If you'd open your Bibles this morning to the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, we'll be looking at chapter 2 this morning. But it has been a few months since we last considered this word from the letter to the Ephesians and we, I want to bring you up to speed just a little bit before we get into this new section. We've been considering sizable sections, considering major themes and teaching not plumbing the many depths and profound truths of this beautiful letter only because to do that on a once a month base it would take me till retirement perhaps but paul the apostle of christ jesus by the will of god opened this letter in verses one and two of chapter one with a blessing by which god himself speaks to his saints to those who have faith in christ jesus and to them only god declares an effective blessing granting grace and peace to them. And we consider how the saints of God today are to receive God's blessing, not only from His Word, but in particular on the Lord's Day when the minister of the Word announces God's greeting and God's benediction. It is, as Paul does here, it is the Word of God speaking to His people to be accepted by faith. In verses 3 through 14, the apostle raised the doxology of praise to the glory of our triune God. whose glory was revealed and is revealed in the election of the Father, the redemption of the Son, and the certification of the Holy Spirit to the saints of God. With Paul, we're to praise God's glory revealed in Christ because it's in Him we've been chosen as God's own possession. It's in Him that we've been made citizens of the kingdom of God and it's in Him that we've been adopted as children and granted an eternal inheritance. Indeed, we have been blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus, Paul says. And this is certainly to our benefit and certainly to our comfort, but it is ultimately to be to the praise and the glory of God. And in verses 15 to 23, Paul recorded a prayer. A prayer for the saints, for their ongoing needs. And in particular, he prays that the saints would more fully know God, our Father. That we would know the hope of His calling, the riches of His glorious inheritance, and His incomparably great power toward us who believe the power that exalted Christ from the grave is the power that works in the people of God to bring them from the depths and death of sin to the heights and glory of heaven in Christ. And we begin today a section in chapter 2 that will run entirely through chapter 3 in which Paul demonstrates the great truth that the gospel in Christ, the Jews and the Gentiles together, have been reconciled. And that because each has been reconciled to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Paul opens this section in chapter 2, verses 1 through 10, with a strong and undeniable statement about the truth about who we are. First of all, by nature in verses 1 through 3, and then second of all, by grace in verses 4 through 10. Now, throughout this section, Paul refers to the Ephesians who, in the most part, are Gentile converts as you. And then he slips into terms of us and we. And we would be mistaken to think that Paul is opposing the Jews, the Gentiles. And he's in fact making the point that when he slips into us and we, he's speaking about how the Gentiles have been included with the Jew as the people of God. And therefore he speaks in a way that includes all of the saints in all times and all places, including here today. This is the Word of God for us today. Read with me verses 1 through 10 of chapter 2. As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins 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 and those who are disobedient. 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 objects of wrath. But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 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. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, And this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. Not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Here ends the reading of God's Word. Paul begins in verses 1 through 3 by making very clear the truth about who we are by reminding the Ephesians of who they were by nature. As for you, he begins, in verse 1, you were dead. And yet at the same time, he says in verse 2, you used to live. Now Paul is not confused here and he's not contradicting himself. What he's saying when he says you used to live, he's saying you used to conduct yourself. You used to walk in a way that showed that you were dead. He might have said you were dead men walking. Now there are pagans today, even today, who believe in voodoo. And they believe in a thing called a zombie. A dead body possessed by a power that makes it seem alive. It's controlled as it were like a puppet on strings. But even though a zombie would be dead, it would look like it was alive. Now Paul certainly did not believe in zombies and we ought not believe in zombies either. But it does illustrate the point that Paul is making here. The Ephesians were to appreciate the fact that by nature they were dead. Even though they looked like they were alive. The Ephesians were dead, he writes in verse 1, in their transgressions and their sins. They transgressed, that is, they broke the law of God. They were trespassers on ground that God had declared off-limits. They were absent without leave. They were off the reservation. They'd been created to glorify God with the desires of their hearts, with the thoughts of their minds, the words of their lips, and the actions done in the body. And yet on all counts, they were missing this mark. They were missing this purpose. They were sinning. By nature, the Ephesians were dead men walking and Paul wanted them to remember it. But he wanted them to know that he and his fellow Jews were also, by nature, dead men walking. Now, before his conversion, Saul, a Hebrew of Hebrews, would have never admitted to such a point. He would not like to put a Jew on playing with a Gentile. But as Paul, the born-again Christian, appointed by God to declare the gospel, He knew that simply possessing the law as the Jews did was no protection for the Jew against who He was by nature. In Matthew 23, 27, and 28, Jesus declared to the law teachers and the Pharisees. He says, Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You're like whitewashed tombs. You look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to be righteous. But on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. Therefore, Paul writes in verse 3 of our text, All of us lived, all of us walked among them at one time. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. And Paul spends considerable time developing this theme in his letter to the Romans where in chapters 1 and 2 he lays the charge that Jew and Gentile alike are all under sin. As it is written, he says in chapter 3, verse 10 through 12, there is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away and have together become worthless. There is no one who does good. not even one. And he concludes in Romans 3.23 that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. You see, the truth about who we are by nature is that we are all dead men. Walking on the wrong side of the boundary between the narrow road that leads to life and the broad road that leads to destruction. By nature, we consider ourselves wise by the standards of this world, blind to the fact that the wisdom of the world is foolishness in the sight of God, and yet we follow it like a road map down the broad road to destruction. We are all dead men, unable to hear and understand the word of God because as Jesus taught in John 8, by nature we belong to our father, the devil, and want to carry out his desire. By nature we're unable to stand against the devil and his schemes apart from the full armor of God of which Paul will write in chapter 6 of Ephesians. We all are dead men taking God-given needs and distorting them into lust with our discontented hearts. Boasting in God-given talents as if they were our own. Abusing God-given authority by lording it over others and serving our own selfish ambition instead of serving God and our neighbor. We're all dead men. We're comfortable with conduct that is contrary to God and His purposes and conformed to our deadly enemies, the world, the devil, and our own flesh. By nature, Paul writes in verses 2 and 3, we follow the ways of the world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient, that would be the devil, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature, our flesh. And we can be sure of this, Paul writes in Ephesians 5, verses 5 and 6, that no immoral, impure, or greedy person has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one be deceived with you with empty words, for because of such things God's wrath comes on those who are disobedient. The truth about who we are by nature is that each and every one of us is an object of God's wrath. Now in our time, He holds back His wrath, but over and over again in Scripture He has promised that it will come. The prophecy of Enoch is recorded in Jude, verses 14 and 15 promises that the Lord is coming to convict all the ungodly. For all the ungodly acts they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh words, ungodly sinners have spoken against Him. Word and deed will be measured out and none will stand. Yes, indeed, Judgment Day is coming. And when it comes, dead men will no longer walk. They will be as men who have been bound, hand and foot, tossed out of the kingdom of God into darkness. For they will experience separation from God and torment as men burned by fire but never consumed, eternally weeping and gnashing your teeth. The truth about who we are by nature is an ugly thing. Now I want you to make a mark in your Bibles in chapter 4, or chapter 2, verse 4. Circle or somehow identify two words, two words that in the NIV do not stand together, but in the Greek they do. The word but and the word God. But God. But God did something about who we are by nature. But God did something that we neither expect nor deserve. But God changed the truth of who we are by grace. Now we must remember as we read forward that this letter was written to the saints in Ephesus. Those who had faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and whose love for the saints was evident to all. It was written for all the saints, including each and every one here today who has or will have faith in the Son of God come in the flesh, Jesus Christ, the Lord. Each and every one who has or will trust that Christ's obedient life and His death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead and His exaltation of glory brought His benefits not only for others, but for you as well. For each and every one who has or will believe that God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. But God did something for you. Read again with me verses 4 through 8. And I will read verse 4 the way it lays out in the Greek and then go on from there, just so you get a sense of the strength of this phrase. but God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love for us, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It's by grace you've been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus 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. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. See, the truth about who we are by grace is that instead of knowing only the condemnation, the wrath of God, is that the saints have known and will know the kindness of God in Christ Jesus. God is kind to the saints, not because of who they are and not because of what they've done, but because of who He is. And he reveals his kindness to the saints in his love and in his mercy and in his grace that he has bestowed upon them in Christ. The kindness of God toward the saint, Paul says, is motivated by his great love because of his great love for us. A love so great that it surpasses knowledge, Paul says. In fact, he prays in chapter 3 verses 18 and 19 that the church would be granted the power to grasp how wide and how long and how high and how deep is the love of Christ. And it's greater than any created thing. For nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. But even though this love is incomprehensible, we can't get our minds around it. We can know it and we can know it truly because God has demonstrated His love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. As Paul says in verse 5, He made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. And the kindness of God toward the saints of God is an expression of His rich mercy. And to show mercy is to show pity and to give aid to someone who's in a miserable condition and that we certainly are as dead men walking. Peter says of God in 1 Peter 3, it is His great mercy, in His great mercy, He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And as Paul says in Romans, it doesn't depend on man's desire what he wants. It doesn't depend on man's efforts, what he does. It depends on God's mercy that we are given this life. This is the God who said of Himself, I have mercy on whom I'll have mercy. And I'll have compassion on whom I have compassion. And the kindness of God is a work of His boundless, immeasurable, limitless grace. by His unearned favor, He grants pardon to the guilty. And to be sure that we don't miss it, Paul repeats himself in verses 5 and 8. He says, It's by grace you've been saved. It's by grace you've been saved. By grace you've been released from the bondage of sin and set free in Christ. By grace you've been resurrected from death to life. By grace, you've been raised from the pits of the tomb to the heights of the throne room of God. And by grace, you no longer stand apart from God alone. You've been brought close in Christ to become one of His family, joined to His church. There's nothing stingy about God's grace. It is immense enough to embrace both Jew and Gentile, and yet specific and deep enough to reach down and save the worst of sinners. The truth about who we are by grace is that the saints have experienced the kindness of God in Christ and that by faith and not by works. Read with me the familiar verses 8 and 9. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith and this not from yourselves it is the gift of God not by works so that no one can boast. Now as you may be aware when it comes to understanding what exactly is the gift of God given here that Paul refers to there's some disagreement among theologians among Christians. Those who come to this text already believing that when it comes to salvation that grace is God's part and faith is our part will necessarily interpret this gift to be the act of being saved by grace that God holds out to be received by those who somehow get the faith to take it. In other words, God saves by grace those who have in and of themselves already worked up faith, realizing their own sinfulness, realizing they need a Savior, and picking from the plethora of so-called saviors in this world and come up with Jesus Christ because either they're smart enough or they're strong enough in their will to do it. And He waits for them to take this gift. But if we've gained anything from verses 1 through 3 of the truth about who we are by nature, we cannot begin with the expectation that dead men will come up with faith on their own. We only look alive. By nature. Rather, with Reformed theologians, we must take seriously the impossibility of dead men to either be willing or able to desire salvation. Now, we may agree with Calvin, who says the gift is the grace and the faith combined. It's a package deal. And that's certainly true. Or we may agree with Kuyper, who says that the gift here is specifically faith alone because Paul wants to take from the people any opportunity to say that, well, I get credit for believing. He said, no, faith, that's the gift of God. In either case, Paul's point is certain and clear that the whole of salvation must be credited to God and not to man. There's nothing in which a man can boast, he says. We are God's workmanship. created by God. Just as the world had nothing to do with its formation and Adam had nothing to do with his formation out of dust, this life that we are given in Christ has nothing to do with who we are or what we do apart from what God has done for us. There's no work we can do to add to it to substitute for the kindness of God that is shown to the saints in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you've been saved through faith, not works. I was raised believing that as long as I wasn't too bad and as long as I was pretty good at obeying the golden rule, I had a good shot at heaven, that God would look on me with favor. Then the Lord granted me repentance and faith for the sin that I didn't think was sin and faith in Christ to save me from it. He converted me and he gave me understanding of texts like this about his marvelous grace that he has accomplished for his people. And so I joined a church that confessed this understanding. A reformed church expecting everyone there to believe this truth and to have great assurance because of it. And it saddens my heart to say that over the years I have found that this is not always the case. There are many that I've met that don't have assurance because somehow they think something's lacking either in their life or in their faith. Somehow they hope that they've done well enough that God will give them a wink when they come up. And I've come to believe that one of the greatest temptations for the saints of God is for them to delude themselves into thinking that there must be something that they can do. now whether that's something as straightforward and minuscule as the mustard seed of faith that they can generate on their own or as complicated as trying to be a good person and cover all the bases it doesn't matter in either case it comes up to boasting the very thing that God has removed the ground from there is no room for boasting but we would like to boast and it doesn't matter how humbly we do it it's still boasting saints of God we need to know that at the final judgment the only ones who will be boasting are the dead men walking they will appear before the judgment seat of Christ crying out Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles and the Lord will tell them plainly I never knew you away from me you evil doers the goats on the left that will be ushered to judgment will be full of words to make their case. Those on the right, the sheep brought home to God. They won't remember the good deeds that they did. Now, does that mean that there's no place for good works in the lives of the saints? Certainly not. Paul says in verse 10 that the kindness of God toward us in Christ enables the saints to fulfill our ordained purpose, and that is to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. So there's certainly a place for good works. But as we heard preached last Sunday by Reverend Voss on good works, this text supports what was said then, and that is that there's nothing we can do that will contribute to our salvation. But good works necessarily flow out from our salvation as a testimony of God's work in us. And we will find when we get to chapter 4 that Christ appointed the apostles, the prophets, pastors, and teachers to equip the saints for doing these good works to benefit Christ's church and to bring glory to God. And then briefly, Paul reminds us of a theme introduced in chapter 1 in the doxology of praise that we considered when we considered the question, what's it all about? And we concluded it was all about the praise of God's glory. And that is true, and it's true here. Paul says in verse 7 that the reason God has done all that He has done for the saints in Christ Jesus is that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of His grace. that in this present evil age as long as it lasts and in eternity to follow the crowning display the flashing billboard the time square of God's kindness God's grace will be His kindness that He showed to the saints dead men walking that He transformed into living men working. so now you know the truth about who we are by nature and the truth about who we are or could be by grace the truth about who we are by nature ought to have caused you some distress distress that can only be relieved by grace now if you know this distress and you don't have the relief and you want the relief that only Christ can give then turn from your sin, confess it to God, trust in Christ to save you from it. And then give me a call. Or pastor boss. Or an elder. Or a friend you know to be a Christian. So that together with some part of the body of Christ, there can be rejoicing together and thanksgiving together for the kindness that God has shown you. And if there's any here who deny the truth about who we are by nature, Thinking that somehow that doesn't apply to you. May God show you His kindness and make you uncomfortable so that you would turn to Christ and seek relief from the condition you really are in. And if you're here this morning and you already enjoy, by the grace of God, relief from the distress, then I just tell you this week to embrace this week with vigorous thankfulness and with confident assurance that God's work of grace has accomplished all for you. You've been saved by grace through faith, not works. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we are humbled and distressed this morning by the fact that creatures that you created in your own image that you set in this creation, Lord, to be your servants and to do your will and to accomplish your purposes fell into such a miserable state that we all became dead men walking, faking life, all the time dead, walking apart from you, away from you, against you, objects of your wrath that, Lord, in the final judgment you will bring down upon those who do not repent and believe. But, God, we thank you that you intervened, that you are rich in mercy, and that out of your great love for us in Christ, you showered us with your grace and you saved us. Help us, Lord, to know the confidence that comes with trusting in Your work and not our own. Empower our thankfulness, Lord, that it shows not only to You but to others that we know what You've done for us. For we were dead men walking and You have made us living men to work out our salvation with fear and trembling in the presence of this world to the praise of Your glory for eternity. We thank you in Christ's name. Amen.