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God's Grace in the Salvation of a Sinner By Murray Capill

Well, if you could also turn to Ephesians 2, to the passage that was read just before,
we're going to be looking at Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 10.
If you were to study World War II, you would be able to learn of battle plans and air raids
and allied strategies and victories and the demise of Germany.
But you could also study the lives of many individual soldiers, stories of personal sacrifice
and in many cases death.
So you have both the big picture and the individual stories.
And that's what we have as we move from Ephesians 1 to Ephesians 2.
In Ephesians 1 we have the big picture of God's plans and purposes and redemption.
God is at work in this world, unfolding His glorious plan to the praise of His glorious grace.
And His plan revolves around His own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
And in Him, He's chosen a people for Himself, He's redeemed a people for Himself, and He's
sealed them unto Himself by the work of the Holy Spirit.
And then in the second half of Ephesians 1 we saw that Paul prays that those who are
caught up in that plan, those who have faith in Christ and love for the saints, will have
an ever deepening grasp of just how great that plan is and of what it means for them
to be a part of it.
So that's what he's been unfolding in chapter 1.
But now as we move to chapter 2, he zooms in on the story of every individual Christian,
the story of each person who's a part of that big redemptive plan.
Every Christian has a personal testimony, a story to tell, a story of how and where
and when God worked in their life.
Our stories vary.
If we had time to just turn into little circles this morning and tell our stories, I think
we'd find a great variety of stories.
We'd find that some were converted very early in life and some very late.
My granddad was converted at 95 the year before he died.
We find that some people were converted suddenly, dramatically, and others just a very gradual
process slowly, nothing very dynamic at all.
We find that some of us were converted from lives of greater morality, very messy lives
and others, our lives were changed before they really got that messy.
God has a great variety of ways of working in people's lives and millions of Christians
in hundreds of countries for a couple of thousand years have all these different stories
to tell of how God's worked, but behind all those different stories, there is a basic
pattern that's been unfolded again and again and again with endless variety.
There is, if you like, a salvation template.
Just as I look at you and I see lots of different people who have the same basic facial features
in one sense, like most people I see at the moment have one nose, two eyes, a mouth, I
see on a good number a couple of years, yet that basic facial structure has been unfolded
with endless variety and so it is with salvation.
There's a basic salvation template, a paradigm, a pattern that God has used again and again
and again, but He's used it with endless variety.
In these ten verses, I think we have that pattern wonderfully depicted for us, but as
I go through these ten verses and as we look at three phases in the basic salvation template,
I'd love you to be thinking about your own life and your own story and how it fits into
this overall pattern.
The first phase is spiritual death.
Spiritual death.
Our physical journey begins with life and ends with death, but our spiritual journey
begins with death and ends with life.
And so Paul starts the story saying, as for you, you were dead.
You were dead in your transgressions and sins.
And transgressions and sins are two words that together really encompass all our waywardness,
all our spiritual folly, all our spiritual rebellion, all our disobedience and our failure
to live up to God's standards, all the ways and times in which we have missed the mark,
our sin and rebellion.
It speaks of a life of godlessness, of lawlessness, of spiritual failure.
And the Bible teaches that sin cuts us off from God.
It separates us from the holy God.
And when we're cut off from God, we're dead.
Because God is the source of life.
And if we're cut off from the source of life, if by sin we've been separated from Him, then
we're in a state of spiritual deadness.
When we're dead, we don't respond to God.
Dead people don't talk.
And spiritually dead people don't talk to God and communicate with Him.
Dead people don't respond.
And spiritually dead people don't respond to God.
They see evidence of God in creation all around them, but they don't respond to it.
They may hear Bible messages, but they don't respond to them.
They're dead in their heart.
Spiritually dead people don't listen.
They don't hear what God says to them.
They don't hear the Word.
But, Paul says these spiritually dead people were living.
Look at what he says at the start of verse 2.
You were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live, literally in which
you used to walk.
We were the walking dead.
We were dead, but there was a certain way in which we lived out our spiritual death.
We were dead to God, but we were still living, we were still choosing, we were still thinking,
we were still acting and feeling.
And Paul goes on to say that there were three things that controlled our walk, three things
that controlled our life of deadness.
First we were controlled by the ways of this world, in which you used to live when you
followed the ways of this world.
In this phase of our life we were not influenced by God.
We were not influenced by His Word.
We were not influenced by what is true.
We were influenced mostly by what's around us.
We were influenced by the world, other people, peer pressure, culture, TV, advertising,
just a world of things that impact how we think and what we choose.
In all sorts of areas of life we find that our values, our tastes, our appetites are
conditioned by the world around us.
I mean to take just a very ordinary area of life to illustrate that, think of fashion.
Don't you find that a new fashion comes in and you say, yuck, oh, I can't believe people
are wearing that.
We used to wear that 30 years ago.
And then about six months later you've bought one of those items.
How was that?
Last year we renovated the ensuite in our home and we ripped out the orange vanity,
the brown shower and the green toilet seat, as well as the very nice shiny small brown
tiles on the floor.
Once that was a state of the art ensuite.
Everyone thought it was magnificent.
And 30 years later we thought it was revolting and we got rid of it all.
Mind you, we're beginning to regret it because it's all coming back in.
And if we'd just waited a little bit longer we might not have had to do the renovation.
Now what happens to us in the world of fashion and taste happens to us all the time in the
world of values and morality and so-called truth.
When we are not influenced by God and by His word and by His spirit, we're influenced
by the world.
And the values, the appetites, the culture of the world shaped our walk.
That's the first thing that controlled us.
The second thing that controlled us, Paul says, is we were controlled by Satan.
We were controlled by Satan.
Now he doesn't actually use Satan's name as such, but he describes him with this title,
the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is at work in those who are disobedient.
I think he's described that way because Paul understands the evil one to be a great power,
a spiritual force at work in the kingdom of the air, that is not at work in the material
physical realm which we see, but in this immaterial realm, the spiritual realm.
And we were controlled, he says, by that great evil ruler.
And other influences and temptations stands the power of the evil one who tempts us and
lures us, who deceives us, and delights in rebellion against God.
His scheming lay behind our rebellion.
We followed His ways.
We followed His ways of lying and greed, impurity, immorality.
We were dead to God, but alive to Satan.
And then Paul adds a third one in verse 3, he includes himself, Jews, a part of this
deal as well, all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings
of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.
We were controlled by the flesh.
It's not just that we followed other people and things going on in the world.
It's not just that the evil one was working behind the scenes in our life.
No, often what was happening was we were simply doing what we wanted to do.
We were simply living out what lives within.
We were just following our own passions and our own desires.
We followed our own heart and we found that our appetites were contrary to what God wants.
Our hearts were marked by selfishness and greed and impurity, by lust and anger and
rage.
And we know that because we still find, even now having been saved, we still find that
the sinful nature rears its ugly head and deep down inside we see that we're not as
sweet as pie.
There's some pretty nasty stuff deep down inside us.
That was our state of deadness and we were there by nature, by nature.
Like the rest we were by nature objects of wrath.
We were born that way.
As part of Adam's fallen race we were born dead.
We were born with a heart programmed to rebel, programmed to be wayward and sinful, boot
up a human being and the entire operating system of that human being is rebellion against
God, waywardness, living in independence of God, programmed to follow the world, the flesh
and the devil.
This is phase one of every Christian story.
And when some people tell their story they can speak of phase one in graphic detail.
Some people can look back on when their life was just gross and vile and they look back
on drunkenness and debauchery and immorality and violence and terrible addictions and they
tell their testimony and it's kind of this riveting story of a terrible death before
God worked in their lives.
Many others of us don't have a terrible phase one.
We don't have graphic stories to tell.
And that leaves us in danger of thinking that we were never really dead.
It leaves us in danger of thinking that well I was really just a little off colour, just
a little spiritually queasy.
I needed some real spiritual tweaking.
I wasn't dead but I was a little sick.
That friends is never the case and we need to think about that.
There are some reasons why maybe you didn't have a graphic phase one.
It may be that you were saved so early in your life that you never really got to see
your heart for what it was.
The Lord in His grace may have planted you in a Christian family and you heard the Gospel
when you were very, very young and the Lord worked in your heart and inclined you to faith
from before the time when you can actually remember the date.
So that the Lord's grace saved you from having such a messy and gross phase one.
Now if that is true of you, please, whatever you do and whatever you say, don't wish
that you'd had a dirtier phase one.
It's one of the bizarre things amongst Christians that we hear these graphic testimonies and
we start to feel inadequate because we haven't had it.
I start to think oh dear, look I'm sorry guys I haven't got much of a story to tell
because I can say that I've never been drunk in my life and I've only ever slept with
one woman and she's my wife and I've never done drugs and I'm just an incredibly boring
person because I just haven't got a very good story to tell.
But that is rubbish, I've got a wonderful story to tell, it's a story of God intervening
in my life so early that the sinful inclinations of my heart could never come to full bloom
and what a wonderful mercy and grace that is.
And if you're in that position, don't wish that you'd messed it all up first.
Be deeply thankful for God's early grace.
There's another thing which may have happened to prevent you from a really awful phase one
and that is that God in His grace restrained you and restrained your evil desires long
before you were saved.
God's grace does not begin in a person's life simply at the moment when they are converted.
God's grace often begins long before and many of you will be able to trace God's grace
way back long before the time when you yielded to Him.
He was already restraining you, already putting people in your life, already holding you back
from things that you would otherwise have done.
And now you're deeply thankful for His restraining grace.
Thankful that He prevented you from making greater stuff-ups before you came to know
Christ.
But there's another scenario that may explain why you didn't have a more graphic phase
one, and you need to think about this.
It may be that you'd simply learned to mask your deadness.
You were dead, but you'd learned to mask it.
You see, we learned to cover up greed and rebellion, anger and lust.
Oh, it's there, but we've been taught to be polite.
Our parents have taught us how to be civil, how to be decent.
And so we have this veneer of civilisation over us and we look pretty good.
From time to time the mask slipped and we saw ourselves for what we really were.
But mostly we managed to keep it up.
I have a brother who is a funeral director.
One of his jobs, therefore, is to prepare bodies for burial.
And so he will pump the bodily fluids out of the body and then pump in the embalming
fluids to preserve the body.
He'll make the body up, apply a bit of make-up, maybe pat out the cheeks, dress it, prop it
up in a casket with white silk lining.
He takes great pride in his job and he can do a good job.
He can make a dead person look pretty good so that the body is kind of acceptable for
the family to come and view.
But no matter how well he does his job, that person is still dead.
And it doesn't matter how civilised, how polite, how nice, how wealthy, how together, how well
clothed, how educated someone might be, if they're dead, they're dead.
Paul says that's what we all were once, every single one of us.
And left to ourselves we would never have found our way to heaven.
We would never have reached out to God.
We couldn't, we wouldn't, we didn't, we were dead.
In fact, we were under His wrath, living in a state of deadness where we didn't even
realise that God was angry with us for our rebellion and our disobedience.
And His wrath hung over us.
That's always phase one of the salvation template.
And in the story of every Christian, at some time, in some way, it's given way to phase
which is amazing grace, amazing grace.
The second part of every Christian's story is the story of God's love, somehow, somewhere,
seeking them out.
It's the story of God's kindness, God's mercy.
Verse 4, if you have a translation in front of you which begins verse 4, but God, then
you've got the best kind of translation around.
NIV says, but because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive.
But the sentence begins with God, but God, we were dead, but God did something.
God came to us and He dealt with our deadness.
God didn't leave us in our deadness.
He did three things.
He made us alive with Christ, verse 5.
He raised us up with Christ, verse 6.
And again in verse 6, He seated us down with Christ.
Each is with Christ.
We've been united to Christ.
We are in Christ.
Once we were in Adam, he was our federal head.
He was our representative.
And when He fell, we fell.
And when He came under condemnation, we came under condemnation.
But now God has placed us in Christ.
He's given us another head, another representative.
And so when Christ was made alive, we were made alive with Him.
When Christ was raised up, we were raised up.
When Christ was seated in heaven, we were seated in heaven with Him.
God has given us new life.
He quickened us.
He awakened us.
He put a spark of life into our dead heart.
He changed our heart of stone and gave us a heart of flesh, one which pulsates and pumps
and thumps.
He started to draw us to Himself.
He started to open our eyes to see spiritual things.
He started to unblock our ears to hear spiritual truth.
He gave us life.
And Paul, as he talks about this, it pains to stress that this had to be the work God
alone.
Look at verse 5, just after he said, He made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead
in transgressions.
Then he says, It is by grace you've been saved.
First by grace you've been saved.
And just in case you missed that, he says it again in verse 8, It is by grace you've
been saved through faith.
And this, not from yourselves, it's the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.
It had to be His work, because we were dead.
Dead people don't respond.
Dead people don't decide to give their life to Jesus.
Dead people don't do anything.
It had to be God's grace.
There's an old hymn that goes like this.
I'll read a number of verses of it.
Lord, I was blind.
I could not see in Thy mad visage any grace.
But now the beauty of Thy face and radiant vision dawns on me.
Lord, I was deaf.
I could not hear the thrilling music of Thy voice.
But now I hear Thee and rejoice, and all Thine uttered words are dear.
Lord, I was dumb.
I could not speak the grace and glory of Thy name.
But now, as touched with living flame, my lips, Thine eager praises wake.
Lord, I was dead.
I could not stir my lifeless soul to come to Thee.
But now, since Thou hast quickened me, I rise from sin's dark sepulchre.
Lord, Thou hast made the blind to see, the deaf to hear,
the dumb to speak, the dead to live.
And lo, I break the chains of my captivity.
That's the story of every single one of us here who's been saved.
We were blind, but now we see.
We were deaf, but now we hear.
We were dead, but now we're alive to Christ.
And therefore, Paul says in verses 8 and 9,
you can't possibly boast about your salvation.
You didn't do it.
You were dead.
Even faith, the faith by which you responded to Christ,
even faith was a gift.
God gave to you this gift of being able to respond.
He awakened your heart.
He planted in you the seed of faith so that you would trust in Christ.
There's nothing to boast of.
If you were to ever come around to my place for dinner,
you come to Geelong and you come and have a meal with us
and my wife turns on an absolutely magnificent feast.
You know, she just, well, she hears that you're coming
and she turns it right on.
And then we sit down at the table in this marvelous spread
and you're hoeing in and thoroughly enjoying it
and you say, you know, thank you for the wonderful meal.
If I lean forward and say, well, pleasure, pleasure.
Love to turn on something good for visitors.
Spend a few hours doing it, but if you knew me,
you would know that that was nothing more than a lame joke.
It's utterly impossible that I would turn on a decent meal.
I would be in the most pathetic, incredible way,
stealing glory from my wife.
As Christians, we need to watch that we don't,
in the most pathetic, incredible way, steal glory from God.
So someone says, I decided to give my life to Jesus.
And I'm thinking inside, really?
Did you now?
What a remarkable dead person you were.
So I started to get my life back on track.
I knew I just had to sort things out
and I started to really just trust God and put him first,
thinking, really?
Did you now?
What a remarkable dead person.
You were dead.
God turned your life around.
He might have done it when you were two years old or four years old
or 40 or 90.
I don't care when.
God turned it around.
God gave you life.
God made you alive with Christ, raised you with Christ,
seated you with Christ.
And all you can do is thank him and praise him and just
marvel at how kind and merciful and good he's been.
We tend to think of our spiritual life as for us now.
But verse 7 actually throws another whole light on it
when it says that this making alive
is 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.
Salvation is not so much for us here now.
It's for God then in eternity, for all eternity.
Our salvation will be to his glory.
We will be trophies of his grace for all eternity.
The praise is his.
But having said that, this free gift of life
has changed everything.
It has completely changed the way we live.
Now we are alive to God, and we listen, and we respond to God,
and we start to see God's hand in all sorts of situations.
And Bible passages that once bore the living daylights out
of you are now thrilling to you and exciting.
And sermons which once had you nodding off to sleep,
now having you nodding in all sorts of other directions.
There's been a profound change, has there not,
when you've come to spiritual life.
You have a new identity.
You're no longer children of wrath.
You're children of God.
And you have a new ruler, no longer ruled
by the power of the kingdom of the air,
but ruled by God Almighty and by his ascended king.
That's what true conversion is.
True conversion is this radical change in someone's life.
It's not just tweaking us spiritually.
It's a massive change of heart.
Now again, our spiritual stories will vary in detail.
When God worked, who he used, passages of scripture,
situations, we'll all have different stories
of how God brought us to life.
But if you sit here this morning as a believer in Christ Jesus,
I know that you were once dead, and now you're alive.
But I also know that there's a phase three.
Phase three appears in verse 10, last verse of the passage.
And it's good works.
Phase three is good works.
For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus
to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us
to do.
Actually, there's a deliberate contrast between verse one
and verse 10 of this passage.
It's disguised in the NIV, but both verse one and verse 10
talk about walking.
In verse one, it says that we walked
in sin and transgression.
In verse 10, it says, now we walk in the good works
which God has prepared for us to do.
The Christian life doesn't begin with good works,
but it does end with them.
And we must forever get that the right way around.
We completely gut the gospel of everything if we invert that,
and we say that if we have good works, we'll be saved.
And isn't that perhaps the most common misunderstanding
of the gospel?
There are Australians all over the place
who think that being a Christian is
about doing enough good works to win God's favor
to be part of his people.
Yes, I go to church, and I try to do a good turn
to my neighbor, and I've tried to live a decent life.
And people think that if they've lived a good enough life,
they're in.
This passage says it's completely
the opposite way around.
Even their very best attempts were about signs of deadness.
But once you're made alive, once God has changed you,
then he begins to open to you a whole new life of truly serving
God and working for him.
We no longer live in the ways of rebellion and selfishness
and worldliness.
God has recreated you.
He's reprogrammed you.
He's installed a whole new operating system.
And now if you boot up a Christian,
their default setting is to serve God.
He's given you spiritual life so that you'll make
a difference in this world.
You've been saved to serve.
You've not been saved to be selfish.
You've not been saved to be impure.
You've not been saved to just mark time
until Jesus comes again.
You've been saved to start living
a very full and rich life of serving the Lord
and using the gifts and the opportunities
that he's given you.
And again, our stories will vary,
because the Lord has prepared different works for us to do.
He's given us different gifts and different personalities
and different situations.
And it may be that where you were when you were dead
gives you special opportunities for ministry and service.
The Lord doesn't waste anything.
Nothing's wasted in God's economy.
The Lord will open up unique opportunities for you
to serve him.
He's planned that your life will count for the glory of God.
So friends, make sure that it does.
He's saved you so that you'll live to his glory.
Make sure that you do.
Search out what God has prepared in advance for you to do.
It's good to ask God to do that.
It's good to ask the Lord often, Lord, what have you
prepared for me to do?
And I encourage you to ask that question both on the macro
and on the micro scale.
On the macro scale, ask it of your whole life,
Lord, what is it you'd have me do with my life?
You've given me life.
You've brought me to life.
It's been wonderful grace.
Lord, what do you want me to do with my life?
What career do you want me to pursue so that I can glorify
you and not just make a whole bucket of money,
not just put bread on the table, but really honor you?
What person do you want me to marry so that together we
can serve you and glorify you because of the way you've
worked in our lives?
What kind of lifestyle, Lord, do you want me to adopt?
What values should I take on?
What choices should I be making?
Lord, what have you prepared for me?
And then you can also ask it on the macro scale.
Lord, what do you want me to do today?
What people are you going to put on my path today, Lord,
to whom I can show something of your grace?
Amidst traffic jams and computers freezing and kids
messing up and problems at work and annoying things at church,
amidst all the rough and tumble of life, stop and ask,
Lord, what have you prepared for me to do here?
Because we know that we were once dead and now we're alive
and God has prepared good works for us to do.
I think that's the pattern of every Christian life.
It's the salvation template, spiritual death,
amazing grace, good works.
Can you see that pattern in your life?
How's it unfolded?
What happened in phase one?
How long was it?
How did phase two come about?
What's going on in phase three?
Too often, of course, we'll see the old dead life returning.
Too often, the old man rears his ugly head.
You know what you should do whenever the old man rears
his ugly head?
Chop it off.
That got you, didn't it?
That's just to wake everyone up before I finish.
Chop it off.
When you see those remnants of the old dead life coming back,
when you see that old greed and that old selfishness
and that old immorality and that old impurity,
when you see that you're just being conditioned
by the ways of this world and not being conditioned
by the ways of this world and not influenced by God,
then deal with it.
Because of Christ, you're alive in Him.
You're no longer dead.
You don't have to follow the ways of the world
and the things of the flesh.
You're alive to Christ.
You don't have to live a life of impurity.
You can live a life of good works, things which God
has prepared for you to do.
So be decisive in dealing with sin.
Kill it off in Christ.
And day by day, seek to walk with the Lord
and live out this new life that He's given to you.
And as you do it, just keep singing Amazing Grace.
Shall we pray?
Father, we want to thank you that you've worked
in so many people's lives, even in this room,
let alone throughout the world and throughout history.
And you've taken us through this template that we've looked at.
We once were dead.
We've been made alive, and now you've opened to us
a new way of living for you.
Thank you so much, Father, for what you've done for us.
Help us to mull it over and to recall with deep gratitude
the changes that you have made.
Help us to tell our story to others,
but always to tell it in a way which honors you.
And help us to live our new life,
putting to death the old man and living to Christ
and seeking each day what you'd have us do.
Father, we want to live to the glory of your name
and to the praise of your glorious grace.
Help us to do so, for Jesus' sake.