The Power of Grace (Ephesians 2.1-10)

Believers are blessed in Christ with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places. This is how Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians. The first section of the letter is a single, run-on sentence; a litany of praise for all of the ways God has heaped benefits on those who are united with His Son. All of this is part of a predetermined plan, made before the World was made.

Paul is building the confidence of believers. They had already heard the Word of Truth, the Gospel, and believed it. But now he wants them to see more. He prays for them that they can see the greatness of salvation.

In the Gospel the mystery of God's eternal purpose is revealed. God's plan is to show to the Heavenly Powers the greatness of His wisdom. He will do this through the Church, or those who are being saved. The Church is being prepared as an eternal dwelling of God, so Paul again prays that the believers will be even now filled with all the fullness of God and able to comprehend
God's expansive, loving, gracious plan for His people in Christ.

Paul wants us to know how blessed we really are and what the grace of God has done for us and is now doing in us. It is wrong for believers to remain ignorant or small-minded about salvation or fail to appropriate everything grace has brought to us. We need grace to be saved, but we require more grace to understand what happened when we were saved.

Grace has made us acceptable and useful to God.

But that was NOT our former condition at all!

In order to help us understand what grace has made us Paul takes us back in time to our former life in sin, apart from grace.

Formerly we were dead in our sins. This is not a popular view of humanity! This will shatter your self-esteem!

Spiritual death involves both insensitivity and alienation or separation. Being spiritually dead means you do not and cannot respond to God, just as a dead body does not respond to stimuli.
Now this is important if we want to understand grace.

Without the power of God's grace in our lives, we would still be dead because a dead person cannot help himself. People dead in sin do not think about God, obey God, or care about the glory of God. As far as they are concerned, there is no God.

But death also causes alienation. There is a huge separation, a tremendous gap, between God and those who are dead in sin.

Death is also corruption and it is offensive. Just as we are repulsed by a decaying corpse, a holy God is also offended by sin. People who are dead in sins cannot be pleasing to God.
Sin was once our native environment, like a fish is at home in the water, and this environment was a place of death.

But there is more.

We were also following the course of this World. The World Paul is talking about is that spiritual system of organized rebellion against God, which is recognized by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. We were caught up in the current of the World and swept downstream by its force, away from God, even though we were probably unaware of this force. The World is not neutral but is moving, and its movement is away from God.

We were also following the Devil. (In our text he is called “The Prince of the Power of the Air.”)

Everyone is subject to spiritual influences, and many of these spiritual influences are evil, that is, they are opposed to God and will lead a person away from God. Satan influences people who only live according to their earthly, carnal appetites. That is Satan's domain!

To sum it up, we were destined for wrath, that is, God's righteous anger against all unrighteousness.

It seems to some people that Paul is exaggerating our former condition. People who are dead often seem to be nice, cultured people. They don't seem to be dead. They seem to be very much alive! And they are alive to many things, but not to God. We were biologically alive in the world, but spiritually we were dead. People in this condition are alive to many things in the world like money, pleasure, fame, power or success.

You can remember a time when these things meant more to you than your connection to God. And many of these worldly pursuits are not evil. But God was never in your thoughts.

When people are in a state of spiritual death, it is easy for them to be swept along by the current of this present evil world. We are not aware of this; we just thought we were doing what we wanted to do. But that was an illusion. People in the world are swept along by trends, fads, fashion, and popular ideologies. We might call it being a slave to fashion or just wanting to fit in or to be hip. Young people especially just want to be accepted by their peers. No one wants to be an outsider. And so they are thoughtlessly swept along by the strong current of the World, which is actually Satan's domain. He is in control, but of course he lets them think it is freedom.

Jesus said that anyone who sins is a slave to sin. It is subtle deception! We think we are free, free to do what we want to do, but therein is the greatest slavery of all: the slavery to ourselves.

Perhaps you remember what a small world you used to live in, thinking only from day to day about what you wanted and how to get it! Nothing made you angrier than when something or someone got in the way of you being able to be happy, that is, being able to get what you wanted!

There is only one possible destiny for people who live like this. God has already passed judgment on Adam's race and He will also destroy the World that so many have come to love instead of the One who made the World and everything in it.

Of course, Satan keeps his people blissfully unaware of their true condition and destiny.

The problem with our former condition was not just the things we did, but it went deeper than that. The problem was what we WERE, not only the things we DID. People who are dead in sins can do all kinds of things, many of which appear to be very nice, moral, and even religious. The trouble is that none of these things, even the good things, were done unto God.

The living God simply cannot accept dead people. We had to be given spiritual life! And that is exactly what grace has made us in Christ—alive to God! This brings new sensitivity and new awareness. What we want is no longer the primary consideration when we are made alive to God!

God can work with people who are alive. In fact, the only people who can serve God effectively are those who have been given spiritual life and recreated in Christ Jesus.

When we begin to think of being saved, or the Christian life, in terms of actually being made spiritually alive then we begin to understand that Christianity is more than just morality or being nice. If being spiritually alive is the real issue then the mere practice of religion is not enough, because spiritually dead people can go to Church on sundays. Even signing off on all the right doctrine and belonging to the right Church or Movement comes far short of being made alive.

All of the best efforts of the Flesh are obnoxious to God, just like putting lipstick on a corpse.

A lot of religious activity is not done unto God, but is done for others to see. Spiritually dead people are more concerned about what other people think about them than what God thinks about them.

If we are honest, we can all remember when this was how we lived. We were dead to God, insensitive to His will, and thinking only about our own agenda. Even when we did something good, it was only for others to see, not for the glory of God. We may have even gone to Church, and on the outside carefully whitewashed our tomb, which inside was full of death and decay. In this state we were offensive to God and unable to please Him.

But now the grace of God has made us alive and a new creature in Christ!

There was a great Divine turning point in our experience. We were dead but now we are alive. There is only one person who could have done this. Only God can raise the dead. You could not raise yourself from death. God had to intervene.

Grace is God's intervention in the natural course of things, which always brings supernatural results. We must begin to see grace as a powerful force that gets things done. Grace is active. Grace does something and always accomplishes God's purpose. (What people call “grace” is really the mercy of God. God may have mercy on us, not treating us as our sins deserve. But grace goes further than this, not simply withholding wrath and judgment, but bestowing God's good gifts upon us. When Joseph revealed himself to his brother in Egypt, he sent them back to get his elderly father, Jacob. This was during a time of famine. Not only was Jacob's family being saved from the famine, they were also getting a first-class ticket to the best of the land of Egypt under Joseph's rule and care. When old Jacob saw the wagons, Joseph had sent for him and his family to go to Egypt, his spirit was revived! THAT IS GRACE!)

The grace that gave us life has made us part of God's eternal purpose.

Before this we were being swept downstream in the current of the World. Now we are right in the middle of the current of God's purpose. The eternal purpose of God is running throughout this context in Ephesians. Everything that has happened to us is really part of a Divine plan, formulated before the foundation of the world.

This kind of thing often sounds less than desirable to modern ears because we believe in our ability to make our own choices and chart our own course. But Paul has already told us that this kind of self-determination, or free will, is really an illusion. We were not in control of our lives. In the same way our rescue from our previous state was not something we could bring about ourselves. It had to be grace!

What has happened to us in Christ was not our doing but was part of God's plan. If we can somehow escape from the presuppositions of our Age, this truth of predestination can be a great source of joy and confidence to the believer in Christ. Paul is not saying that we are made into mindless drones or that God ruthlessly condemns people to Hell who desperately want Heaven.

God is the one responsible for us being in Christ, and not ourselves, which means it is all grace! In other words, God has made it possible for us to be saved because if there was no plan of salvation then no salvation would be possible, no matter how much we wanted it or searched for it, all would be lost. But God has opened the Door.

We were once outsiders but now we are insiders—made privy to the secret of the universe—a mystery that was once hidden but is now revealed in the Gospel. We were destined for eternal ruin and uselessness. But now we are on a new journey, one with a divinely appointed destination and purpose. The only way we could have gone from outsiders to insiders is if God chose to open the Door and let us in on His secret.

No philosophy or scientific experiment could have discovered the eternal purpose of God. If you know the Truth, it is by grace. We know God's plan through revelation. The Gospel is really the revelation of God's eternal purpose and our introduction or induction into it, and that by grace alone.

Now it was the Apostle Paul who seems to have had the most insight into the Gospel and this eternal purpose, more even than the other Apostles of Christ. When the time was right God let His secret out through Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. Indeed part of this mystery was that Gentiles could get in on God's plan, something that previously would have been thought impossible! Here was God once again doing something new, something surprising.

The grace of God is even big enough to reach out and include the Gentiles in the Plan of the Ages! The choice of God was clear and it is never a good idea to object to God's choice. God had chosen even the Gentiles by grace and no one has the right to veto grace. God's choice is the thing that makes grace what it is. Grace is God choosing to do what He wants to do and we can either get in on the blessing or get out of the way!

God has revealed what He intends to do and that purpose will stand and will not change. This purpose has been prepared over many centuries, with small-scale information leaks periodically. How blessed we are to live in these Times! It is an eternal purpose, prepared outside of time, and continuing even when Time will be no more and the heavens and earth passes away.

Even with the light of the Gospel we still do not see the fullness of God's purpose. Only in the coming Ages, while the ceaseless cycles of eternity roll on, God will unfold the riches of His grace. We have only touched the hem of the garment on this side of Eternity, locked within the confines of Time and the limitations of the Flesh.

Grace is preparing us for eternity, where the real story will begin, of which we have only read the first chapter.

Because we are part of an eternal purpose, we must be people with an eternal perspective. Our minds are not dominated by what is temporal.

Many Christians are afraid of being overly spiritual or too heavenly minded so as to be of no earthly good. But C.S. Lewis said "whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date." Nothing is more relevant than eternity. If our main preoccupation is the purpose of God it is not because we are checking out of life in this world, neglecting our stewardship and responsibilities, but because we know that ultimately no other agenda will succeed except for the purpose of God. Why would you be part of a losing team? Why invest in a bankrupt company? Why buy a ticket for a cruise on the Titanic?

Paul does not mean to make us into a bunch of starry-eyed mystics, gazing up at the heavens while life passes us by. He means to build our confidence in our calling and salvation, which are even more reliable than the heavens and earth. These things will pass away, but God's purpose will not.

By this time we should know about the instability of the world. Whatever can be shaken will be shaken. Our brother Henry F. Lyte wrote in his beautiful hymn "Abide with Me" about the world in which we live: "Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away; Change and decay in all around I see—O Thou who changest not, abide with me."

What we call sanctification is really the process of eliminating everything from our affection that competes with the eternal purpose of God. God's people have been taught to think of our life in the world as a journey, a pilgrimage, or a voyage to Glory. There is some baggage we can't take on this journey.

Any good journey has a destination that is predetermined. Otherwise we would never know where we are going! (Someone once stopped a stranger to ask for directions. "Where are you going?" he asked. The man replied "I'm not sure." The stranger replied "then the road you are on is just fine.")

Every journey has a beginning, middle, and an end. The same is true for salvation. The beginning is really what most people call salvation. But as long as we continue to sojourn in these mortal coils, our salvation is technically a work in progress. By grace we must remember where we have come and what we are in Christ.

Grace has united us with the resurrected Christ!

The Apostle is reminding us of these things so that we will not lose ground but will instead move forward toward the heavenly goal. In other words, you are not what you were so you can't go on living like you did!

Paul says that believers are in Christ; united or identified with Him. This is not just a metaphor but describes a spiritual reality. This is not a goal: that we should be united with Christ. It is a description of what it means to be saved by grace. By grace God put us in Christ. The implications are staggering to consider! And we must consider this often.

By way of contrast, we were IN Adam. We were identified with Adam and his race which is under God's condemnation. But now we have been united with Christ and everything that is true for Christ has been transferred to us. Just as Christ was raised, we have also been raised. Just as Christ has been exalted into the heavenly realms, we are also seated there with Christ. Now this may sound strange because our bodies are still on the earth. But the work is not finished. The goal is to bring everything in heaven and on earth together in Christ, and the first stage is accomplished by God putting us in Christ!

In order to understand the final destination of God's purpose we must first understand where we are now, saved by grace, having been made one with Christ.

Our connection with Christ is not like the connection we might have with a great hero of the past whom we admire and want to imitate. When we are connected to Christ, we are being connected to a living person. The fact that Christ is in heaven does not limit our connection to Him at all.

In fact, His presence in heaven is the thing that makes all of this possible. That is why He told His disciples that "it is for your good that I am going away." Christ can do much more for us in Heaven than He could while on the earth, being limited by space and time. If God's ultimate plan is to bring heaven and earth together, then it is only logical that the Redeemer needed to first descend to the earth and then ascend into heaven, which is exactly what Christ has done. And He will descend again when the plan of God reaches its fulfillment.

In the meantime, those who are in Christ, united with Him, are spiritually already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. Physically we are on earth. Spiritually we are already in Heaven, reigning with Christ. This is a prelude of things to come. But even now being seated with Christ in heavenly places, we have access to God through Him. And we are aware of a higher reality, no longer living with our heads nailed to the earth.

If all of this begins to sound too high-minded and mystical we need to go back to when we were first united with Christ, which was at our baptism. Remember that everything that is true of Christ is true for those in Christ. When we were baptized, we died with Christ and were raised with Him. The Lord gave us this visible way of remembering something that is invisible because this becomes an anchoring point for our faith.

We are to reason on what happened when we were baptized into Christ. A man put us under the water, but God put us in Christ, uniting us with Him and all the saving effects of His death, resurrection life, and ascension into the heavens. Where He is, there we will be also.

Now grace gives us the ability to see this union with Christ and to begin to appropriate its power. There are things that we must appropriate, or learn, or become acutely sensitive to and aware of—things that are not apparent to the senses. If this appropriation does not happen, we will not grow up in Christ, which is the goal of salvation.

Grace gives us more than forgiveness of sins. We also share in the life of Christ, having been united with Him. Ultimately the purpose of God is for us to be conformed to the image of His Son (Rom. 8.28-30). (We should be intimately familiar with what God is doing: God is creating a new race of men who are like His Son! He is the firstborn among many brethren. Adam represents the old race, and Jesus is the new. We belong to one race or the other, each with radically different destinies. The destiny of those in Christ is glorification – the final stage of salvation – but the process of change leading to glory begins here in this world.)

But how does this happen, practically speaking?

The Lord gives us what seems like terribly mundane ways to make this happen. We start with a humbling act of being submerged in water. Soon after this we are regularly ingesting very small portions of bread and wine. We read the Scriptures. We pray. We meet with other Believers, who are also called to do these things, and together we learn to care about each other. He may even ask you to give money! But notice all of these things require some kind of self-denial. And as we continue to deny ourselves each day, more grace is given, and with grace more of the life of Jesus.

Remember Naaman the Syrian who was desperate for a cure for his leprosy? He was told to simply dip seven times in the Jordan River, which at first he refused to do. But when he humbled himself and obeyed the Word of the Lord he obtained grace. The Lord sometimes asks us to do unexpected, perhaps even unexciting, things. But in our response of self-denial we are given grace, and eternal life.

In his letter to the Ephesians the Apostle wants believers to be able to comprehend the greatness of salvation so we will continue to grow in this grace. The grace of God has raised us from death and grace can also empower us to be filled with the very resurrection life of Jesus. Spiritually we are already seated in the heavenly places with Christ, but physically we are still in the lower, earthly regions. And so we still need the power of grace, until the work is finished and all of God's children are safely home.