This morning I want to talk to you about zombies and two steel mill works in Western Pennsylvania from the 1970s. Along the way, I want to talk about God’s grace.
I’m continuing a series of messages entitled Creed: 9 Essentials to the Christian Faith.We are exploring the beliefs that form the theological center of Christianity. It is a series devoted to the discovery of what you believe and why it matters.
We Believe in God June 17
We Believe in the Trinity June 24
We Believe in the Bible July 1
We Believe in Creation July 8
We Believe in Sin July 15
We Believe in the Cross August 5
We Believe in Grace August 12
We Believe in the Church August 19
We Believe in Christ’s Return August 26
Each of these beliefs serves as lynchpins to the Christian faith, so that if you were to remove one of them you would see the Christian faith crumble.
This morning I want to talk about something unique to Christianity – GRACE. The New Testament contains some 155 references to grace while 100 of these come from the pen of Paul himself. The word opens, closes, and dominates every letter he wrote. He mentions grace twelve times in the letter of Ephesians alone. Grace defines his letters and his teaching. This word grace was on Paul’s mind when he wrote today’s text. For you’ll notice that Paul repeats nearly the same sentence in a matter of four verses when he says, “by grace you have been saved”. Listen carefully as you’ll hear this word grace in one of the most familiar and popular verses in all of the Bible.
Today’s Scripture
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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—3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:1-10)
This is a rich passage of Scripture.
Where Christians talk about being saved quite a bit, we should be sure that whatever we mean by “being saved” we should mean what is here. For this text is the quintessential passage that defines the biblical view of salvation. If you are unfamiliar with this book called Ephesians, then allow me to offer a helpful summary of the first three chapters. The first chapter describes God’s unique working of saving sinners from God’s point of view. Where the second chapter describes God’s work from our point of view, the individual’s point of view. Then in chapter three, we learn how God executes His plan by taking the sinners who are now saints and forming them together into the body of Christ, the church.
You see the horrible plight of people before Christ in contrast to their experience after Christ.
1. Sin Works Against Us
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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—3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” (Ephesians 2:1-3)
The first three verses tell us the life we are saved from. The first six words of verses one and five are nearly identical. Before the Bible talks about the grace of God in any depth, it first informs us of the terrible condition we are outside of Christ. So Paul has every intention of talking about the grace of God in verse one but he wants to make sure we understand our condition before God’s grace enters into the picture. Verses one to three point to a comprehensive picture of who human beings are outside of God. Notice the use of the word “once” both in verse two and in verse three. Compare the use of “once” to “But God” words beginning in verse four. Consequently, you begin to see the powerful before and after picture of what it means to follow Christ.
1.1 Three Terms that Describe Sinners
If the Bible were an artist, it would paint our status before Christ’s rescue in bleak and foreboding colors. It paints this desolate picture by using three terms in verse two: “this world,” “the power of the air,” and “our flesh.” Where many people think of Christ followers as living narrow lives, the Bible says the opposite. It’s those outside of Christ that lack real freedom. In today’s text you’ll see the word “following” twice in verse two. This word doesn’t fully communicate the force of the Bible’s descriptions what happens to those outside of Christ. Indeed, the original word behind this could be translated “mastered.” We are mastered as a slave would be mastered.
And the Bible points to three layers of slavery for us. Earlier this week, I was tooling around on the Internet and came across a National Geographic diagram that showed the New York Underground. Here below the streets of New York City, lies the infrastructure that carries power, information, and steam that runs the city. I discovered that power and cable lines lay near the surface while the subway and sewage were more than thirty to ninety feet below the surface. Here the Bible is doing the very same thing. It’s exploring the multilayered depth of our lives before Jesus Christ entered the picture. Paul offers us an internal look at what makes us tick. Again, the Bible points to three layers of slavery for us.
1.1.1 World
Here the word “world” is not the literal sense as the world God created but the word is instead used to describe as everything that is anti-God. The “world” could include all that is anti-God in non-Christian religions, economic systems, fashion, the media, academic philosophy, etc. “World” communicates a supernatural power that controls the destiny and the action of human beings. Real freedom evades those outside of Christ as they go along with what is fashionable and acceptable. Those outside of Christ follow the “course of this world.”
1.1.2 Satan
Then the Bible ads another layer as it describes sinners as being under the control of Satan himself. Satan is described as the “the power of the air.” Here in the world, the very air of the world is under the rule of Satan. The Bible says that Satan powerfully exerts his influence in the lives of non-Christians.
1.1.3 Flesh
Then we have one more layer, a third layer that describes our lives prior to Christ: “our flesh.” “Flesh” is not the physical substance of life but it is used in the Bible as an overwhelming influence that orders our lives before Christ. The “flesh” is our self-centered human nature. The human heart is profoundly self-centered. Martin Luther describes this aspect of human nature as The Inward Curve. He said, the human heart is “incurvatus in se” or curved in on itself. We are looking inside on ourselves and at ourselves. We are self-centered. Luther said (and I paraphrase), “Our nature is so “curved in” are humans before Christ, that we take everything around us for ourselves. They’ll even use God for its own sake.” That’s how the Bible describes sinners here. The human heart uses everything but serves no one. The “flesh” is the anti-God principle inside of me. There are essentially two ways to live. The first way is the life before Christ: Your life for me. Your life to enhance my life but notice the second way: My life for you.
Notice two effects of this self-centeredness…
1.2 Sin Makes Us Dead
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins…” (Ephesians 2:1)
The Bible also describes people as “dead.” Paul describes people as zombies – people who have died but are nevertheless up walking around. Before God intervenes in a life, we are the living dead, or zombies. We are decaying spiritual corpses who stink in the nostrils of God. Specifically, it’s your (and my) self-centeredness that stinks before God. Self-centeredness is hell begun in you that will eventually take you to hell. These words “you were dead” mean we are no more able to help ourselves spiritually than a corpse is able to live. Your abilities to live for God and others are as a dead man. Because of these three layers influencing you, you have no more ability to fight these outside and inside influence that a dead man would. Dead people have no power to bring life to themselves.
Again, we are enslaved. Until God speaks to us, we cannot and do not want to respond to Him. We are dead to Him and everything that is holy.
1.3 Sin Makes Us Alive
“among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:3).
Although we’re dead, we’re alive. Again, we’re zombie like. Although we’re dead in sin as far our ability to respond to God is concerned, we are nevertheless alive enough to be quite active in the practice of sin. We are alive to the evil acts of self-centeredness. We are alive to live for ourselves. Again, there are essentially two ways to live.
The first way is the life before Christ: Your life for me. Your life to enhance my life. The second way is My life for you.
I want you to see how God acted to save you from yourself. This is the life that you are saved from.
2. God Works for Us
Given the dire status we are in left to ourselves, we need a rescue. While the first three verses tell us the life we are saved from, verse ten tells us the life we are saved for. Yet, it’s these verses in the middle, verses four through nine, that tell us how to get from here to there.
“But God…” (Ephesians 2:4a). These first two words are a brilliant ray of hope. “But God…” (Ephesians 2:4a). Can you appreciate the magnitude of this?
God is the One whose power is described earlier in Ephesians 1 as: “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places…” (Ephesians 1:19-20).
Now we learn that God applies His power on you before you are a believer. The sheer awesome power of God is exerted for our benefit. Look at the description of God’s power beginning in verse four: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-7).
Paul is not calling us to take action. We might have expected the Bible to say at this point, “Let’s take a firm stand against sin.” We might have expected the Bible to say, “You are self-serving to your core. So I need you to be more loving…” “Straighten yourself out!” The Bible doesn’t call on humans to take action. Instead, the Bible tells us the solution is pointing away from ourselves. The Bible tells us how to move away from the self-serving life and the how is done by God. There are three words (verbs to be exact) that summarize God’s actions on our behalf. The first of these is found in verse five.
2.1 God Works to Make Us Alive
Look with me at the words in verse five as this serves as the center of our entire passage today. “…even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…” (Ephesians 2:5). God powerfully and dramatically changed our zombie status from dead to alive. This idea that God makes dead people alive is central to the entire passage. God changes your status from dead to alive. You are no longer zombies to God.
2.2 God Works to Raise Us Up
“and raised us up with him…” (Ephesians 2:6a).
God does these three great things to our sins. And each of these three words has a prefix attached to them in the original Greek. It’s the prefix “syn.” By using this prefix, Paul is telling us that not only has God raised us, made us alive, and seated us in heavenly places but all of this was done together with Christ Himself. That is the significance of the little prefix “syn.” All of this is past tense. Consequently, the moment you believe in Christ you are united with Christ.
While you are not literally in heaven but you are legally in heaven. You are loved by God as much as Christ is loved. As He has been raised, so we are also raised. When you are united to Christ, everything that Christ has done and deserved…is now yours. You are as honored and loved as Christ’s actions deserve.
So watch the transaction that takes place. Sin is putting ourselves where God deserves to be. Salvation is God placing His Son where we should be – on the cross. The essence of sin is me substituting myself for God. The essence of salvation is God substituting Himself for me. Because God absorbed the wrath of God for us we are now raised with Him. Sin is placing myself where God deserves to be. Salvation is God placing Himself where I deserve to be.
2.3 God Works to Seat Us Next to Christ
“… and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…” (Ephesians 2:6b). God took our seat on the cross, which is the punishment I deserve. Because God absorbed the wrath of God for us we are now seated in His seat. He went into your seat so that now you may sit in His seat.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
These two verses have three parts. The first part tells how it is that God saves us: “by grace you have been saved…” The second part tells how we can be connected to this grace: “through faith…” The third and last part tell us how God does not save us “not a result of works…”
Grace is a five-letter word that can be spelled J-E-S-U-S. Grace is not merely just a free gift but it is a free gift given to those who deserve the exact opposite. Grace means there is no cause inside of us that pushed God to act they way He did. The Bible is taking space and time to ensure that you are getting grace. The Bible wants you to get grace that it places the following in front of your eyes, “And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8b) There is nothing you’ve done to catch God’s attention. To experience this grace, you must change seats. As if you were on a seat in a vehicle that is headed for a crash, you must allow Christ to take your seat. Only then will you experience safety.
3. God Works Through Us
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).
Notice the word “works” is repeated in today’s text. The first time you see it is in verse nine where it is used in the negative sense. Yet, no sooner than Paul rejected “works” as getting us closer to God, than he says that Christ followers are created precisely “for good works.” The work you are called and commanded to do is the result of God’s work in you. Indeed, you were “created” for the very purpose of doing good works. The Bible uses the words “prepared beforehand” to describe God’s preplanning to design saved people to do good works. These words “prepared beforehand” were used in ancient Greek to describe the preparation witnesses did in advance of their testimony before government officials.
I want to show you why you were created by telling you the story of two men: Wayne Alderson and Jim Mordecki. Jim Mordecki quit school in the tenth grade.He was determined not to work in the Pittsburgh steel mills as he father had done for years. He ventured out in a landscaping business that lasted only two years. Mordecki soon found himself punching in one morning at the very factory he swore he would never work at. Now father and son were working alongside one another at the foundry where they worked a combined forty-five years. But something unusual had happened at the Pittron Steel Mill just southeast of Pittsburgh, PA.
Wayne Alderson was a WW II vet and served as the chief financial officer of the mill. He had been the first man to cross the Siegfried Line in the battle to invade the German homeland near the end of the war. Alderson was a hard-nosed man whose father was a coal-miner. Though he was a Bible-believing Christian, his language was still salty on the mill floors. After his father broke his leg in the coalmines, Alderson’s father left the family to live in a literal tent. Alderson’s experience left indelible mark on him that he never forgot where he had come from. Through the years he had worked himself into a management position in Pittron Steel, again he was in the position of Chief Financial Officer. His place of leadership in management was tried in 1972 when management and labor were on the brink of eruption. A strike had developed on October 26, 1972 and was describe by some as “eighty-four days of hell.” Alderson eventually changed the climate of mill as he had been challenged to bring his Christian faith into the marketplace. He did just that as he treated men with dignity and worth. He later called his strategy the “Value of the Person” In time he won the respect of union bosses to the point that the men had asked Alderson to hold informal Bible studies. The dirty men soon gathered in one of the most dismal places imaginable. They met each Wednesday during their lunch break in an old abandoned storage room, situated directly under the open hearth. Mordecki had heard about the rumors of the Bible study for a long time but he wanted no part of it. His brother had religion and it annoyed him. Yet, the second generation foundry worker’s interest was piqued when more than 300 men gathered each Wednesday with paperback Bibles in hand to hear the chief financial officer, Wayne Alderson. In a place where gigantic molds were filled with one hundred thousand pounds of liquid metal in ladles that had a mouth eight feet wide and were poured into the furnace that might remind you of steaming cup of coffee… men such as these were not prone to study the Bible together. Mordecki was drawn to man whose faith was real and to a place where the Bible was taught. He was drawn to a place where the lives of the men around him were changed and where no one talked about work scheduled and increased quotas. Mordecki’s skepticism vanished when he showed up at the Wednesday afternoon “chapel.” For it was plain that Alderson spoke to him in love. All of this happened at time when Jim Mordecki was hitting the bottle to the tune of four to five hours a day. Often he would come home cursing, venting his drunken anger on his wife, Tami.
Mordecki recalls those days of the early 1970s, “Tension and frustration were surely leaving the mill. It started to leave my life as well. Suddenly I found I didn’t need the bottle anymore. The entire atmosphere of our home changed. My wife says I’m a different person. She is glad.” “My work changed. I put more of myself into it. I knew before how to do a job that passes. All I cared about was getting my quotas filled and past the inspectors in quality control. Now I started to do my job with special care. Not it had to pass my own inspection standards. I took pride in what I was doing.”
Grace is a life changing power that changes you from the inside out. Once you change seats with Christ, your life is changed.
I want to challenge you to do the good works that you were created to do. I want to challenge you to be graceful and kind to others.
Let me give you some examples. I had the opportunity to pay for the breakfast of someone at McDonald’s on Friday. I was graced by you so I took the opportunity to send a gift certificate to another person earlier this week. I want to challenge you give generously to others with expecting nothing back.
Email me your stories of grace and mercy this summer at pastor@nrhbc.org.
4. God Works For God
“so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7). This statement tells us God’s purpose in saving us. Throughout all eternity, every follower of Christ will marvel at three things. We will marvel at his “immeasurable” grace. This is the same word used in Ephesians 1:19 to describe God’s power.
God’s grace is measured by the same yardstick as His power. We will marvel at the “riches” of His grace. We will marvel at His “kindness.” God’s grace is designed for people to marvel at God throughout all of time. If you know what was done for you, then you cannot help but love the One who graced you.Love awakens love. If you know the bill that was paid for you, then you cannot help but love the One who grace you.
