Most of you will recognize the name, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. He was a priest in the Church of England in the 1700’s who preached up and down the British Isles and organized people into small groups everywhere he could with a format that brought thousands of people into a new life and a living relationship with Jesus Christ and empowered them to do incredible works of service for those in need. He made real disciples for Jesus Christ and he made a lot of them.
Historians have asked why it was that France exploded in the French Revolution, with the mass beheadings by guillotine and years of turmoil that ended up in the dictatorship of Napoleon that plunged all of Europe into war, while England with much of the same social injustice as France did not explode. Some historians say that the primary reason that England didn’t explode was the ministry of John Wesley, who turned the hearts of England, first to God and then to the poor.
John Wesley was a preacher of grace. He emphasized what he called prevenient grace, God’s Spirit working in our hearts even before we believe, justifying grace, by which our sins are forgiven by the death and resurrection of Christ on our behalf, and sanctifying grace, by which the life of God fills our souls and makes us new.
But let me read you a very curious entry from John Wesley’s journal, dated Sunday, May 14, 1738, a day that he was guest preacher in two churches in London. “I preached in the morning at St. Ann’s, Aldersgate; and in the afternoon at the Savoy chapel, free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ. I was quickly apprized, that at St. Ann’s, likewise, I am to preach no more.”
Wesley preached “free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ,” and they told him, you’re never preaching here again. It wasn’t long before pulpits all up and down England were closed to John Wesley. The only way he could get an audience was often to just go out into the marketplace, or along the road where coal miners walked on the way to work, sing a few hymns to draw a crowd, and then preach to anybody who would listen.
When he went back to his home church, where his father had been pastor for years, the new pastor wouldn’t let him speak in the church. So he went out into the church graveyard and preached outside, standing on his father’s gravestone, figuring nobody would deny him that pulpit.
And up and down England the good church people rejected John Wesley while the unchurched masses came out to hear him in droves and found new life in Christ through his preaching and his small groups. And the day did come when some churches could no longer deny his anointing from God and he became widely respected. But there was something in the churches that found it very hard to hear a message of salvation by grace. And I don’t think they were that much different from most churches today.
We’ve been working our way through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. We’ve already spent three Sundays in the first ten verses of chapter 2. So far we’ve talked about the three big enemies that we have going against us, the degrading influence of the world around us, the temptations and deceptions of the devil and our own selfishness, which Paul calls the flesh. Those are in verses 2 and 3 of our text. Instead of standing up and accepting God’s call to rule this earth in love and righteousness, we have all followed these three enemies of our souls, every one of us. And so Paul is clear in his letter to the Ephesians, and in his letter to the Romans and in his letters to the Galatians, Corinthians and Thessalonians, as well as letters to his sidekicks, Timothy and Titus, that we are really, deeply, messed up by these enemies of our souls, the world, the devil and the flesh. In our text for today, Ephesians 2, he tells the Ephesians that they were dead through their trespasses and sins.
The combination of the world, the devil and our own selfishness leaves us spiritually dead. A physically dead person has no appetite for food. A spiritually dead person has no appetite for God and can go for days without a serious talk with God. They can even go to church without a serious talk with God. Think about that. A spiritually dead person can even go to church without a serious talk with God.
A physically dead person knows nothing about what is going on around them. A spiritually dead person has no sense of the wonder of God’s creation around them. It’s just stuff, just a meaningless, empty world to be exploited.
A physically dead person doesn’t worry about whether things are right or wrong. A spiritually dead person has a dulled sense of morals, a fuzzy understanding of right and wrong, and can cut corners easily.
A spiritually dead person can see people hurting and turn away. They can’t see that every human on earth was originally created in God’s image and so is very, very important.
And the world tells us to just do our best and we’ll be OK. The world tells us to believe that basically we are OK, just believe in ourselves. We can all find somebody who does something worse than us and use that comparison to tell ourselves we’re pretty good, after all. Have you ever heard such things?
Did you ever realize that the Bible says we are not OK? We can’t do it ourselves. Did you ever let that sink in? Our hope is in God’s grace, which we receive through faith. Our hope is not in being good enough. That’s a dead end.
We talk about salvation by grace very lightly and glibly in the modern church. And yet most of our lives blatantly deny it. It’s a hard doctrine.
Wesley went on in his journal to explain that every human being works very hard to build up their own, self-justifying, mental framework of why they are good enough. We all tend to make our personal lists of good works by which we figure we have earned our salvation and don’t really need God that much, so we are free to go our own way.
Religion can become an inoculation against a living relationship with God. Every church makes lists of rules that give you a few things to do with the false promise that doing these things make you good enough.
In some churches it may be rules that say if you don’t drink or smoke or dance you are OK. In some churches it may be that if you don’t use anything but the latest, most politically correct inclusive language you are OK. In some churches it may be that if you can recite the proper doctrines you are OK. If you like the right style of worship with whatever list of favorite hymns or choruses, then you are OK. And their victims go to church and honor those few rules and then go home and feel they are OK and they don’t really need God at all.
Wesley called the Christian teaching of salvation by faith in God’s grace a downright robber, that takes away all the accumulation of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction that we accumulate and use as insulation to keep God at a distance.
So now can you understand this strange entry in Wesley’s journal?
“I preached in the morning at St. Ann’s, Aldersgate; and in the afternoon at the Savoy chapel, free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ. I was quickly apprized, that at St. Ann’s, likewise, I am to preach no more.”
I’ll ask Joe to come and read our text for us now, and as we do, listen to what Paul says. Apart from God we are really messed up, dead. We cannot make it on our own. Our only hope is to come to God with faith in his grace.
Please stand for the reading of God’s word. And right after that we’ll have a short interview with Paul himself about it.
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.
There are two ways that it’s dangerous to let go of the doctrine of salvation by God’s grace. The first way is taken by those who try to earn their salvation by being good enough and realize that they can’t make it. And that leads to a heavy load of condemnation. “I’m not good enough to be a Christian. I don’t have a chance of being accepted by God.” It can lead to deep depression. Or it can lead to a kind of perfectionism that is always having to take your own temperature, always questioning whether you are doing things well enough. And of course nobody can do everything perfect.
This may be more common among those who were raised by an overly demanding or overly critical parent or those who have had their basic trust in life upset by some trauma.
And it leaves people very tied up with themselves, very hard on themselves, and usually very hard on everybody else as well.
Those who try to earn their own salvation, but realize they can’t, have it half right. They recognize their own limitations. But they sell God’s grace way short and in their fear of God’s rejection they push away their only hope and try to live apart from God until they believe they can earn their way to acceptance.
But the other way is even worse. That’s those who believe they can be good enough to earn God’s blessings. They set up their own standard, suitable to whatever they want to deal with and whatever they want to avoid. Maybe their standard is going to church once a week, maybe just once a month. Maybe it’s not swearing as bad as that other guy. Maybe its having right opinions about theology or social issues. Maybe it’s giving a certain amount of money. And it’s like giving God a bribe. “Here, take this, God, and leave me alone.”
This way may be more common among those who had a parent who were afraid to ever say ‘no’ to their children, who didn’t get around to impressing their children with the importance of right and wrong, who put open-mindedness as the highest morality, or who never bothered to really give their children real moral training.
And they go through life blind to the whole wealth of blessings that God intends for them.
We are saved by grace. Our only hope of salvation is God’s grace. And sure, we do our best to obey God and live a good life. But that only works once we have the foundation laid. Our hope of salvation is in God’s grace, not our own works.
The world, the devil and our own selfishness and dullness doom our efforts to earn our way to salvation. Some do better than others, but we all fall short.
Imagine a swimming race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Some drop out in the first mile. Some last 10 miles. Some, heroically, last 100 miles. But nobody swims from Los Angeles to Hawaii. We can’t do it alone.
Not even the greatest Christian saint in history is good enough to earn salvation. Paul wrote to the Romans “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)
And when we quit trying to fool ourselves that we can do it, it’s only natural to come Christ. We throw ourselves on his grace and stop pushing him away. And he is there for us. When we allow ourselves to be united with Christ, when we open our hearts to him to walk with him every day and allow his Spirit to live inside us and fill us, then it’s no longer us alone, but Christ in us. And then there is hope.
It is when we dare to take Christ at his word and come close to him that we come alive. In our text Paul draws a direct connection between Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and exaltation. In verse 5, when we connect with him, his victory becomes ours, making us alive. His Spirit inside us makes us what we can never be alone. His Spirit in our hearts opens our eyes to the wonder of creation, gives us a hunger for more fellowship with this wonderful God, gives us a deep concern to live moral lives, pleasing to our savior, a sharing in his compassion for our fellow human beings.
In verse 6, Christ in us raises us up to a new life. We start to find ourselves walking in a new dimension of hope and joy and peace.
And, again in verse 6, in connection with Christ we come to be seated in the heavenly places, enjoying the blessings of love from God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, no longer meekly following the pushings of the world, the devil and our own flesh, but more and more starting to win the battle for our souls.
But that’s nothing that we can do ourselves. It happens when we dare to trust in his grace and walk in his grace. Be grace we are saved. AMEN
