“Let No One Deceive You” (Part 2 of 2)

As followers of Jesus we continue our study in Ephesians chapter 5.

Alistair Begg delivers a warning for all of us. If you are declared righteous in Jesus because of what Jesus has done, then, in actual fact, your lifestyle is pretty much your own deal. And so the person says, as in Romans 6, Why don't I just go out and sin so that grace may abound and prove that I really understand the doctrine of justification? The answer is, you clearly don't understand the doctrine of justification. Because to put it in a nutshell, God does not justify those whom he does not sanctify. Those who were predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified—Romans 8.30 around—and those whom he justified he also glorified. So you can't take one piece of the puzzle and separate it from the unfolding drama of God in salvation. So the justified person is the being sanctified person. And the person who is not being sanctified or is not giving any evidence of it either has never been justified or doesn't understand what it means to live within the framework of God's great salvific purpose. I hear it all the time.

I don't have to deal anything with the law. That's the Old Testament, they tell me. The kingdom of God was different. The kingdom of Christ is new.

Notice the translation. No one has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. I think what Paul is saying is this.

Don't play that stunt. Don't play the idea that the Old Testament was really concerned about this and the New Testament isn't concerned about it at all. And if you have any doubt about that, then just keep reading your Bible. Romans chapter 8. And as Paul makes it clear that the law could never put a person right with God, because nobody could ever keep the jolly thing. We've all broken the law. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So if our view of Christianity is, what you're supposed to do is you get involved with a group of people, and then you just try your best for the rest of your life, and hopefully you'll be able to overcome some of the bad stuff you've been doing.

If you have a bad week, then try and have a good week, offset the bad week, and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here we have it, verse 3 of Romans 8. God, God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do.

Couldn't do. How has he done it? By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemns sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the Spirit set their mind on the things of the Spirit, for the things of the flesh is death, and so on. He goes with his argument. Now, remember where he has started.

He started gloriously. There is now, therefore, no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, those who have been justified by faith. Romans chapter 5, verse 1.

And he has gone through six and the challenge there, and he's rebutted that. Why don't we just do what we want? He said, God forbid, you've never even understood justification. Into chapter 7, the good that I want to do I don't do, the bad I don't want to do.

I end up doing it. I'm involved in a continual and irreconcilable war. Well, then, who am I?

What am I? The struggle of seven is more than matched by the reality of eight. You live your entire Christian life in seven and in eight! And it is the reality of seven that is met by the glory of chapter 8. But in case they were going to go wrong, he says to them, by the way, what the law could not do, God has done in the person of his Son in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Not so that we can be lawless.

Now, I can see you looking at me and you're wondering a little bit about this. In actual fact, what this has to do with is an understanding of the doctrine of justification and the doctrine of sanctification. And we'll really make a mess of these two verses if we don't get a hold of this. So let me quote the catechism, because that saves time, and it's really good. Question 33 of the shorter catechism asks the question, What is justification? Here's the answer. Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone.

All right? So in the same way that a judge is able to declare the person in the dock free from condemnation, the judge does not declare the person sinless and does not make the person free from condemnation. In the same way, justification is forensic.

It is legal. Every so often I hear people praying, and they say, Thank you, thank you that you have made us righteous through our justification. No, he hasn't. He doesn't make us righteous through our justification. He declares us righteous. He doesn't make us righteous.

Well, how in the world is he gonna make us righteous? That is the process of sanctification. Justification is instantaneous. Justification precedes sanctification. But justification, as I said before, does not exist on its own, placed in a right relationship with God by what Christ has done for us so that not only are our sins forgiven but we are accepted in his sight. Question 35, what is sanctification? Answer, sanctification is the work of God's free grace—same—whereby we are so renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and to live unto righteousness. So the one is, if you like, legal and forensic. The other is moral and ongoing. The one is a crisis, if we can use that word, that eventually will be met by another crisis. If you think—it's not a great word, but I've used it now, so I'll stick with it—but if you think of justification as, like, a crisis, instantaneous event, if you think of glorification as a crisis, instantaneous event, when I see him, I will be made like him.

That will not be a process. That will be, in the moment, in the twinkling of an eye, changed into his image. But in the meanwhile, tomorrow morning, when I have to go back to the things I do tomorrow morning, and you do too, what is it that God is doing? He is working in the realm of sanctification to conform us to the image of his Son. Therefore, he says, you'd better get this clear in your mind, that if your life is marked by sexual immorality, by adultery, by the things that our world, our culture this morning says are just absolutely fine, you have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. It's dramatic, isn't it?

And the reason it's dramatic is because it is absolutely crucial. God, I say to you again, does not justify those he does not sanctify. So what you have in this verse is, first of all, a warning. And then, actually, you have a test. You have a warning about how important it is to be in a right standing before God and how that is revealed in a progressively sanctified life.

You have a test—not the only test, but you have a test against which you can gauge yourself. And actually, the verse provides a means to the very end. You see, how does God sanctify me? By not only his promises but by his warnings. That's why if you read, for example, in Hebrews—in Hebrews chapter 6, in one of the quote apostasy passages—if you read the apostasy passage and you just scan right through it and you go, Well, I'm sure that's very important for somebody and not me, you ought to be more worried than you realize. We ought to read the apostasy passage and say, Dear Lord Jesus, help this not to be me.

You get it? Because justification is not a synonym for presumption. It's not a synonym for presumption. It does not allow us, then, to presume on things.

It actually fashions us according to these things. And so, unless my life testifies to being in the process and of being perfected by the process, I'm forced to conclude that I'm gonna have to start at the very beginning again. I'm not gonna be able to pass go, and I'm not gonna be able to collect two hundred pounds, dollars. No, I'm gonna have to start at the beginning. Where's the beginning?

At the cross of Jesus Christ. Acknowledging that what I've been doing is calling you Lord, Lord, but you're not my Lord. I've been actually trying my best to put myself in a good standing with you, and I'm completely messed up because it doesn't work. That's, you see, what it does. It's not supposed to make us go, Oh, well, I'm sure that's not me. Do you remember when Jesus has his disciples in the room, and he says to them, he says, one of you is a betrayer? Do you remember what the response was? To a man, they said, Lord!

It's not me, is it? They didn't all go, Oh, yeah, that's all Judas here. Yeah, we know him.

No! In fact, Judas was adept at saying, Lord, Lord. He had it buttoned down. Well, we'd better just say a word about verse 6. It's no surprise, then, that he says, Let no one deceive you with empty words. Let no one deceive you with empty words. Because he realizes that there's gonna be a whole ton of people that come around and say, Oh, you don't have to believe that stuff. The Gnostic heresy in that period of time was very, very attractive, because the Gnostics taught that anything that you do with the physicality of your body cannot affect your spiritual standing before God.

What a heck of a deal, right? So you're secure, quotes, somewhere in the inner place, and you can go out and do what you want—sleep with anyone you want, do with anything you want. Doesn't matter if you deal with this issue or that issue.

It's not an issue. Pulsars do not be deceived by vain and empty words. You say, Well, we don't have that today, do we?

Are you kidding me? Think of all the empty words that are part and parcel of everyday life. God, they say, people say, if he exists, is far too kind to punish anyone.

We don't believe the wrath of God anymore. Clearly, it's not something. It's an old-fashioned idea, and really, we must distance ourselves from it. People who say the same thing, they'll say it's all about living in the moment. Sounds so good, doesn't it?

It's on the golf course today when they play the PGA, the final at East Lake. You'll hear it again and again and again, and there's absolute validity to it, isn't there? You don't want to be thinking about if you're gonna win it.

You'd better just make sure you hit this five-iron. So stay in the moment. That's true. Jesus said, Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. But Jesus was saying, The now matters because of the then.

Contemporary philosophy says, The now matters because there is no then. You see, this is dead-poet society. This is Robin Williams. What a tragedy when I think of Robin Williams.

He probably believed that. Look, he says, in the corridor. Look at all the people who were at this school before you. Where are they now? They're nowhere. And you'll be nowhere. Therefore, carpe diem.

Seize the moment, because this is all you have. That is one of the great lies of the evil one. This is not all you have. There is a reality beyond this transient life. It is called eternity, and it is the destiny of every created being under God. But his vain, jangling words, they'll tell you, No, it's not there. The autonomous self says, It doesn't matter how I conduct my being. I am entirely in charge of my own destiny. Where does this come from?

Goodness gracious! You know, people argue the toss about Darwin and his evolutionary hypothesis, but it's all there, actually. I'm not laying it at the root of old Darwin. But, you know, do you really believe we are animals evolving upward?

We're all evolving upward. We've had a good go at it since about the 1840s, since he explained to us that there is no God who created us. There is no God that stands outside of time.

He's created the philosophical construct or the scientific methodology to allow us just to say, Forget all that nonsense, but deep inside our hearts we know it isn't true, because every sunset says it isn't true. Every birth of a little child says it isn't true. The whole of creation cries out, It isn't true. But we suppress the truth of God to embrace a lie. And those vain words come at us again and again and again. And so Paul says, if you're gonna live a life that is marked by godliness, you're gonna be up against it left, right, and center—and we are today.

Everything. The psychologists have psychologized away sin. The educationalists tell us that we're only just a few courses away from getting everything perfect. And so we go down the line.

And where in the world are we? There are more murders this weekend in Chicago than in some countries of Western Europe in one city. There is indiscipline in the home. There is chaos in the school.

There is loss of structure in the courts. There is fearfulness in the realm of medicine. You just go right down the line, and you hear the vain words coming back, Don't listen to that stuff. We know that isn't true. We're all evolving upwards. It's all going to be fine in the end.

And don't let anyone tell you about the wrath of God. No, God would not be that way. I visited a lady Friday afternoon in the oncology ward—one of the oncology wards at the Cleveland Clinic. And I'll tell you right now that whoever her oncologist is hates that cancer in her with a passion. It's justifiably committed to eradicating every last element out of her body, if she or he can.

And nobody would stand back and say, Well, that's not the right thing to do. In fact, it makes perfect sense. You see, the wrath of God is not the fiery outburst of a dad who's lost his temper and kicked the cat and driven his car into the wall.

No, it's not like that at all. It is the settled response of the entire holiness and character of God to everything that he knows is marring and spoiling and disappointing and just destroying life. Don't be led away by these vain words. Why all the bitterness, the unhappiness, the brokenness, the wretchedness? Well, it's the wrath of God. Read Romans 1. God says, You want to do it on your own? This is how it goes. Read Romans 1.

How does it go? Suppress the truth—idolatry, immorality, homosexuality. The destruction of a culture. You want it on your own?

Let me show you how it works. No culture in history has survived the kind of stuff that our culture is going through right now. And the one thing that you mustn't do is stand up and say, Do you know what God actually says about this? And do you know why? Because… And do you know that he sent his Son to die on the cross so that all this brokenness and wretchedness and disintegrated life could be found in all of its fullness, that we can understand who we are, what we are, why we are in him? That's the message. And Paul, you can just almost hear his heart, can't you? What are you gonna do about this, in light of the fact that it is appointed unto man once to die, and after this comes the judgment? If you go to funeral services much—and some of you do, it's almost an occupational hazard, the older we get—it's quite remarkable to me, because I do go to services every so often that I don't have a part in. And they often do, as Psalm 90, but they always excerpt it.

Not always, but often. So it goes like this. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations, and before the mountains were brought forth, wherever you formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you were God. So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Hey, wait a minute!

You just missed a big chunk. You return man to dust and say, Return, O children of man! You sweep them away like a flood. We are brought to an end by your anger, and by your wrath we are dismayed. Where is the answer to the wrath of God? Where has God's wrath been poured out? It's been poured out on the cross of his dearly beloved Son, in order that we might be able to heed the word of Hebrews, Flee from the wrath to come. You have the same thing when they do 2 Corinthians 5. 2 Corinthians 5, we know this earthly tent we live in is destroyed. We have a building from God that is not waved with hands.

It's lovely, the picture of the tent going away, and so it goes on. And then they finish at verse 9. But verse 10 is the kicker, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive what each one has done in their body, whether good or bad. Well, are you saying, Alistair, that with them we're justified by our good deeds?

No. How could I? That wouldn't be true. The ground of our salvation is in the work of Jesus Christ for us, not as a result of something done in us—definitely not done by us. But the evidence of the fact that we have been brought into the realm of the justified is in the ongoing of his work in us, which is teaching us to say no to ungodliness, to stand away from these things, to nip it in the bud, because of who we are.

I can still hear my father's voice. Now, that's not the boy. That's not my boy. You're not gonna do that, are you?

They appeal to my identity. Well, that's right. The father looks down and says, You're my girl. You're not gonna do that, are you? And if you've done that, you better come down, bow your knee. Let's get it back on. Let's go. Onward and upward. The reason we say no to ungodliness is because we understand we belong to God. That's Alistair Begg today on Truth for Life, and Alistair joins us again in just a minute to close with prayer. We heard today that living a life marked by godliness is a process. Part of that process is spending time with God in his word, and that's easy to do when you subscribe to the new Truth for Life daily devotional. It presents a passage of scripture followed by a reflection from Alistair. All of these daily reflections are taken from his recently released book titled Truth for Life 365 Daily Devotions.

You can sign up for the free email online at truthforlife.org slash 365. And while you're on the website, be sure to look for our featured book this month. The book is called Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. Reading God's Word is just one of the ways that as believers we become more like Jesus. In this book we'll see that there are other areas of discipline to help us grow in godliness, and we'll find out why pursuing these disciplines is so important for our spiritual maturity.

You can request the book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life when you donate online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or give us a call at 888-588-7884. Now let's join Alistair in prayer. Father, thank you. We commend one another into your loving care. May the love of the Lord Jesus draw us to him. May the joy of the Lord Jesus fill our hearts as we seek to serve and follow him. May the peace of the Lord Jesus keep us when all the vain and prevailing voices sound in our ears, so that we might on that day stand before you clothed in Christ's righteousness and unashamed. To this end we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. You've often seen before and after pictures in advertising. They show the physical changes that a product can make. Tomorrow we'll hear about the kind of transformation all of us need, one you can't see pictures of. It happens on the inside. Be sure to listen tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.