2:3).

The word lust refers tostrong desires, like sexual drives, appetites, or addictions. The word desiresrefers to a strong, stubborn willfulness that wants something so strongly that weinsist on having it and will do whatever it takes to get it.

Together, these three factors dominatethe life of an unsaved person. In our natural-born state, we are controlled by bad,ungodly urges and a determination to live in a self-centered, self-absorbed waythat disregards God’s purposes for his or her life. As a result…

We are destined to experienceGod’s wrath.

Paul says that we “were bynature the children of wrath, just as the others” (Eph 2:3). This means that wewere headed for God’s eternal judgment. This was not just because we did badthings, but because it was our nature to do bad things. That’s how helpless wetruly were.

God’s wrath is not a popularconcept today. Theologians who are culturally sensitive may attempt to softenthis concept and non-scholarly believers may try to avoid this concept when wespeak about Christ to others. We fear it may turn people off. The problem,however, is not with the wrath of God, it is with our natural tendency toreject God.

Wrathrefers to “white hot” anger. Think of the strong, breathy nostrils of a warhorsepreparing for battle or the noble, fearsome rage of a medieval soldierdefending the women and children of his village from bloodthirsty barbarian raiders.

As you will readily admit, notall wrath is wrong. Wrath is good and appropriate when you are angry for a justcause. If you witnessed the brutal killing of an innocent child, for instance,would you not feel justified rage?

Since God is perfectly holy, just,good, and loving, then all of our sin is repulsive, offensive, and horrible. That’swhy we don’t have to be psychotic killers to be under the wrath of God. We’re sobad by nature that we’re born under the burning wrath of God. “We were bynature the children of wrath.”

However, though we were bornin this miserable, hopeless condition, the very God who is angered by our sindid something astounding. What’s more, the fact that his wrath burns hotagainst our sin makes what he did extremely astounding for sure and helps us…

We must grasp the greatness ofGod’s grace.

When we see theseverity of our sin, we must also grasp the greatness of God’s grace.

“But God” (Eph2:4). These two words are the key to the gospel message. They are the bridge betweenour sinfulness on one side and the salvation we need on the other.

Who is thisGod? He is “rich in mercy” (Eph 2:4). He looked upon our hopeless situation andfelt pity and compassion for us. In fact, he is “rich” in mercy, which means hedidn’t just have a “small trace of compassion” – he had an extravagant dose ofmercy instead.

No matter howgreat your sins may be, his mercy is greater. He didn’t just “kind of” havecompassion, he had compassion to the maximum degree.

Why did herespond this way to our sorry, sinful state? “Because of his great love withwhich he loved us” (Eph 2:4). He had compassion on us not because we deserved pity– we didn’t. We deserved wrath. He didn’t have compassion on us because ofanything in us at all – we were sinful and depraved, repulsive by nature and unresponsiveto him. God’s love is so great that he loved us “even when we were dead intrespasses.”

God hadcompassion on us because of who he is. He is loving by nature and that’s why heloves – not because we are lovable. Just as he is not only merciful but “rich”in mercy, so he is not only loving but “great” in his love. God is loving tothe maximum degree.

God loved us somuch that he applied Christ’s victory to our lives.

In his prayerfor the believers to understand the greatness of the power of God, Paulexplained how God the Father had raised Christ from the dead and then raisedhim up to the throne of the universe to rule over all things (Eph 1:20-21). Nowhe expands this thought to show how God has applied this resurrection andexaltation to us (Eph 2:5-6).

• He “madeus alive together with Christ.” (This is the main idea.)
• He “raisedus up together with Christ.”
• He “madeus sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

What’s astoundingabout this merger with Christ is that because God is so loving, he has sharedwith us the full benefits of Christ’s resurrection and exaltation.

We call this doctrine“union with Christ.” Though it’s hard to understand, one thing is clear – it isa spiritual union, not a physical one. Just as we are born spiritually dead toGod, union with Christ makes us spiritually alive to God. It restores our relationshipwith him.

Furthermore,this “union with Christ” is called being “saved” (Eph 2:5, 8). Twice Paul says,“you have been saved.” The word save means “to deliver or rescue.” Itassumes that the person who is being “delivered” is helpless and unable todeliver himself.

In our case, wewere entirely helpless and unable to deliver ourselves from the world, the flesh,and the devil. We were born with a sinful nature and disposition. We weredestined and deserving of God’s wrath forever. But God rescued us from thissevere problem by joining us together with Christ instead.

This amazing andsurprising deliverance underscores a very important truth.

God saves us bygrace alone.

Just as Paulrepeats the fact that we “were dead in trespasses,” he also repeats the factthat we “are saved by grace” (Eph 2:5, 8) This repetition is like underling today.It shows that Paul – through the guidance of the Holy Spirit – wants to emphasizethis fact.

God is a God ofgrace. He is perfectly good in every way, which automatically means that heshares this goodness with others. The phrase “in his kindness” makes thisclear. You cannot be perfectly good and stingy at the same time. Goodnessgives, shares, and spreads itself to others.

As you mightexpect, Paul describes God’s grace and his giving nature in excessive terms.Just as our sin is exceedingly sinful, so God’s grace is excessively good. Pauldescribes God’s grace as “riches,” which means that God’s grace is so excessivethat it reaches the highest point by any measurement you choose.

God’s grace extendsto the maximum degree. In fact, Paul says God’s grace goes even farther. It is “great,”which means it surpasses the highest measure and is therefore immeasurable andbeyond comprehension. Such grace is the source of our salvation.

Salvation is agift received only by faith.

We can donothing to catch God’s attention or earn his favor. It’s not like we do alittle bit for ourselves and then God finishes the job. We do nothing good andhe does it all.

To make thisvery clear, Paul tells us that salvation is a gift, which means a “gift, offering,or grant” (Eph 2:8; see also Rom6:23). We earn neither of these things. They are offered to us and wereceive them. We don’t do any work to get them. Someone else does the work andthen we take them.

Paul says thatsalvation is “not of yourselves” (Eph 2:9), which means we don’t contributeanything to salvation. We’re spiritually dead. We can’t do anything anyway.

To make thispoint even clearer, Paul says that our salvation is “not of works” (Eph 2:9). Noamount of personal effort, energy, or exertion – no acts of behavior that wecan do – will contribute anything towards earning, meriting, or accomplishing oursalvation.

God saves us byhis grace and he alone saves, with no help from us. Our only obligation is notto “do” but to “receive.” That’s what “through [by means of] faith” means (Eph2:8).

When a personhears this message of salvation from sin by the grace of God alone, the onlyproper and necessary response is faith. Faith means to believe, to accept, toreceive the gift at true – true for us and to us.

In Rom 10:9, Paul teachesthe same thing: “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe inyour heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

To respond infaith, we must acknowledge that we are sinners who need to be saved. We must alsoacknowledge that Jesus (who is God and man) is our only Savior who died andresurrected for us. When we believe on Jesus this way, God applies victory ofJesus in his resurrection and exaltation to our lives. From God’s perspective, wemove from being “children of wrath” to children of God, objects of God’s judgmentto recipients of his love.

Our salvationis a creation all over again – only spiritual.

“We are hisworkmanship” (Eph 2:10), Paul says in conclusion, “created in Christ Jesus.” Byusing these two words, workmanship and created, Paul uses creationlanguage and turns our attention back to the beginning of the world.

In thebeginning, God spoke the worlds into existence ex nihilo, which means “outof nothing.” We know that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spiritcooperated together to create the world and all that is in it, but did anyone elsehelp them?

More specifically,did Adam and Eve do anything to help God to create the world or even morespecifically, to create themselves? The answer is obviously ‘no.’ God createdthem to do good things, to provide guidance and care for the world and to make ita better place for his glory, yet he alone created them.

The firsthumans did nothing to help God with Creation. Instead, their obligation was to acknowledgehim as God after he created them and to live in obedience to him as a result.

Remarkably,that’s how Paul describes our role in salvation. He describes our salvation asa new “creative work of God,” a creation that is spiritual in nature. Thoughyou were formerly “dead in trespasses and sins,” God created new spiritual lifeout of nothing.

God creates newlife in you through the person and work of Jesus Christ and your only role inthis creative work of God is to receive what he is doing by faith. He says somethingsimilar in 2 Cor 5:17,“If anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation.” But what is the purpose of thisnew creation?

God saves uswith two purposes in mind.

The firstpurpose – like anything else that God does – is to bring him glory. We see thisin the first “that” of this passage, which says, “that in the ages to come hemight show the exceeding greatness of his grace” (Eph 2:7).

By creatingsalvation in your life and bringing you into union with the resurrection andexaltation of Christ, God will be able to show off his goodness and hisgreatness forever in eternity. He deserves that, doesn’t he? This is God’sfuture purpose for saving us.

The secondpurpose is a present one. We see this in the second “that” of this passage,which says, “that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10; them refers to “good works”).So, while good works are not a means to salvation, they are the reason forsalvation.

God doesn’tsave us just to provide us with a feeling of eternal security, which he doesprovide. He saves us so that we can genuinely do good works, which is somethingwe are unable to do without being saved first.

What is a goodwork? It is any word or action that reflects the goodness of God both outwardlyand spiritually. We cannot do these things to become saved, but weshould do these things because we’re saved. In fact, God is so intent onus doing good works as Christians that he prepared for us to them in eternitypast, before he made the worlds.

This word “preparedbeforehand” is rarely used in Scripture. Isaiah 28:24 uses this word to describe how afarmer prepares the soil of his fields long before he plants the seeds andexpects them to grow.

Josephus, anancient historian, used the word outside of the Bible to describe how witnesseswould plan ahead of time what they were going to say before government officialswho were prepared to give them a death sentence (Jos., Ant. 17.121).

As you know, afarmer puts a lot of hard, excruciating work into prepping his soil because hislife and wealth depend on producing a good crop. And if you are going to defendyourself against the penalty of execution or torture, you would put a lot ofeffort into what you’re going to say to the judge.

In the same wayand more, God prepared ahead of time so that would end up living a life thathonors and glorifies him in this world. To “prepare the soil,” so to speak, hesent Jesus Christ his Son to die on the cross for our sins. When Christ rosefrom the grave and was exalted to a place of authority over all things, hejoined us together with him. By his grace alone, he overcame our spiritualdeadness and created in us new spiritual life.

He planned allof this out before he created the worlds, then we worked this out over time –preparing the soil for our salvation. Why did he do all of this when we were sobad? So that we would stop walking (“living”) in a lifeless, godless way andstart walking (“living”) in a good and godly way.

If we’re savedby grace, then we should live a virtuous life.

God has done somuch to prepare you for this. What’s more, if you’ve been saved by grace, thenyour life is on display for the glory of God. If for no other reason, youshould live a godly, virtuous life because God deserves it to be that way.

Therefore, everyone of us whom God has rescued from the judgment of his wrath has a moralobligation to abandon shameful and impure practices from our lives. Suchpractices merit the wrath of God and have no place in grace.

As Paul will saylater in this letter, “put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man whichgrows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit ofyour mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God,in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:22-24).

You must makethe daily – often moment by moment – choice to “put on” this new way of livingand “put off” your old way of living, just as you take off dirty clothes andput on clean ones. For a detailed discussion about how God intends for you tolive, see Eph 4:25-5:7ff.

If we’re savedby grace, then we should live a grateful, grace-filled life.

We need toembrace a new motivation for the things we say and do. We should not pray, readour Bibles, attend church, serve at church, and treat others with love andrespect in our relationships to get something more from God or to earn hisfavor.

We should livea godly life, doing what is important to God, as a grateful response to theexcessive grace that he has already given to us by rescuing us from our helpless,sinful state. And as we live this way, we should do so expecting nothing inreturn.

Therefore, weshould not obey “as little as possible,” nor should we live godly out of somesort of legal obligation not do so. Instead, we should obey as lavishly as thegrace of God itself. We should love one another in an excessive, grace-likeway. We should forgive one another in the same way. At home, we should exhibitlavish grace, and at work, too.

We shouldespecially exhibit such lavish grace in the way we participate with our church.Does our attendance, behavior, singing, contributions, involvement, conversations,service, and relationships at church reflect the excessive grace of God at workin our lives? Or do we exhibit a stingy, minimalistic approach instead – doing thebare minimum, only when it’s convenient, and rarely with all of our heart.

God has savedus by grace to show his grace to the world. Together, let’s take steps in ourdaily walk to be that kind of church in Queens even more.