Battle Ready: "But God... " Eph 2:4-5 Pastor Daniel Reese

So if you have your Bibles will be in Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

When we began our study on Ephesians 2 last week, we saw that Paul painted a

very realistic and yet very disheartening picture of what our lives were like before Christ.

Paul made it very clear that we need a Savior because without one we are dead in our trespasses and sins.

We were dominated by the world, dominated by Satan and our flesh and we were doomed to face the wrath of God.

But fortunately Paul doesn't leave us there.

He makes it quite clear that God had an answer to all the problems that we have apart from Christ.

And so let's look together what Paul writes about God's answer in verses 4 and 5.

But God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he has loved us,

even when we are dead in our trespasses made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved.

Amen. There is a sense in these verses in which those two words at the very beginning may very well be the most

important two words in the Bible because they show how God enters into our lives and how he works in our lives

with those he created to do a work in us that no man could ever do, that we could never do.

But God, those have to be two of the most exciting, encouraging, hopeful words in all of God's word.

So it's no wonder that Paul chooses to use them at this point in his letter.

He has just finished writing about the total hopelessness of man apart from God.

But with these two simple words, Paul immediately restores a sense of hope.

Things looked really bad for all of us.

We were dead. We were dominated and we were doomed.

Think about the sense of hope that can come with those two words.

Time and time again I hear people telling me their story, telling me about how bad their life was.

And then it's like it comes out of nowhere.

I was heading down the wrong path, but God got my attention.

I was struggling with infertility, but God provided a child for me.

I was struggled with addiction, but God helped me overcome it.

But God, I mean those words, there's hope.

Paul is about to reveal to us how God entered into our lives to deal with the death and domination and doom

that we all experienced at one time.

Next week we're going to come back to this passage.

And we're going to see how Paul addresses each of these problems that we faced.

But what I'd like to do this morning is to focus briefly on why God did all of this for us.

Why did God choose to enter into our lives to redeem us from the kind of life that we looked at last week?

Why did God save us?

We can answer that very question in very simple terms.

God saved us because of his nature.

We learned about that in chapter one.

It is God's nature to choose us, to redeem us, to secure our future, and to pour his power into our lives.

But in this passage, Paul describes three particular attributes of God's nature that bear particular relevance to God's work in saving us.

The first one is he responded to our lostness with his love.

Paul says, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses.

I'm really amazed how God responds to our lost condition.

What we deserve is his justice.

What we deserve is his wrath and his anger and maybe even his disgust.

But instead, God responds to us with his love.

I think one of the reasons that we have such a hard time understanding how God could do that is we don't really understand that kind of love.

When we think about love, we tend to think of an emotion, we tend to think of a feeling, but the kind of love that God demonstrates towards us,

and which, by the way, he commands us to show to others is an act of the will.

It's not an emotion.

As we'll see here in just a moment, God is moved with compassion towards us.

But that is not the primary expression of his love for us.

In fact, in this passage, Paul has a particular expression of God's love for us in mind.

So let's take a closer look at what Paul writes here.

The first thing we notice is the greatness of God's love.

Paul uses both the verb and the noun forms of the word love, and God's love is described to us as his great love.

As we've already seen several times, Paul likes to use this kind of grammatical structure whenever he wants to emphasize the greatness of something.

For instance, we saw that several times back in chapter one when Paul wrote about God's incomparable great power.

As we'll see in much more detail in just a moment, the love Paul is describing here is without a doubt the greatest love the world has ever known.

But there is something about what Paul writes here that really catches my attention.

When he writes about his great love with which he loved us, you'll notice that he uses the past tense of that word, God loved us.

My first reaction to reading that was to wonder, did Paul mean to use the present tense?

God loves us.

I mean, after all, I know that God still loves me. I know that God still loves you.

But after further reflection, it appears to me that Paul really uses the exact words he wants to use.

And he uses the past tense because he's writing about one particular action that God took in the past to demonstrate his great love for us.

This is even clearer if we go to Romans.

And I'll just read it to you.

Romans chapter five says in verse eight, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So there's no doubt in my mind here in Ephesians chapter two that Paul is referring to Christ's death on the cross as God's greatest demonstration of love for us.

God didn't just say he loves us. He demonstrated his love for us by his actions.

Too many people believe and sometimes teach that love is a feeling or love is an emotion.

Now, yes, feelings and emotions are involved in love, but the greatest part of love is action oriented.

I learned this when I was growing up in church.

I was asked a question.

Are you down with the DC talk?

Down with the DC talk.

For some of you that goes right over your head.

But I learned that love is a verb.

Love is a verb.

It's what you do more than a noun, what you feel.

Now, many marriages, even amongst Christians are failing because they value feelings over actions.

I've counseled many couples over the years who say they just don't feel the love that they once did for their spouse.

They fell out of love, but there is really no falling out of or falling into love.

We can fall out of bed.

We can fall up the stairs, but we grow to love someone over time.

This love for one another grows from what we see them do for us and for others.

Now imagine Christ just before he went to the cross.

He's in the garden and he thought, I hate this feeling.

I don't feel like doing this.

I'm going to base this decision on how I feel.

If that had happened, if that had been his response, we'd all be hopelessly doomed to hell.

But the good news is, of course, is that Jesus resisted that feeling.

He fought back against those feelings, even though he prayed for them to God three different times.

God removed this cup for me.

He was more interested in doing the work of the Father than what he felt like doing.

Thankfully, Jesus displayed his love for us by willingly going to the cross and dying for sinners and those who were still his enemies.

Those who were still desperately wicked.

So we must preach that love is not dependent upon feelings and emotions.

Because feelings are one of the most shallowest and most unreliable human emotions of all.

Instead, we must emphasize that love is a choice more than a feeling because feelings are subjective while love is objectively displayed in actions.

Now, this is partly why there are so many lost people around us.

We tend to put our feelings in front of our actions.

I don't feel like loving them.

I don't feel like sharing my story.

I don't feel like sharing the gospel.

What if they reject me?

What if they think I'm an idiot?

What if they ask me a question that I don't know the answer to and I appear inadequate?

Now, those are feelings and we cannot let our feelings keep us from action.

The reality is that as I fight through my feelings and put my love into action, those feelings are not as strong.

It is easier to love my wife today than it was on the day that I married her.

I had to fight through a lot of feelings at times because I knew that my responsibility was to love her.

The bottom line is that love is what a person chooses to do, not what a person chooses to feel.

God so loved the world because he felt like it.

Yes, he does love us, but that love required action and included the supreme sacrifice of his only son's life.

That was the ultimate love in action.

But not only does God respond to us with love, there are two other closely related aspects of his nature that Paul writes about in this passage.

The second one being that he responded to our misery with his mercy.

Paul says, by being rich in mercy.

Now, once again, Paul uses a superlative to describe the magnitude of God's mercy.

God is not just merciful, he's rich in mercy.

So mercy is one of those terms that as believers we tend to use a lot and we'll often use it interchangeably with the next attribute of God that we'll discuss here in a second, his grace.

And while those two terms are similar in many ways, they are not the same thing.

So let's take a few minutes this morning to see if we can't arrive at a better understanding of God's mercy and his grace.

Mercy is God's attitude towards those in distress.

When God looked down from heaven, when he was looking at us and saw us the way that we were without Christ,

he saw that we were miserable, that we're incomplete, a life that is characterized by death and domination and doom.

And it could result in nothing else.

Now, all of us who are parents can certainly relate to God's mercy, right?

One of my most vivid pictures of mercy towards my kids is a day that Sina called me at work and said, hey, the dog got out.

Now, this dog was new to our family.

So for me, there was no emotional attachment whatsoever.

He was a rescue.

So he had this tendency to escape our yard, which I am assuming is what caused him to be a rescue in the first place.

Now, we lived on a busy road, so there's a lot of traffic in front of our house.

And I get home and I realize that Oreo, our dog, is on the other side of the busy road.

Now, my kids are standing on my front porch watching all of this go down.

And so I'm across the street. I've tried to block him out.

I put my truck in an angle. I'm trying to block him in to keep him from going into the street behind me.

But that dude is quick and he gets past me.

And a couple seconds later, he gets smacked by a car going 40 miles an hour.

Now, in that instant, I can hear the cries and screams from my kids over the sounds of the cars that are wishing by me.

I can hear Oreo whimpering and crying in pain.

And my heart broke, right?

Then not because I was attached to the dog, but because I could hear my children crying.

And I know that if they didn't witness that, I would have just put Oreo down.

But I knew in that moment that I would bankrupt us to make sure that that dog was okay so that my kids would not have to deal with losing their dog.

So in an instant, our $100 rescue dog turned into a several thousand dollar dog.

I saw my kids in misery and distress and I heard deep inside as I watched them experience that and go through that.

And that's what God's mercy towards us is like, but with one big difference.

God has the power to do something about my misery that doesn't bankrupt him.

And as we've already seen, God has done that for me with one tremendous act of love.

The third thing we see here is he responded to our guilt with his grace.

Paul says, by grace you have been saved.

So if God's mercy is his attitude towards those in distress, then grace is God's attitude towards lawbreakers and rebels.

Even though we deserve it, God does not want to leave us to suffer from the guilt that comes from being dead in our trespasses and sins.

So in his grace, he reaches out to set aside the demands of the law and to relieve us from the pure due punishment of our guilt and set us free.

It is the grace of God which has dealt with our guilt.

The grace of God also involves God's power and his enabling for us to be able to do what he calls us to do.

I want us to look at a story from the Old Testament because I believe it's a perfect picture of God's grace.

Luke tells us an ax though right before Acts chapter 13, it says,

Acts 13 · chapter mention

Then they asked for a king and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin for 40 years.

And when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said,

I have found in David the son of Jesse, a man after my heart who will do all my will.

So we know that from Scripture, when David finally becomes king over all of Israel, that he began to ask some questions.

He began to inquire were there any left of Saul's house?

Was anyone left in Saul's family?

It tells us in 2 Samuel chapter 9.

2 Samuel 9 · chapter mention

And David said, Is there still anyone left of the house of Saul that I may show kindness for Jonathan's sake?

Now normally this would be horrible news for the former king's family.

Because the new king would come in and he would have killed all remaining relatives, all remaining servants,

to remove the threat of any of his heirs from causing an uprising and retaking the throne or stirring up trouble in the kingdom.

But David didn't operate that way.

He continues in verse 5.

Then King David sent and brought him from the house of Mccur, the son of Amiel at Lodobar.

And Mephysiabeth, the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face and paid homage.

And David said, Mephysiabeth, and he answered, Behold, I am your servant.

And David said to him, Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan.

And I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always.

And he paid homage and said, What is your servant that you should show regard for a dead dog such as I?

Notice the humility, Mephysiabeth.

It's one of the kindest acts in all of history.

Because how David responds to his humility.

Verse 9.

This is then the king called Ziba, Saul's servant, and said to him, All that's belong to Saul and to all his house I have given to your master's grandson.

And you and your sons and your servant shall tell the land for him and shall bring in the produce that your master's grandson may have bread to eat.

But Mephysiabeth, your master's grandson shall always eat at my table.

Now Ziba had 15 sons and 20 servants.

That is a picture of God's love.

That we are helplessly crippled by sin.

We must humble ourselves before our king as Mephysiabeth did before David.

Mephysiabeth saw his grandson who for 40 years relentlessly pursued and tried to kill David was provided for.

And he was placed at the king's table.

As David graciously said, You will always be able to eat at my table.

Mephysiabeth was treated like the king's son.

He was accepted graciously at the king's table.

He was allowed to be in the king's presence and he was able to be provided with all that he needed for the rest of his life.

Even though he was helpless to do any of that on his own.

Mephysiabeth couldn't even provide for his own living.

Wasn't that all of us before we were saved?

But now, right, we can dine at the Lord's table.

Someday there's going to be a great wedding feast of the king of kings and he will forever abide with him.

Even though we're helpless.

Even though we're crippled by sin.

Who could never survive by our own strength or our own means.

We are invited into the king's presence.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, My grace is sufficient for you.

For my power is made perfect in weakness.

Now, although Paul is writing here with particular reference to his thorn in the flesh.

The general principle is pretty clear.

It is God's grace who gives us the power and ability to do what God calls us to do.

This is especially true when it comes to our salvation.

When Paul writes that it is by grace you have been saved.

He is saying that it is God who provides the ability for us to be saved.

And it's completely independent of anything that we are capable of doing on our own.

Paul is going to drive that point home even more forcefully in the next few weeks.

But before we close, let me share with you a summary of the difference between God's mercy and grace.

His mercy is God's solution to man's misery.

Whereas grace is his solution to man's sin.

Mercy relieves the pain.

Grace covers your sin.

Mercy restores his grace and forgives.

Mercy withholds what we deserve.

And grace gives us what we don't deserve.

Now, although mercy and grace are similar, but they're not the same, they both have one thing in common.

We don't deserve either one of them.

All of us were once dead in our trespasses and sins.

All of us were once dominated by this world, dominated by Satan, dominated in our own flesh.

And all of us were once doomed to face the wrath of God for eternity.

But God responded to our lostness with his love.

But God responded to our misery with his mercy.

But God responded to our guilt with his grace.

I believe there is one way to respond to God's grace.

And that is to live a life of grateful holiness.

What the law required has been fulfilled in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

And because of that, we don't find our righteousness in obeying a set of rules.

We don't find our righteousness by following the law.

We find our righteousness in Christ alone.

Period.

I came across this story by an author named Timothy Paul Jones that I think captures God's grace in a perfect way.

He says, quote,

I never dreamed that taking a child to Disney World could be so difficult.

Or that such a trip could teach me so much about God's grace.

Our middle daughter had previously been adopted by another family.

I, Timothy, am sure this couple had the best intentions,

but they never quite integrated the adopted child into their family of biological children.

After a couple of rough years, they dissolved the adoption.

And we ended up welcoming an eight-year-old little girl into our home.

For one reason or another, whenever our daughter's previous family vacationed at Disney World,

they took their biological children with them, but they left their adopted daughter with a family friend.

Usually, at least in the child's mind, this happened because she did something wrong

that precluded her presence on that trip.

And so by the time we adopted our daughter, she had seen many pictures of Disney World

and she had heard about the rides and the characters and the parades.

But when it came to passing through the gates of the Magic Kingdom,

she had always been the one left on the outside.

Once I found out about this history, I made plans to take her to Disney World

the next time I had a speaking engagement that took our family to the southeastern United States.

I thought I'd mastered the Disney World drill.

I knew from previous experiences that the prospect of seeing cast members

and freakishly oversized mouse and duck costumes somehow turns children into squirming bundles of emotional instability.

What I didn't expect was that the prospect of visiting the dream world

would produce a stream of downright devilish behavior in our newest daughter.

In the month leading up to our trip to the Magic Kingdom, she stole food

when a simple request would have given her a snack.

She lied when it would have been easier to tell the truth.

She whispered insults that were carefully crafted in order to hurt her sister as deeply as possible.

And as the days on the calendar moved closer to the trip, her mutinies multiplied.

A couple days before our family headed to Florida, I pulled our daughter into my lap to talk through her latest escapade.

I know what you're going to do, she said flatly.

You're not going to take me to Disney World, are you?

That thought hadn't actually crossed my mind, but her downward spiral suddenly started to make some sense.

She knew she couldn't earn her way into the Magic Kingdom.

She had tried and failed to test several times before.

So she was living in a way that placed her as far from possible from the most magical place on earth.

In retrospect, I'm embarrassed to admit that in that moment, I was tempted to turn her fear to my own advantage.

The easiest response would have been, if you don't start behaving better, you're right.

We won't take you.

But by God's grace, I didn't.

I asked her, is this trip something we're doing as a family?

She nodded, brown eyes wide and tear-rimmed.

Are you part of this family?

She nodded again.

Then you're going with us.

Sure, there may be some consequences to help you remember what's right and wrong, but you're part of our family and we're not leaving you behind.

I'd like to say that her behaviors grew better after that moment.

They didn't.

Her choice is pretty much spied out of control at every hotel and rest stop all the way to Lake Buena Vista.

Still, we headed to Disney World on the day we had promised and it was a typical Disney day.

Overpriced tickets, overpriced meals and lots of lines mingled with just enough manufactured magic to consider maybe going again one day.

In our hotel room that evening, a very different child emerged.

She was exhausted, pensive and a little weepy at times, but her month-long facade of rebellion had faded.

When bedtime rolled around, I prayed with her, held her and asked her, so how was your first day at Disney World?

She closed her eyes and snuggled down into her stuffed unicorn.

After a few moments, she opened her eyes ever so slightly.

Daddy, she said, I finally got to go to Disney World, but it wasn't because I was good.

It's because I am yours.

It wasn't because I was good.

It's because I'm yours.

That's the message of grace.

Grace isn't a favor you can achieve by being good.

It is the gift you receive by being God's.

Grace is God's goodness that comes looking for you when you have nothing but the middle finger flipped in the face of God to offer in return.

It's a farmer paying a full day's wages to a crew of deadbeat day laborers with only a single hour punched on their time cards.

It's a man marrying an abandoned woman and then refusing to forsake his covenant with her when she turns out to be a whore.

It is the insanity of a shepherd who puts 99 sheep at risk to rescue the single lamb who's too stupid to stay with the flock.

It's a love of a father who hands over his finest rings and robes to a young man who has squandered his inheritance on drunken bids with his fair weathered friends.

Grace is one way love that calls you into the kingdom, not because you've been good, but because God has chosen you and he's made you his own.

And now he is chasing you to the ends of the earth to keep you as his child and nothing in heaven or in hell can stop him.

But here's what's amazing about God's grace.

This isn't merely what God the Father would do.

It's what God the Father did.

God could have chosen to save anyone.

He could have chosen to save everyone.

Or he could have chosen to save no one after the fall.

But when God did, what he did is he chose a multitude of someone's.

And if you are a believer in Jesus, if you have surrendered your life to him, then you are one of those someone's.

God in Christ has declared over you, I could have chosen anyone in this world.

And I chose you.

And no matter what you say or no matter what you do, neither my love nor my choice will ever change that fact.

That is grace.

That's what he did for us.

And my question is, are you living in it?

Are you living in his grace?

It's just another religious week for you.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray.

I pray thanking you for Jesus.

Thanking you that he willingly put aside his feelings.

And put his love into action.

Thank you for rescuing me.

Thank you that when you see me, you see the righteousness of Jesus.

So God, as we respond and as we sit and dwell on your love for us, I pray, God, that you will speak to our hearts.

I pray, Father, that we will humble ourselves like the fish of death.

And understand that everything we have is because of you.

You could have chosen anybody.

But you chose me.

You chose us.

So Father, I pray right now that you'll minister to the hearts of those who are questioning.

I pray, God, that you will bring salvation into this room.

I pray, God, that you'll use this time to speak to our hearts.

That's all these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We're going to have time to respond this morning like we do every week.

And if there's anybody in the prayer team, if you all will come, just be available.

But I think sometimes we just need to, sometimes a hug can change the trajectory of our day, right?

So if you need a hug, if you need somebody to pray with you, then come do that.

But help us not be a church that just follows religious platitudes, but really believes and lives out God's grace in our life.

Maybe we give Him thanks for that today.

Maybe we offer, we confess that we've taken advantage of that today.

I don't know how it looks like to you.

I'm just trusting that the Spirit will move in this place and you will humble yourselves before Him.

Amen.