The Weight Of Grace (Ephesians 2:4-8) Series

The Weight of Grace

Morning Lent Prayer, Day 7

Introduction

There is a moment in every honest person's Lent when the weight becomes real. Not the weight of the fast or the early morning prayer, but the weight of what you are actually fasting from, and why. You begin to sense that something deeper than discipline is at stake. Something larger than a calendar season is happening in your soul.

The season of Lent is designed for exactly this kind of reckoning. It is forty days of looking clearly at two things: the weight of your sin and the weight of God's grace. Most people are familiar with the first weight. We know what guilt feels like. We understand the heaviness of failure. What we often miss, and what the Apostle Paul refuses to let us miss, is that the second weight is far greater. Grace is not a light or fluffy word. It is not a theological ribbon tied around a gift. It is substantial. It is serious. It is heavy enough to carry the full weight of the world's sin.

The passage we bring before us today is Ephesians 2:4-5, where Paul writes, "But 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." Two small words sit at the center of that sentence and at the center of the entire Christian life: "But God." Everything before those two words is a description of death. Everything after them is a declaration of life. This sermon asks you to sit with both sides of that pivot and to feel the full weight of what grace means.

1. Recognizing Our Spiritual Death

Before we arrive at the grace, we must stay honestly in the diagnosis. Paul does not move quickly past the condition of the human soul before God. In Ephesians 2:1-2, he writes plainly: "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world." Notice that Paul does not say you were sick. He does not say you were weak or struggling or in need of a tune-up. He says you were dead.

This distinction matters enormously, and Lent is the season to feel its full weight. When we say someone is sick, we imply they still have resources within themselves to respond to treatment. A sick person reaches for the medicine. A sick person walks to the doctor. A sick person makes choices toward recovery. But a dead person does nothing. A corpse does not lift its own arm. It does not open its own eyes. It does not call for help. The condition of spiritual death, as Paul describes it, is not an activity problem. It is an incapacity problem. You were not just doing bad things. You were unable to do anything spiritually alive.

Romans 6:23 reinforces this with precise clarity: "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Wages are what you earn. Death is what sin earns. Paul is telling you that apart from God's intervention, the trajectory of a life lived in sin is not improvement; it is a settled, earned outcome of death. Ezekiel 18:20 says the soul that sins shall die, and Paul says every soul has sinned (Romans 3:23). The arithmetic is sobering.

Lent holds up a mirror and asks you to look honestly. The temptation is to soften the reflection. We prefer to think of ourselves as people who are mostly good but occasionally off-track. We prefer the narrative of the patient who needs a second opinion, not the narrative of the person who needs a resurrection. But Paul insists on the harder truth, because the harder truth is the only one that makes the grace make sense.

If you think you were merely sick, you will thank God politely for the medicine. If you understand that you were dead, you will fall on your face in awe that He raised you. The depth of your gratitude will always match the depth of your diagnosis. This is why Lent begins with ashes and the words of Genesis 3:19: "For dust you are and to dust you will return." It is not meant to depress you. It is meant to prepare you for the resurrection that is coming.

2. Marveling at God's Rich Mercy

Now we arrive at the pivot. "But God." Two words that divide every human story into before and after. In Ephesians 2:4-5, Paul writes: "But 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."