“Surprised by Grace”
Ephesians 2:1-10
We are a forgetful people.
I know I am.
I think that is one reason some of us wander from the faith.
To remember what the Lord has done is something the people of God have always been called to do.
For example, the Lord told the Israelites, back when they were wandering in the desert after being rescued from Egypt, to be careful to remember all the Lord had done for them.
God knew it would be easy for them to forget the God Who delivered them out of slavery, Who preserved them in the wilderness, and Who brought them into the Promised Land.
In Psalm 77:11, David talked about remembering “the works of the Lord,” and in Luke 22 Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, showing His disciples that He wanted His death to be remembered in a certain way.
The author of Hebrews worried that that persecuted congregation would wander from the faith and forget what God had done for them in Christ Jesus and so he wrote, “Let us…not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing…”
It’s important for us to remember what the Lord has done for us.
Forgetting the wonderful works of God in our lives can make us feel entitled like we deserve His grace and mercy.
Forgetting can also cause us to think that we have gotten to where we are on our own and that we don’t need God.
It can cause us to lose empathy for those who have yet to believe.
It can also contribute to our faith drying up and the fruit of our lives to stop growing…
…Not to mention our joy, peace, hope and love.
The call to remember is one of the reasons for Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
He doesn’t want them to forget where they were before God rescued them.
He wants them to continue the journey they have begun and the great work God has begun in them.
“Don’t give the devil a foothold” he warns them.
He wants them “to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that [they] may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
And so, Paul starts out our passage for this morning by reminding the Ephesians the condition they were in before God saved them.
And I think it’s important for all of us to remember this.
And the reason is that we are no different from the Christian people of Ephesus who lived some 2,000 years ago.
Do you remember what life was like--life without Christ?
Paul says that we were dead in our transgressions and sins.
Some of us it may not forget that we were once in this state.
For others, perhaps for those whose conversion to the faith was not very abrupt, it may be more difficult.
So, let’s try and remember.
The word Paul uses for sin is a word related to shooting.
It’s an archery word.
It literally means to miss.
Someone shoots an arrow at a target and the arrow misses.
It’s missing the mark.
That’s sin.
It’s failure to hit the target of life.
And what is the target of life?
To have a living relationship with God through Jesus Christ and to do the good works God has created in advance for us to do.
We often have a wrong idea of sin.
Most of us might agree that those who rob or commit murder are sinners, and that may cause some of us to think sin doesn’t have very much to do with us.
But sin is anything we do that falls short of Loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and Loving our neighbor as ourselves.
It’s any time we hurt another person by word, deed, action, or inaction, no matter how slight it may seem.
There can be no doubt that I am a sinner.
There can be no doubt that I do not love perfectly—not even close.
There can be no doubt that I fall terribly short.
And there can be no doubt that before I met Christ I was not even aware that there was any other way to live.
And that is because I was dead—spiritually dead.
The writer Thomas Lynch is not only an award-winning author but he is also the undertaker in the town of Milford, Michigan.
Mr. Lynch knows a thing or two about dead people but most of what he knows comes down to one very simple fact: the dead can’t do much for themselves.
If you want a corpse to move from one room to another, you’ll have to do it yourself.
Calling to the dead body is consistently ineffective.
The dead, Mr. Lynch reminds us, don’t listen worth a hoot.
You really just have to do everything for them.
In the same sense, if we are going to come alive, spiritually speaking, someone is going to have to do this for us.
And that Someone is Jesus Christ.
Back in the days of the Reformation, Martin Luther was debating with a guy named Erasmus.
Erasmus described God’s rescue like this: It was like a mother helping a baby learn to walk.
She holds the baby’s hand, steadies the baby’s little body, lets the baby take a few unsteady steps, and then catches the baby when she falls.
“No,” said Luther, “it was like a caterpillar surrounded by a ring of fire.
God reached down and plucked the helpless creature from certain death.”
And that is what Paul is saying here,
“because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
And we need to remember this!
Not long after my born-again experience, I backslid.
I lost my way.
And hard as I tried, I couldn’t get back on track.
It was the most horrible time of my life.
As time went by, I began to forget.
I tried and tried to get back to where I had been, but I couldn’t do it.
It took ten years, but eventually, I completely lost my faith in God.
I lost my ability to believe.
To be honest, this was a relief because I had been living with so much guilt for so long due to not doing what I knew was right.
At the time, I owned a Rock and Roll Tee-Shirt Shop in a mall.
And my customers were the heavy metal kids, the skateboard kids, the outcasts, the dirt bags, the kids I would have been hanging out with had it been ten years earlier.
And as time went by, I started to really care about these kids.
They shared their deepest feelings with me, their frustrations, and their anger.
At the time, my biggest seller…
…the band I was making most of my money off of was a band called Marilyn Manson.
Manson’s album, Anti-Christ Superstar was a huge hit and my young customers loved him.
One night, Manson, who claimed to be a minister in the church of Satan was performing on the MTV music video awards.
He got up in something that looked like a pulpit, except in the front it had an arrow pointing down.
Then he tore up a Bible and said something like, “Who would want to go to heaven anyway.
You’d just be surrounded by a bunch of … well, I’ll let you fill in the blanks.
This troubled me.
This was the guy my young customers idolized.
This was the guy I was making most o of my money off selling his tee-shirts, hats, watches, stickers, patches—you name it.
That night, I made a decision, and it was a decision I didn’t know if I could keep.
But I decided I would no longer sell Marilyn Manson Merchandise in my store.
At the very least, I did not want to be a part of the problem in the lives of these kids.
I wasn’t thinking of it this way, but I was making a stand in the name of love.
And God is love.
And it only takes a spark.
We need only to open that door just the slightest bit for God to come in.
The next day, out of the blue, my faith started to return.
And it startled me.
It surprised me.
I wasn’t looking for it.
And at first, I didn’t want it.
I started reading a book that my Uncle had given me a long way back.
It’s a book by J.B. Phillips called “Your God is Too Small.”
And once I got into that book, boy did my faith come roaring back!
And when that started to happen I became filled with joy.
It was a joy I had forgotten all about, but had experienced ten years earlier.
It’s a joy I had been missing.
It’s a peace I had been missing.
And an indescribable love poured into my heart.
I remember telling someone at the time, “I had no idea how unhappy I was.”
Because I had always felt the call to be a pastor I started applying to seminaries and the rest is history.
Through that experience, I learned what Paul is trying to express here in Ephesians Chapter 2 when he says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
I found that even my ability to believe is a gift.
I can’t even boast about that!
It is a precious, precious gift.
And it’s a gift that I had once taken for granted until I had lost it.
And so, I never want to take it for granted again.
I want to remember that before Jesus Christ plucked me from the ring of fire, I had been dead in my transgressions and sins, in which I used to live when I followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
I want to remember, that like the rest I was deserving of wrath.
“But because of his great love for [me], God, who is rich in mercy, made [me] alive with Christ even when [I] was dead…”
…and He has raised me up by the same power that He raised Christ from the dead on Easter morning.
Can you imagine that?!!!
Verse 6 says that [I] have even been seated with Jesus Christ in the heavenly realms.
Me???
What did I do to deserve this?
Absolutely nothing!!!
For it is by grace I have been saved, through a faith that I didn’t ask for, a faith I didn’t invent, a faith I didn’t deserve, a faith that is a gift…a gift from God…
…a faith, that if I accept it and live into it, will absolutely transform my life.
For I am God’s handiwork.
God has been working on a mess like me for a long time.
And it started when Jesus bled and died on the Cross.
I am God’s handiwork, He has been working in me ever since I was born.
I am God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to live the kind of life God prepared in advance for me to live at the very creation of the world.
And the same goes for YOU!!!!
I don’t want to forget this, although, shock of all shocks, sometimes I still do.
That’s why I must regularly attend church to worship the One Who saved me.
That is why I must read my Bible.
That is why I must pray.
And that is why I must put my faith into practice, loving God and my neighbors through loving action.
That is why I must treat this most precious of gifts like it is the greatest treasure in the world.
Because that is what it is!
Without it, I am as good as dead.
(pause)
This Thursday is Thanksgiving.
How about all of us make a pact, a decision, that when we are asked to express what we are most thankful for—we say, “I am most thankful that God loves me so much that He gave His One and Only Son so that Whoever believes in Him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.
I’m most thankful that God has given me the ability, the gift of being able to believe this.
And that through believing this, my life has been changed, transformed.
I have a hope.
I have a future.
I am no longer dead.
I am alive and I have a reason to live.
I have a calling.
And I want to pass it on.
Thanks be to God!!!
May we never forget.
In Jesus’ name and for His sake.
Amen.
