The Devil Series

In my freshman year of high school I went out for tennis. I wasn’t very good. The coach never took me to even one away meet because most everybody was better than I was. But I had a lot of fun. It was great being outside with my friends in the springtime. And tennis wasn’t near as much work as most other sports. And I even learned some things about tennis.

One day I challenged one of my friends, who wasn’t on the team, to a match. I could beat him. One thing I learned was how to put a spin on the ball. Chop down on it and it goes off with a nasty spin. And every once in a while, I would hit these easy lobs towards my friend. He would see them coming and figure it would be easy to calculate where the ball was going to bounce and he could return it easily. He’d be in place for it and ready for his return. But because of the spin I put on it, it would never bounce straight ahead like he expected it, but always went over to the side. And most of the time he never got to it. And he just couldn’t figure it out. He got very frustrated. He never figured it out. And I don’t think I ever told him. And I had a lot of fun from just learning that one little trick.

Do you ever feel like things in your life don’t bounce the way they should? Challenges come towards every one of us every day. That’s normal. We figure we should be able to handle them. But every once in a while there is something more, something irrational, something sneaky. Sometimes it just seems that everything is more complicated or scarier or stirs up some argument or conflict that’s totally unnecessary. You set out to play it straight and then it bounces crooked.

We’ve been working our way through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. I summarized chapter 1, as “You’ve Got a Lot Going For You,” because there Paul describes this incredibly wise and powerful and loving God, one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But it isn’t that simple. Paul starts out chapter two with warnings that we’ve also got a lot going against us. And he forewarns us so that we can be forearmed. And with that I’ll ask Sylvia to come and read our text for us, Ephesians 2:1-10. But we’ll mostly focus on verse 2.

1 You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3 All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5 even when we were dead through 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 ages to come 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 the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Last week we talked about what Paul and Jesus called ‘the world.’ That’s the accumulation of distorted, often sick ways that people interact, the pressure that we feel to go along with destructive, foolish things. It’s very close to the ‘peer pressure’ that we warn junior highs about. The world is something that can really pull us down.

Today we come to another deadly threat against our souls: the devil. There is something more in this world than just human stupidity or human meanness. How can you explain the hold that came upon the German people that gave us the slaughter of 5 million Jews and plunged most of the world into an inconceivably horrendous war? Add to that the atrocities of the Communists in Russia and China against their own people, genocide in Armenia, Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda, Darfur, and on and on. How do you explain Arabs who go to a fellow Arabic nation and blow up markets and busses and shoot police officers, people who blow up a whole federal office building with a preschool inside or crash airplanes into giant office buildings just filled with human beings? Do you think the devil might have a hand in such things? Sometimes the ball bounces really crooked.