"dead Or Alive?"

“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.