FULLY ALIVE Ephesians 2:1-10 Theme of the Month Life Together: Church and Community
Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Sharp
Lead Pastor, English Congregation Vancouver Chinese Baptist Church, Vancouver, British Columbia
Sunday Sermon for 8 August 2010
Scripture Passage Ephesians 2:1-10
1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
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A few years back a stateside paper had a story that was picked up by several news agencies. Officer Tori Matthews of the Southern California Humane Society got an emergency call: a boy’s pet iguana had been scared up a free by a neighbor’s dog. It then fell from the tree into a swimming pool, where it sank like a brick. Officer Matthews came with her net, but she couldn’t fish out the iguana, so dived into the pool, emerging a few seconds later with the pet’s limp body. “Well, you do CPR on a person and a dog,” she thought to herself, “why not an iguana?” So she put her lips to the iguana’s. “Now that I look back on it,” she says now, “it was a pretty ugly animal to be kissing, but the last thing I wanted to do was tell this little boy that his iguana had died.” The article went on to say that the lizard responded to her efforts and is expected to make a full recovery (cited in “To Quip,” Leadership, Spring 1996, p. 771). Now I think I would have some difficulty bringing myself to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an iguana even if it was a pet. I salute Officer Matthews. In my mind, she went beyond the call of duty. In today’s scripture passage, in verses 4-5, the Apostle Paul writes to the church at Ephesus: “Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us a live with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” To relate this passage from the Apostle Paul to the story of Officer Matthews, we might say that in Jesus Christ, God has resuscitated an iguana—and we are that iguana. “While we were dead in our transgression, our sins” Paul says to us. While we were not beautiful, while we were unworthy, in our spiritual death, God reached out with love and forgiveness and eternal life. By grace we have been saved. This is God’s gracious act. A gift. Now, maybe you and I don’t enjoy being compared to an iguana. Maybe we prefer a story that Max Lucado tells in his book, A Gentle Thunder. A story that I have shared before and some of you might remember it. In the book, Lucado tells about a friend of his named Kenny who had just returned with his family from Disney World. “I saw a sight I’ll never forget,” Kenny said. “I want you to know about it.” “He and his family were inside Cinderella’s castle. It was packed with kids and parents. Suddenly all the children rushed to one side. Had it been a boat, the castle would have tipped over. Cinderella had entered. “Cinderella. The pristine princess,” Kenny said, “she was perfectly typecast. A pretty, young girl with each hair in place, flawless skin, and a beaming smile. She stood waist-deep in a garden of kids, each wanting to touch and be touched. “For some reason Kenny turned and looked toward the other side of the castle. It was now vacant except for a boy maybe seven or eight years old. His age was hard to determine because of the disfigurement of his body. Dwarfed in height, face deformed, he stood watching quietly and wistfully, holding the hand of an older brother.
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“Don’t you know what he wanted?” Lucado asks. “He wanted to be with the children. He longed to be in the middle of the kids reaching for Cinderella, calling her name. But can’t you feel his fear, fear of yet another rejection? Fear of being taunted again, mocked again? And then it happened. “Cinderella noticed the little boy. She immediately began walking in his direction. Politely but firmly inching through the crowd of children, she finally broke free. She walked quickly across the floor, knelt at eye level with the stunned little boy and placed a kiss on his face.” That is a story of love, a story of grace, a story of healing. And maybe that story is more appealing to you than being compared to an iguana. The point is that no matter who we are, or what we have done, or how unacceptable we may feel about ourselves or others may think of us, you and I are loved by God and that there is nothing that you and I have done or can do to merit God’s grace, God’s love, God’s salvation, God’s invitation to be a part of his family and mission in the world. “For by grace you have been saved,” writes Paul, “and this is not from yourselves; it isn’t your doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one can boast.” Author Anne Lamott in her book Plan B (pp. 54-55) has this to say about grace: “Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.” Some of you know the name Art Linkletter. If not, you can google it. But Art Linkletter in the segment of his TV show called, “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” once interviewed a little girl of about 6 or 7. He asked her “What does love look like?” The little girl answered “It’s when I let Johnny get in front of me at the drinking fountain line.” Linkletter smiled and said “Well, you must love Johnny very much.” But the little girl responded, “No, I don’t even like him.” That is what God’s love, agape love looks like, isn’t it? God loved us when we weren’t even likeable. We are the objects of God’s grace and love. Now, of course, that offends some of us. What me, unlikeable? Me, a sinner? Am I really dead in transgression and sin, following the ways of the world, gratifying my sinful nature, following its desire and thoughts (2:1-3)? Not a very pretty description. Especially for those of us who see ourselves as upright, clean, decent people. But Paul doesn’t offer any caveats or any exceptions. This, he says, is all of us. For you see the standard of what human life is to be like is Jesus. And the question we need to ask ourselves is not, am I better than the people around me, him or her? But am I like Jesus? And if we are really honest, we have to say “No.” There is selfishness, and arrogance, and pride, and unfaithfulness, and a host of other things in my heart and life that make it clear that I don’t love or care or relate to others like Jesus. And so I fall short of being the person God wants me to be and created me to be. But even with all of this, God loves me and shows how much he loves me by making a new start possible and a new life a reality in Christ. Did you notice the relationships between verse 3 and 4 in our text? In verse 3, Paul says: “Like the rest, we were by nature deserving the wrath of God. But because of his great love for us, FULLYALIVE 3
God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ….” That “but” is God’s exclamation mark placed in the story of our lives. It is a reminder of Gospel Grace. Tim Keller reminds us: “Here’s the gospel: you’re more sinful than you ever dared believe; you’re more loved than you ever dared hope. But the Apostle Paul doesn’t stop here. He writes (v. 10), “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared before us to be our way of life.” Here is the reason we have been saved, brought into a relationship with God and given a new start in life. This is our intended life. We have been saved, reconciled, brought into a relationship with God so that we might live lives with purpose, filled with good works. That is the Gospel and life in its fullness. We are to be good people doing good things. Not because we are by nature good people, but because God is good and he has put his life into us. Now I want to make sure you understand what I’m saying. We don’t do good works in the hope that they will save us or make us acceptable to God or somehow balance the books before God— our sins and misdeeds and selfishness on one side and good works on the other. Many people think of salvation this way and think that since my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds, God accepts me and lets me into heaven. But that isn’t the gospel, that isn’t the message Jesus lived and taught. Good deeds/acts/works, a changed life is the result/our response to the salvation Christ offers and we have received; it is God working his life out in us; it our becoming more and more like Christ in heart and mind. It is our recognizing our need for God in our lives; accepting that God has come to us in Christ; accepting that gift and surrendering ourselves to live for Christ. The Gospel is that we have already been saved by Christ’s death on the cross. Good works are our response to that salvation and the living out of that salvation. Later in this same Letter to the Ephesian Christians (4:1) Paul asks followers of Christ to walk/ live a life in a manner “worthy of the calling you have received.” The word “worthy” means living in keeping with your calling, with the new life that you have been given in Christ because of your decision to accept his gift of forgiveness and life. The order is important: God acts first and shows us his love and forgiveness and acceptance and new life. We acknowledge our need for that new life and when we accepts God’s gift given to us in Christ, we do deeds of loving kindness and mercy and compassion as an expression of our gratitude and as an expression of Christ living his life out through us. His heart and mind formed in us. It’s like a small town in France which hid Jewish people from the Nazis during World War II. An investigative reporter went to this town to see what kind of people would risk everything including their lives to do such an extraordinary good thing. He interviewed people in the town and was overwhelmed by how ordinary the people were. They weren’t the heroic type, nor were they especially intellectual or politically enlightened. He did learn one thing from his interviews: the people of this town regularly attended Church on Sunday. Week after week, their pastor proclaimed the Word of God. They prayed and read the Bible together. Over time, by habit, they knew what was right and sought to do it. FULLYALIVE 4
So when the time came for them to be courageous, the day when the Nazis came to town hunting for Jews, they quietly did what was right. They knew what to do. Christ’s heart had been formed in them. They refused to give up their Jewish neighbours and paid the price for it. One elderly woman said later: “The pastor always taught us that there comes a time in every life when a person is asked to do something for Jesus. And when our time came, we knew what to do.” This is not legalism. This is not salvation by works. It is a simple acknowledgment that to express our gratitude for that great gift of love which we have received, we are to reach out to those who need our love. There was an interesting and very extensive study that was done by Gordon Allport, a Harvard psychologist many years ago. Allport studied the nature of religious behavior and its relationship to bigotry and prejudice. He found that a majority of churchgoers—of whatever denomination —were what he came to describe as extrinsically religious. The extrinsically religious person uses religion. Going to church for extrinsically religious people is useful to boost one’s status, to bolster self-confidence, and to win friends, gain power, and have influence. Allport found that these people use their religious belief as a defense against reality. Most often, they use it as a supersanctioning of their own formula for living. This kind of religious faith assures people that God sees things their way, that their righteousness is God’s righteousness. According to Allport, the extrinsically religious person turns to God but does not turn away from self. For them, religion is primarily a shield for self-centeredness, serving the person’s deep need for security, status, and esteem. Allport’s empirical tests showed that the extrinsically religious person tended to be prejudiced and bigoted, and that this was true regardless of their religious persuasion. But Allport also found another group of people in church. He called them intrinsically religious. The intrinsically religious were a much smaller group in the sample he studied. According to Allport, these people have a deeply interiorized religious faith and are totally committed to it. Their love of God is integral to who they are and all-encompassing. It touches on all areas of life, nothing is excluded. It is also an open faith, with room for scientific and emotional facts. Intrinsic religious faith is a hunger for and commitment to a relationship with God and others. The intrinsically religious have little prejudice or bigotry. They practice what they preach and do it with humility. (Cited in John Bradshaw, Creating Love, New York: Bantam Books, 1992, 226-227). Now here is what we need to see: Good works are the intrinsically/authentically religious person’s way of life. This is because for them their faith is not something external, extra or something they go to when it is convenient, but something that is part of who they are and who they are becoming, they don’t try to use God; instead, they give themselves in surrender to be used by God. This is the kind of religious experience the Apostle Paul is talking about and is calling us to. He calls us to be so conscious of what he describes as, “the rich mercy of God” that in all we do we seek to live out our gratitude in service to others. Often that means beginning with those
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closest to us. This is key. We are saved by Grace. We are saved to have good works as a way of life and we are to begin with those closest to us. A lot of people stumble over this point. They think that Christian service starts overseas or in a service project in a poor neighborhood, only in church. But sometimes Christian service is as close as your own family. Leo Tolstoy, the world-class novelist and a professed Christian of strong convictions and principles, freed his serfs/slaves so they would no longer live in grinding poverty. But the problem, the tragedy in Tolstoy’s life is that he overlooked the person right next to him. After he died, his wife, Sonya, wrote this: “There is so little genuine warmth about him. His biographies will tell of how he helped the laborers to carry buckets of water, but no one will ever know that he never gave his wife a rest and never—in all these thirty-two years—gave his child a drink of water or spent five minutes by his bedside to give me a chance to rest a little from all my labors.” (Kevin A. Miller, “Coming in Second,” Marriage Partnership, Fall 1996, p. 12) Tolstoy, a great Christian in so many ways, was blind to the needs of those closest to him. And that can happen to us. It is tragic when Christians divorce their Christian life from their daily life. We compartmentalize our life—today’s Sunday—bring out my Christian Life. We are at church—bring out my Christian life. The pastor is here—bring out my Christian life. But daily life is what the Gospel is all about. It is serving Christ in the little things—how we treat the people in our own family, or on the job. It is the kind word, the encouraging pat on the back, the willingness to listen to a friend pour out his/her heart. These small acts of loving service are of far more weight than an envelope in the offering plate or a prayer for a missionary overseas. Often we long to do the great things for Christ, but overlook those daily critical signs of faith that are to be our way of life. Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because of her unselfish ministry to the thousands of hungry, sick, and dying people of India. She wrote a book that offers some excellent ideas about service in the name of Christ (The Love of Christ, New York: Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 73-74). She is commenting on the story in Matthew 25 of the “The Ten Bridesmaids”, a parable about the church and Christ. “Do not imagine,” says Mother Teresa, “that love to be true must be extraordinary. See how a lamp burns, by the continual consumption of the little drops of oil. If there are no more of these drops in the lamp, there will be no light, and the Bridegroom has a right to say: ‘I do not know you.’ “My children, what are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the little things of everyday life: fidelity, punctuality, little words of kindness, just a little thought for others, those little acts of silence, of look and thought, of word and deed. These are the very drops of love that make our religious life burn with so much light.
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“Do not search for Jesus in far off lands,” she concludes, “He is not there. He is in you. Just keep the lamp burning and you will always see Him.” That is why we give attention, pay attention to the spiritual life—that is why we read the Bible and pray, why we gather together for worship and why we gather around this table—to keep the lamp burning; to allow the life of Christ to flow in and through us; to love as he loved. You and I are saved by grace. There are many reasons God seeks you out and saves you in Christ: to bring glory to himself, to appease his justice, to demonstrate his sovereignty. But one of the fundamental reasons God saved you is because he is fond of you. He likes having you around. If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If he had a wallet, your photo would be in it. Whenever you want to talk, he’ll listen. And the truth is that God can live anywhere in the universe, and he chose your heart. God is crazy about you! And God has saved us for good works. Big works? Sometimes, perhaps. But generally for small loving acts to those closest to us. This is what it means to be fully alive. God has shown us how much he loves us in Christ and now it is our turn to reach out in love and kindness to someone else.
Reflection Questions 1. As you read today’s Scripture passage (Ephesians 2:1-10), what images, thoughts, ideas, questions, reactions do you have? 2. What is your reaction to the way Paul description in 2:1-3? Are you offended by this description? If you were to sit down and talk with Paul, how would you respond to this description of humanity (including yourself) apart from Christ? 3. How would you define grace? 4. What “good works” characterize your life? Would you say that you are living a life “worthy” of your new identity as a child of God? (Ephesians 4:1) 5. Would you describe yourself, would others describe you as an “intrinsically religious” person or an “extrinsically religious” person? 6. What small, loving acts are you doing for those closest to you? 7. What questions, thoughts, reactions, objections do you have to this sermon?
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