“Dead or Alive?”
Ephesians 2:1-10
Several years ago, a Los Angeles County parking control officer found a brown El Dorado Cadillac illegally parked next to the curb on a street-sweeping day.
The officer wrote out a ticket.
Ignoring the man seated in the driver's seat, the officer reached inside the open car window and placed the $50 citation on the dashboard.
The driver of the car made no excuses.
There was no argument--and with good reason.
The driver of the car had a heart attack twelve hours before but was sitting up, stiff as a board, slumped slightly forward.
He was dead.
The officer, preoccupied with ticket writing, didn’t notice.
He got back in his car and drove away.
(pause)
“As for you, you were dead…”
That’s how the Apostle Paul starts Chapter 2 of his letter to the Ephesians.
“You were dead.”
That can be a startling thing to hear when you think about it.
It also doesn’t make a lot of sense, on the face of it.
I suppose if you knew someone who had a near-death experience, where their heart had stopped beating on the operating room table or perhaps on the football field like Damar Hamlin and then the doctors or EMTs got their heart going again and these people were yanked back to life—then you could say to that person, “You were dead” and they would be able to relate to what you’re saying.
Usually, though, this sounds a little nutty.
If you told your friend, “You were dead, Bill.”
Bill might steer you in the direction of professional counseling.
Or steer clear of you all together for a while.
Yet Paul gives the Christians in Ephesus, at the beginning of this chapter, a piece of news they didn’t see coming: “You were dead.”
Paul, of course, is referring to the time before the members of the Ephesian Church became Christians.
But still, what might be shocking to the Ephesians is that during the time in their lives when Paul says they were dead, they had certainly not looked dead.
They hadn’t felt dead.
As a matter of fact, some of them might remember when people used to refer to them as “the life of the party,” and they weren’t Christians yet.
Or they might remember when they would get together with friends and go to the beach.
They didn’t feel dead then—as a matter of fact, they never felt more alive than when they were together.
But Paul’s words hang there: “As for you, you were dead.”
The writer Thomas Lynch is not only an award-winning author but also an undertaker in his town of Milford, Michigan.
He knows a thing or two about dead people but most of what he knows comes down to one simple fact: the dead can’t do much for themselves.
If you want a corpse to move from one room to the other, you’ll have to do it yourself.
Calling out the name of a dead body is not very effective either.
The dead, Mr. Lynch reminds us, don’t listen worth a hoot.
You have to do everything for them.
Spiritually speaking, that’s Paul’s understanding of anyone’s life outside of Christ.
“You were dead.”
And the dead can’t do anything for themselves.
That’s why the message of Jesus Christ is such good news: “it is by grace you were saved.”
And this is not your own doing, Paul says in verse 8.
You were dead, and the dead can’t do anything for themselves.
Only grace can raise the dead.
Only grace can bring us salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ’s death and Resurrection is the only thing in the history of the universe that can fix what is broken between God and us, and we can’t even come to believe in it and be saved by it on our own.
Even the ability to believe it is a gift of God.
That’s right, faith is a gift from God.
And it comes to us, even when we are least expecting it.
As Jesus says in John Chapter 3, “The wind blows wherever it pleases.
You hear it’s sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.
So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
The saving is God’s doing, not ours.
And yet, God gives us credit for it—for the work of Jesus on the Cross, it is through Him that we become alive.
And only grace—the greatest gift in the entire world can do that!
That’s why Paul didn’t say, “It is by your resume you were saved,” or “your good looks,” or “your family of origin.”
No, he said it is by grace you were saved, and this has nothing to do with you at all.
You were dead.
All you could do was receive what God had to give you.
It’s not about giving, it’s about receiving.
And that’s all good, but before Ephesians Chapter 2 is finished, Paul talks about good works after all.
Apparently, after you get up off your knees in receiving what only God in Jesus Christ can give, after grace has arrived, there is some stuff to do.
But how does that fit in with grace?
Isn’t this like hopping back onto some moral treadmill and trying to please God with what we do?
Or do we need to distinguish between “Please” and “Thank you”?
The Christian life, it turns out, is how we say “Thank you,” how we show that we understand it’s all a gift.
Gratitude is a big deal because when we realize that we were raised to life by the grace of God in Christ Jesus, then we also realize that the entirety of our lives from that point forward is to be one big chunk of gratitude, on big ongoing way of saying “Thank you” to God.
That’s why every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them fall down and worship Christ in Revelation Chapter 5 saying, “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”
Heaven will be wonderful because we will be with God—the God who saved us—and our joy will be worshiping Him.
It will be something we want to do—not an obligation.
And this is how worship should be while we are on earth as well.
Certainly, right now, we see as in a mirror dimly, but if we have been brought to life in Christ, we will want to worship Him—it will be our joy.
So many say, “I can be a Christian on the golf course or at home just as well as
I can at church.”
But that’s not true.
Church is about the saved gathering to worship the One Who has saved them.
It’s kind of like a practice run for heaven.
It’s also a reminder of what our lives are to be about.
In most languages, the word for grace is related to the word for gratitude.
In Greek, the word “charis” is “grace.”
And the English word “grace” is related to the word “gratis,” which means something free, and from that, it’s a quick jump from “gratis” to “gratitude.”
Our lives are to be one big overflow of gratitude, of God’s grace spilling out over the edges and enabling us to accomplish everything we do in our studies, our work, our families, our church, our careers.
What we do, how we live, what we accomplish matter only because they flow out of God’s grace.
Take away grace, and we’re still dead no matter how busy and alive we seem to be from the outside looking in.
But throw grace into the mix, and we are alive in a way that means we can never be dead again!
Paul saw no inconsistency whatsoever between saying in one verse, “forget about your works,” and saying in the very next verse, “In Christ, you have been created to do good works!”
All throughout history, people have wanted to talk back to Paul and say: “Come on, Paul, make up your mind!
Which is it: do we try to lead good lives or don’t we?”
But for Paul this question is a non-starter because he knew how powerful God’s grace is.
When a grace powerful enough to raise the dead gets deep inside us, it’s going to bubble up in the rest of our lives.
We won’t be able to hold it in.
It’s like shaking a bottle of Coke—once you take the top off, it’s going to explode with energy because the fizz was already in the bottle to begin with.
“You were dead.”
That’s a piece of bad news no matter how you slice it.
“But now you have been made alive in Christ.”
That’s good news that’s so amazing, it defies description.
Is this your good news?
Were you “dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air…” but are now alive in Christ, created and being recreated into His image “to do good works which God prepared in advance” for you to do?
Is that why you praise God with your life?
Has Jesus saved you by grace through faith?
If not, this can be your good news.
This can describe your life.
Let us pray:
Dear God, I am so thankful that while I was still dead in my transgressions and sins You gave Your life for me.
I am so thankful that You did this because you love me so much.
I want to be alive, not dead.
I want to open your free gift of salvation.
I want to thank you with my entire life.
In Jesus’ name and for His sake.
Amen.
