Dead, Enslaved and Condemned

If you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, I want you to turn to Ephesians
Chapter 2 this morning as we continue our study in the book of Ephesians. There are
six words that no one wants to hear from their doctor, and six words that no
doctor ever wants to have to say. Those six words are, I'm afraid I have bad news.
Some of you know that back in
Mary Ann and I had an experience like that. She had over a period of two years,
had three experiences where her tongue had twitched unusually.
She had just found herself like a muscle spasm in her tongue. I came home from
work one day, and she said, I had the weirdest thing happen. She told me about it.
Nothing happened for a year. It happened again a year later. Again, nothing for a
year, and then a third time, a year after that. So we just thought this was an
odd kind of a, like I said, a muscle spasm. But we happened to be at the doctor's
office and I said, she's had this tongue twitching situation. He said, oh, you
should see a neurologist about that. So we scheduled the appointment, went in, had
an MRI done, and they had scheduled us to come back the following week for the
results of the MRI. And the next day we got a phone call saying the doctor would
like to see you first thing tomorrow morning.
When you get that call,
you're not thinking, oh, I bet he has good news for us, right? And it turned out
he put the x -ray up on the board, and there you could see was a circle on the
left side of her brain. There was a mask there. A mask is what doctors call a
tumor before they know for sure it's a tumor, but it's a tumor that's there. And
the doctor said, you're going to need to have surgery to have this taken out. It
was bad news that we were getting that morning. It was not news that we wanted to
hear. It was not news that the doctor wanted to share with us. Now, it's been more
than 10 years. You can see Mary Ann sitting here. She's doing fine. We did have
the surgery. The mass was removed. Thank the Lord, everything was fine.
She didn't have to have radiation or chemo. There have been no lingering effects of
that, although from time to time I'll say, maybe this is that brain surgery thing
that is causing you to be like this?
So we're grateful for how all of that was resolved. But the passage we're going to
be looking at this morning is a bad news passage. It's a passage where Paul,
as a physician, a spiritual physician for our soul, comes to us and delivers bad
news about our condition. In the letter, as we've seen so far, Paul has been
telling us only good news. He starts in Ephesians 1 by saying, you have been
blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Every spiritual blessing
there is, you have it. He says, you have been chosen by God by His grace,
you've been adopted by Him into his family, you've been forgiven of your sins,
you've been redeemed, he's given you His Holy Spirit as a down payment on your
salvation. And then he prays for his readers, and by extension for us,
that the eyes of our heart would be enlightened, that we would come to know what
God has done for us in Christ, the hope we have in Christ, the riches of our
inheritance, and the immeasurable greatness of his power. He wants these things to be
things that we become more intimately aware of and acquainted with. I listened the
past week to the message that Kendall preached from Ephesians chapter 1 and the
message that Trey Tyler preached over the last couple of weeks. So grateful, so
encouraged, it helped me see in this passage how the resurrection and the ascension
of Christ puts the power of God on display, that he is able to accomplish every
good work in our lives, that the work he has begun in me, he will be faithful to
complete, and we have the evidence that he is able to do that and that he is
willing to do that because of what he has accomplished through Christ, through his
resurrection and his ascension. God has not only promised good for me, but he has
shown through the resurrection of Christ then through his ascension, that he's
powerful and he's able to accomplish what he has planned for me. And Kendall's and
Trey's sermons helped the eyes of my heart to be freshly enlightened,
and I trust they did for you as well. It is good and glorious news that is
declared there. This morning, I have to deliver the bad news. And this news is
actually a continuation of the good news, as we will see. But here's the premise
for the passage we're going to be looking at this morning. The three verses we're
going to look at today in Ephesians chapter two, verses 1, 2, and 3 will show us
that the more you can wrap your head around, your head and your heart around what's
being declared in these verses, the brighter and more clear the message of the good
news the gospel will become for you. The better you understand the bad news, the
more glorious the good news becomes. The more you see how bad the bad news is,
the more you'll see how good the good news is. And that's my own story. Until I
came to understand what we're going to be reading today in Ephesians 2 verses 1
through 3, I didn't fully understand the good news. I didn't understand the gospel.
I had a superficial or a deficient view of what these verses were teaching,
and as a result, I had a superficial and distorted view of the gospel. I was not
believing the true gospel, and I had that for several years from my late teens into
my early 20s. So my hope, my prayer for all of us here this morning as we look
at these verses as the eyes of our hearts will be enlightened as we come to
understand just how bad this bad news is. In fact, I think that the prayer that
Paul starts back in verse 16 of chapter 1 did not end at the end of chapter 1.
I think he's continuing through the first 10 verses of chapter 2. This is a part
of that prayer. This is what he wants us to be able to comprehend not only the
glory of God on display in the resurrection and ascension of Christ, but also the
glory of God on display in the finished work of Christ on our behalf. He is
showing us that these verses in Chapter 2 that the power of God is on display
through the resurrection in our life as we believe the gospel.
And the link between chapters 1 and 2 is that link. Paul says, I'm praying that
you will see more clearly that the eyes of your heart will be enlightened, how God
raised Jesus from the dead and has exalted him and how God is going to do the
same thing for you. He's going to raise you from spiritual death and bring you to
life. Actually, he's done it for the Ephesians because they're already believers. But
if God can raise Jesus from physical death and exalt him and put him at the right
hand, He can also take those who are spiritually dead and bring them to spiritual
life and can raise them up in glory as well. In fact, here's how one commentary
from a century ago describes the connection between these two chapters. I'm going to
read this slowly because this is really good. The love which went out toward the
slain and buried Jesus when the father stooped to raise him from the dead,
bends over us as we lie in the grave of our sins, and exerts itself with a might
no less transcendent that it may raise us from the dust of death to sit with him
in heavenly places. That's glorious news. But I'm getting ahead of myself,
because before we get to the good news, we've got to get to the bad news. So
let's read. We're going to read all 10 verses in the second chapter of Ephesians
and we'll focus this morning on the first three verses where the bad news is found.
Let me pray again before we open God's word. Father, we need you now to be our
teacher. We need you now to speak to us through your word by your spirit. We need
you to prepare our hearts. We need you to give us ears to hear. We confess that
all is vain unless the spirit of the Holy One comes down, and so we ask that you
would come down, be in our midst, and give us ears to hear and hearts to
understand and obey your word. Make us not just hearers of your word, but doers. We
pray in Jesus' name.
Ephesians 2 beginning at verse 1, this is the word of God for the people of God.
The Bible says, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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,
among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires
of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of
mankind. But God, being rich in mercy,
because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our
trespasses made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved and
raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ
Jesus so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace
in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through
faith. This is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works
so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for
good works, which he prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Amen.
May God bless this reading of His word. The grass withers and the flower fades. The
word of our God will last forever. I'm going to be borrowing John Stott's outline
for these verses, because I found it very helpful. I think it gives us the best
way for us to understand what Paul is saying here. Really, it's three words. You
were dead, you were enslaved, you were condemned.
This passage tells us that before we were in Christ, we were dead in our trespasses
and sins, we were enslaved by the world, the devil, and the flesh, and we were by
nature children of wrath, and we were condemned as a result of that. Now,
that's some bad news right there. Let's look more closely at what Paul is saying
here. Verse 1, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.
It starts with the word and, so that the beginning of chapter two connects to the
prayer in chapter one. It's ongoing, and he's continuing this. He wants the eyes of
our hearts to be enlightened by the glory and the power of God on display and the
resurrection of Jesus. He also wants the eyes of our hearts to be enlightened when
it comes to the reality of the seriousness of our spiritual condition apart from
Christ, who we were before we came to him. And he's writing to believers because he
says, and you were, he's acknowledging that this is not who they are today, but
it's who they once were, that this is not their current spiritual condition, this is
their past spiritual condition. This is who they were. And then he uses the word
dead. You were dead. The Greek word necrass is the word here. And it means dead.
It means not sick. It means dead dead. You were not on your deathbed still
breathing. You were gone. You were dead. And Paul uses that word to convey this
idea that before we were in Christ we were spiritually dead to him.
Before we were made spiritually alive, we were unresponsive to him. We were unable
to respond to him. We did not care at all about what he wanted from us.
We were dead to him. If you've been an actor, if you've ever done a presentation,
Sometimes actors will come backstage after a performance and they'll say, boy, the
audience was dead tonight. They don't mean that they were acting for corpses.
They mean that when they were doing what they were doing, the audience was not
responding the way you expect the audience to respond. They told the jokes, nobody
laughed. They did the sad scene and nobody cried. The people were just sitting
there. They were dead. They were not responding to what they were seeing.
After a relationship goes sour, sometimes we will say that person is dead to me,
right? I'm not responded to their texts anymore. I've tuned them out. I've got no
relationship with them anymore. When Paul says you were dead in your trespasses and
sins, that's what he's conveying. You were unresponsive to God. You are cut off from
God. You were separated from God. You were alienated from God. In fact, that's the
word Paul uses later in Chapter 4 of Ephesians when he says, describing the
spiritual condition of people apart from Christ. He said, they are darkened in their
understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in
them due to the hardness of heart. That's a description of what it means to be
dead, hard -hearted, alienated, cut off from God.
Now, people today have three ways of understanding the human condition, when they
think about who we are as human beings in relationship to God. Most people you know
have this view. They believe that men and women are basically good people who may
have done a few bad things. I mean, no one's perfect, but, you know, I've got a
good heart. You go up to somebody and say, what about this person? Oh, I know they
messed up here, but they've got a good heart.
That's how I saw myself before I was a Christian. Even during those years in my
late teens and early 20s, when I thought I was a Christian, I still
And as he read Romans 3, he said, I want you to read this because this is
describing you. And here's what I read. Romans 3, what then are we Jews better off,
not at all? For we have already charged, and both Jews and Greeks are under sin,
as it is written.
None is righteous. No, not one. No one seeks for God.
All have turned aside. Together they become worthless. No one does good,
not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive.
The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and
bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery.
And the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their
eyes. I did not like that description and did not like this guy telling me that
this was describing me. But that day in the summer of 1977, as I read that,
God's spirit graciously enlightened the eyes of my heart to say, this is you.
And it hit me hard. To see that I was not a mostly good person who'd done a few
bad things, but that I was a rebel, a stubborn, independent rebel who was happy to
have God along for the ride, but I was in the driver's seat. I didn't mind having
God with me on this journey as long as I was in control. Because,
after all, I'm a mostly good person, how much trouble are we going to get in
anyway?
God showed me in his word that that's not what's true about me,
that I was actually spiritually dead, that I was unresponsive to him. I really
didn't care about his agenda for my life. I cared about my agenda for my life. My
life was about me, not about him.
And by the way, I was in good company thinking that. Every three years,
Ligonier Ministries does a research project together with Lifeway Research, and they
check the theology, they ask theological questions of evangelical Christians, people
who go to good Bible -believing churches. They say, we're going to give you a
statement, and we want you to tell us whether you agree or disagree with this
statement and then they publish it, they put it online, and they've got this survey.
In fact, I think we can put it up there, can't we? Yeah, it's the state of
theology. What do Americans in 2025 believe about God, the Bible, and salvation?
Ligginere Ministries and Lifeway figured it out. And so one of the questions they
asked was, do you agree or disagree with this statement? Everyone sins a little, but
Most people are good by nature. That's the statement.
How many evangelicals do you think would say, I agree with that statement?
53%. 53 % either strongly or mostly agreed with that statement. And you may be one
of those 53%. If you are, Ephesians 2 is here to tell you, uh -uh.
you have significantly underestimated the seriousness and the deadness of the human
heart.
That's why the Bible tells us that we have to ultimately remove, God has to remove
a heart of stone and replace it with the heart of flesh. Our heart is in such a
condition that it can't just be repaired by taking vitamins or going on the
treadmill. No, this stone heart has to be taken out because a own heart will never
respond to God, you need a heart of flesh, and only God can do that transplant
surgery. So to those who think that we're mostly good people who've done a few bad
things, Ephesians 2 is here to tell us that's wrong. The second way people often
think about the human condition is they say, okay, yes, we are, we're in bad shape
because of our sin, but there's still a spark of goodness left in every person.
That spark of goodness that is the spark that somebody can respond to, they hear
the gospel, and somehow that spark of goodness gets fanned into a flame, and they
become Christians. These people would say, we're not dead, we're mostly dead.
Those of you who are old Monty Python fans will remember the scene where they're
saying, bring out the dead, you know, and the one guy is saying, I'm not dead yet,
right? You're mostly dead. That's how a lot of people see us in our spiritual
condition. We're mostly dead. We're sick. We're not in good spiritual health,
but there's still some health in us. They would say our hearts don't need
replacement, they need repair. Ephesians too, again, is here to tell us that your
alienation from God is total and your unresponsiveness to His Lordship is total.
Someone who says, I don't always disregard God. There are people who would say,
well, that doesn't sound like me. I don't always ignore God. What they're really
saying is, I listen to God when I feel like it, or when what he's saying agrees
with how I see. I listen to him then, but they're still saying, I'm in charge,
God's not. And this passage is saying, no,
you are dead in your trespasses and sins.
And that little word in is not, don't be lost on that. Throughout chapter one,
the Bible has been saying, you're in Christ, you're in Him, you find your life in
Him. Over and over again, Paul says, in Him this, in Him, that, in Him. Now he
says, you were in your trespasses and sins. You weren't in Christ,
you were in your trespasses and sins. You're either in one or the other. You're
either in Christ or you're in your own sins. If you're in Christ,
you're a Christian. If you're in your sins, you're a sinner. That's pretty simple.
And the two words that are used here in verse one, trespasses and sins, are two
different Greek words that describe this condition. A trespass means what you think
it means. It's when you step over a line and go to a place you shouldn't be
going. That's trespassing. The boundary is here, and you say, I'm going to ignore
the boundary and go into it. That's a trespass. A sin is to fall short, to miss
the mark. It's an archery term, as you've heard. The bullseye is here. You should
be aiming for it, but you always miss it. You always fall short. You can't hit it.
So you're stepping over the line. You're falling short of what you should be. Your
sin is both by omission and commission. You sin by what you do. You sin by the
things you don't do. You sin in your thoughts, your words, and your deeds. This is
a part of the dead spiritual condition. And this verse tells us that we walked in
our trespasses and our sins. We lived in it. Our sins and our trespasses directed
our lives. We were led by our spiritual, or excuse me, by our sinful impulses and
desires, as we'll see here in just a minute. But let me make this point here, and
this is really important. When we talk about being sinners, we usually focus on
sinful actions, the sinful things we do. We might also take into account,
sinful things we say, or sinful thoughts we have. But when the Bible talks about us
being sinners, it goes beyond our sinful thoughts and words and deeds,
and it talks about these as the manifestation of a sinful predisposition, a sinful
heart. Your sinful actions or thoughts or words come from a place of sin.
When God talks about our sinful heart, he's addressing
In order to be a Christian, I need to clean up my life. I need to quit doing
this and quit doing that. No, in order to become a Christian, you need a new
heart, you need new affections, you need new priorities in your life, and from that
will flow some of these different behaviors or different thoughts. But don't address
the thoughts and the behaviors, address the heart.
it's easy for us to think that we've got to become more moral people and so we'll
just rid our teeth and try harder to be nicer or to be more moral. No, we need
to pray and ask God to give us a different heart, new affections, a new desire.
And we also need to acknowledge, I think this is important, some non -Christians are
nicer and kinder and more ethical than some Christians are. I know non -Christians
where I would go, man, I wish Christians acted more like you. And I know some
Christians who need to get in gear.
And what is it, this can cause us to think, how can God rightly condemn somebody
who's a good moral person, like your non -Christian neighbor who is nice and kind?
How can God condemn that person simply because they don't believe in Christ?
thinks, that's the issue that God's addressing, unresponsiveness to him.
Christianity is about responding to and submitting to Christ,
acknowledging him as your Lord and your king. And from that, should come good fruit,
should come love and humility and gentleness and all the rest. But having the right
behavior and remaining alienated from or hostile to God, that's not pleasing to him.
The Pharisees proved that. The Pharisees had cleaned the outside of the cup. You
looked at them and said, they're very moral, righteous, religious people. But God
said, no, their hearts are far from me.
What condemns a man is his rejection of God, His deadness to God.
And the things he does out of that may look moral or may look immoral. It doesn't
matter whether it's moral looking or immoral looking. What matters is, is his heart
soft and responsive to God?
There's only one power in the universe that can take someone who is dead and make
them undead.
That's the power Paul was talking about back in chapter one, when he talked about
the immeasurably great power of God toward us who believe. We're dead in our
trespasses and sins. What can you do to help a dead person? It's only one thing a
dead person can do to have their deadness resolved, and that is to turn to someone
who has the power to take that which is dead and make it alive again. So you're
dead in your trespasses and sins before you come to Christ, but it doesn't stop
there. It gets worse. You're not only dead, unresponsive to God. You are enslaved.
Look at verse 2. Apart from God, we are following the course of the world,
the prince of the power of the air, that's Satan, and verse 3 says, and we're
living in the passions of our flesh. Those three things. the world, the devil, the
flesh.
We're going to look at each of those because this verse is telling us that these
things that are directing your thinking and your behavior are actually keeping you
enslaved. If you are following Jesus, the Bible says, or excuse me,
if you're not following Jesus, the Bible says you are following the course of this
world. And it's true because each of us have taken our cues for how we live,
how we behave, what we do from what we see around us, from the world. John Stott
says we live in a state of cultural bondage. We are bound by what the culture,
how the culture directs us. In fact, J .B. Phillips, in his paraphrase of the New
Testament, paraphrases this verse saying that before we surrendered our lives to
Christ, we drifted along the stream of this world's idea of living.
I remember in the later years of elementary school when I first started to care
about the clothes I was wearing because I started looking around at what the cool
kids wore or what got attention and I thought I'd need a wardrobe makeover.
I want to be one of the cool kids. 1968, I was in the sixth grade in 1968,
and one of my favorite TV shows in 1968 was this one, the Mod Squad.
Now, those three people up there, on the left, that's Lincoln Hayes. Next to him is
Pete Cochran and Julie Barnes. They are working for Captain Greer. Pete and Lincoln,
Julie, were role models for me for how to live. They had been bad kids that had
been arrested by the police, and they decided they wanted to do work for good, so
they joined the police to try to help the other bad kids get out. It was on the
Mod Squad where I first saw Lincoln Hayes wearing a Nehru jacket.
You know what? Remember the Nehru jacket like that?
And I went to my mom and I said, I want a Nehru jacket that I could wear. I
want to look cool like Lincoln Hayes looks. She did not share my enthusiasm for
that particular style. But here's my point. Watching a guy on TV in a Nehru jacket
made me think that's what I want to look like. That's what I want to do. I was
being molded and shaped by the world, by the culture. I wanted the approval of the
crowd, and It's true for all of us today. The Mod Squad's long gone, but through
media, through social media, through your interactions with friends, you look at those
Instagram pictures, and that's shaping your idea of what you should do and where you
should be and how you should look and how you should act. It's why we've got a
whole industry now of influencers. It's their job to influence you to follow the
trends that they tell you are the right trends to be following.
You are conditioned and shaped by the world, whether you know it or not, whether
you like it or not.
That's why the Apostle Paul tells us that we're to renew our minds. Not to be
conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of your minds. So
We're in bondage to the cultural influences in our world. We're also in bondage to
what Paul calls here the prince of the power of the air. Jesus called him the
ruler of this world. It's a phrase referring to Satan. And it's talking about his
delegated authority over the atmosphere in which we live, the prince of the power of
this atmosphere. The word for air could actually be a word that is translated the
foggy atmosphere indicating the darkness in which the devil likes to operate.
He likes things to be foggy and dark rather than brought to light. And he is at
work behind the scenes constantly wooing or tempting us away from God.
He doesn't care whether you're good or bad. He doesn't care whether your day is
happy or sad as long as God's not a part of it. That's what his agenda is, to
keep you away from God. And Paul is going to unpack the tactics and the strategies
of the devil later in this letter in chapter 6 when he wraps things up.
He'll remind us there that we are living in the middle of an ongoing spiritual
battle every day. We have an enemy who will do all he can do to keep us
distracted or alienated from God. And you may wonder, how does the devil do that?
What are his strategies and tactics? How does he work? I would just commend to you.
Pick up, if you have it at home, your copy of the screw tape letters by C .S.
Lewis. If you've never read this, it's a classic to get. These are letters from a
senior devil to a junior devil describing the strategies that the enemy uses to help
keep you distracted. Paul says Satan is at work in the Sons of Disobedience.
That's everyone apart from Christ. Sounds like a rock band to me, right? Let's go
see the Sons of Disobedience in concert. But that's the band you're a part of
before you're in Christ. You're a part of the group called the Sons of Disobedience.
You're a daughter or son of disobedience before you came to Christ. You're being
conformed to this world. Satan is doing all he can to get you distracted away from
God, and then you're being enticed at the same time by your own sinful desires and
appetites. What's called in verse 3, the passions of our flesh, carrying out the
desires of the flesh and the mind. So you've got working against you in your
unredeemed state, the world, the flesh, and the devil. We still have it in our
redeemed state. We still have to do battle with those three things. The problem is,
before you know Christ and you have a heart of stone, you're defenseless against the
world, the flesh, and the devil. There's nothing you can do. They will form you
into their mold. We did a catechism this morning. The world is catechizing you every
day.
Your flesh, I was thinking about this this morning. I was thinking about people who
would say, You know, I can quit this any time I want to. And you say,
well, why don't you? Well, I don't want to. So what you're saying is, my appetites
rule.
My flesh is in charge. Are you free?
It may not seem like bondage. In fact, non -Christians don't see themselves in
bondage. They look at Christians and say, you guys are the ones in bondage. You're
the ones who have all those, thou shalt nots, those things you can't do. You're the
ones in bondage. I'm free to do whatever I want to do. You have to follow the
rules. But just how free is anybody anyway? An unbeliever is not free to not sin.
He or she is not free to turn to God on their own. In fact,
John Stott helpfully summarizes this by saying, before Jesus Christ sets us free,
we were subject to oppressive influences from both within and without.
Outside was the world, the prevailing secular culture, inside was the flesh,
our fallen nature, twisted with self -centeredness, and beyond both, actively working
through both, was the evil spirit, the devil, the ruler of the kingdom of darkness
who held us in captivity.
Now, let's be honest here, do you recognize how influenced you are by the culture?
Do you recognize how the culture is fixing you into its mold? We live in a day
where failing to conform to the culture can get you canceled. You don't use the
right words. You don't use the right pronouns. You don't affirm the right values.
You don't denounce this group. Those ideas will be met with consequences.
You can lose your job if you fail to conform in our day. You can lose your
friends or your family if you fail to conform. In some settings, you can lose your
freedom if you don't conform. This culture is powerful,
more powerful than most of us realize. And the more time you spend drinking from
the fountain of the world, the more conformed you are to the world.
And let's just be honest about how helpless we are sometimes to resist our own
desires and passions. Whether it's a cupcake or a website, things we call guilty
pleasures,
All of this ends up giving our appetites or desires. We give into our appetites and
desires, even when we said we're not going to do that, we still fall to it. You're
either enslaved in bondage to your sinful heart, or you've surrendered your heart to
Jesus, and you can now fight against that. Bob Dylan said it this way. It may be
the devil or it may be the Lord, but you're going to have to serve somebody.
So this passage tells us that we are dead in our trespasses and sins. We're
enslaved to the world, the devil, and the flesh. And finally it tells us that along
with being dead and enslaved, we are also children of wrath. We stand condemned
before God. Let me talk about God's wrath for just a minute. We tend to shy away
from the idea that God is a God of wrath. We talk about him being a God of love,
a God of mercy, a God of grace. That's true.
But it's also true that he's a God of wrath. And most of us have a wrong
understanding of that idea. God's wrath is not like our wrath. God's wrath is not
uncontrolled angry outbursts that he regrets later. That's our wrath.
We explode and then we have to go back and say, I'm sorry I shouldn't act like
that. That's not what God's wrath is like. It's not a bad temper.
And it's not at odds with his love and his grace. His wrath and his grace coexist.
Paul sees no contradiction between calling you children of wrath and in the next
verse talking about God being rich in mercy.
He doesn't see any contradiction in those two ideas.
In fact, it is because of God's great love for his children that he will pour out
his wrath one day on all sin and evil and wickedness.
In fact, I'm going to quote John Stott again here. This is so good. He said, we
need, I think, to be more grateful to God for his wrath and to worship him that
because his righteousness is perfect, he always reacts to evil in the same
unchanging, predictable, uncompromising way.
Without his moral constancy, we could enjoy no peace.
Let me also point out when the Bible tells us that we are children of wrath, that
we deserve God's wrath, we deserve it by nature. This means it's in your DNA to
rebel against God.
You inherited this predisposition from Adam to sin. You didn't become a sinner the
first time you sinned. You sinned for the first time because you were already a
sinner.
In the early days of the church, I remember we had a family that left because the
dad in this family could not condone the idea that God would rightly condemn us
because of the sin of Adam. He said, I've done enough sins of my own, but he
would not buy into the idea that he was inherently sinful, and it was enough that
they said they can't stay here. It bothered him that God would pour out his wrath
on anyone on account of the sin of Adam. Well, here it is. The sin of Adam is
what predisposes you. You are born alienated from God. So God's not punishing you
for Adam's sin. You are predisposed to Adam to the same sin, but it's your sin.
It's in you because you were in Adam. It's a universal condition. It affects all of
mankind.
Now, let me ask you here, this is sobering to think about it. Do you think that
apart from Christ, you are someone who deserves the wrath of God.
Do you see yourself as someone deserving of God's eternal punishment apart from
Christ? I think it's natural when we hear about the wrath of God to shift into
kind of a protective mode and go, well, I'm not that bad.
You know, maybe I deserve a time out or a spanking, but wrath, I mean,
I understand why that person would deserve God's wrath, but me, I'm a mostly good
person. We're back to that idea. Here's why we deserve God's wrath. It's in Romans
1. In fact, I want you to turn in your Bible with me to Romans 1 because we're
going to spend a little time looking at this. This is helpful as we think about
the wrath of God.
Romans 1,
And look at verse 18 with me.
Here's what Paul says. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Let me just stop there. The Bible is telling us that Every man has an awareness of
the truth that there is a God and that people actively suppress that truth. They
come up with ways not to believe that because they don't like the implications.
Actively suppressing the truth. Verse 19, for what can be known about God is plain
to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes,
namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the
creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without
excuse. What it's saying is you're going to look around and see the world and it's
clear, there must be a God, but men who look around and see and think, oh, there
must be a God, but I don't like that idea, so they'll actively suppress the
knowledge and go, or else some gas exploded and that's why were here.
Verse 21. Although they knew God, which every man does, every man is born with the
knowledge that God exists. Conscience and creation bears witness. They did not honor
him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking their
foolish hearts were darkened. Now just look right over the next page in chapter 2,
Verse 5, where Paul says to the Jews, because of your hard and impenitent heart,
you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous
judgment will be revealed. Refusing to honor or glorify God or give thanks to God
in all things is a wrath -inducing offense.
Refusing to give thanks is a serious offense. It leads to a hard and impenitent
heart, and God's wrath will one day be poured out on all who persist with this
hard heart and remain impenitent. Those who refuse to honor God,
glorify God, give thanks to God, are storing up wrath for themselves. And that's who
you were before you knew Christ. So here's Dr. Paul's diagnosis of our spiritual
condition apart from Christ. You're dead in your trespasses and sins, alienated from
him. You're enslaved to your sin, and you are children of wrath, refusing to honor
or give thanks to God you're deserving of judgment. And that, friends, is a terminal
condition. It's 100 % fatal unless it's treated.
That's the bad news. Do you understand the bad news? Do you believe the bad news?
Do you believe it's true about the human condition and about you before you came to
know Christ? Or you today, if you don't know Christ, if you've not surrendered to
Christ? As I said when we started, if you could wrap your head and your heart
around this description of our spiritual condition, you will be able to better
understand, more fully appreciate and embrace the grace and mercy of God in the way
that we should. You will have an incomplete and insufficient understanding of God's
mercy and his grace in the gospel until you get your head around verses 1, 2 and
3 of Ephesians chapter 2. And Paul's prayer for us is that the eyes of our heart
would be enlightened, that we would see the reality of our spiritual condition apart
from Christ if we are still in sin instead of being in Christ. And as we'll see
next Sunday, when we turn to verse four, there are two words that begin verse four
that are two of our favorite words in this entire letter, the two words but God
that are the game changer,
that take your spiritual condition and say, wait, There's a cure. So I'll leave you
with that cliffhanger until next Sunday, all right? Let's pray. Father,
we thank you that you pull no punches in giving us this description of our sinful
hearts, that you help us see that we are not mostly good people who've done a few
bad things, but that we are stubborn, resistant, hard -hearted,
impenitent,
that we care about us and not about you,
that apart from your grace, we deserve your wrath.
Thank you that the story does not end here. And Lord, I pray for all Here today,
anyone who does not know you, who is not surrendered to you, or who has had an
incomplete understanding of the reality of their spiritual condition,
I pray that your spirit would do what your spirit did for me back in 1977 and
wake us up to see the terrible reality of our spiritual condition apart from you,
that you would extend mercy and grace so that we might have a new heart and have
that heart of stone replaced. I ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.