"surprised By Grace"

“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.