Once Dead, Now Alive! - Part A

The Bible tells us that we have a condition. It's called sin. We are being drug out in the undertow of life.

We have a flaming future certainty that is awaiting us that's called being lost. God saw us in that condition. He took the penalty of sin upon Himself and His Son. And if we understand that and embrace that personally, we can be saved. We have a sin condition and only God can save us from it. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip lays out God's plan of salvation for the world and for you.

But before we begin, here's a resource that will encourage and challenge you to fulfill your purpose to impact your world with the truth of Jesus Christ. Some people find comfort in the status quo. Others just can't wait to challenge it. If this were a recovery meeting, I would begin by saying my name is Skip and I'm a non-conformist.

How about you? Do you go with the flow or swim against the current? The truth is going against the status quo can be difficult, but following Jesus requires it. The Bible's account of Daniel shows how God can transform lives by one person's willingness to defy what's normal.

I like to think of it this way. When the waves of life came crashing down, Daniel decided to go surfing. He thought, I'm going to ride these waves. If these waves are the will of God for my life, I'm going to learn how to master these things and I'm going to get propelled forward. Learn to soar above the status quo with Skip Heitzig's book Defying Normal. It's our way of saying thanks for your gift of $35 or more to help connect more people to God's word. And when you give, we'll also include the booklet What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren. These two resources will help you stand out from the crowd for God's glory.

Visit connectwithskip.com slash offer to give online securely today or call 800-922-1888. Now we're in Ephesians chapter two as Skip Heitzig gets into today's message. There's a lot of things that define who I am. You could say that I am defined by the word man. I am a man.

You could use another descriptor. I'm a tall man. I'm an old man. I'm a German in my origin.

I'm a Californian. But the one descriptor that would define me more than anything else is I am a saved man. I have been saved.

Something has happened in my life that has altered the course presently and forevermore. We understand the concept of what it means to be saved. If a doctor performs an operation on you, pulls out a tumor like what happened to my wife 11 years ago, she had a very aggressive tumor and the very skilled surgeon took it out, I can rightly say that doctor saved her.

If you were in a wreckage, an automobile accident, and pinned under a fiery automobile and a fireman came in and pulled you out of the burning wreckage, we would say that he saved you. If you were out in the ocean and the undertow was taking you out into the sea and you were being pulled under and the lifeguard saw you flailing, went out and brought you back in, same thing, you've been saved. The Bible tells us that we have a condition.

It's called sin. We are being drug out in the undertow of life. We have a flaming future certainty that is awaiting us that's called being lost. God saw us in that condition. He took the penalty of sin upon himself and his son, and if we understand that and embrace that personally, we can be saved. Now this topic of salvation, and this is a series we're going through, 2020, understanding truth clearly.

We've looked at the doctrine of God and Jesus, the Holy Spirit, humanity. We come to the most important subject ever, which is salvation. It is the most important thing in the world. In fact, in a hundred years from now, the only thing you'll care about is this. In a hundred years, you won't care about the election. In a hundred years, you will not care about the economy.

You will not care about a virus. In a hundred years, you will care about, am I saved or not? So I'm going to date myself. I told you I was an old man. I grew up watching a program on television called Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Does anybody remember that show?

Look it, we have a few of us old folks together today. So in that show, and I think it aired from 1955 to 1965, it was black and white. Alfred Hitchcock was the master of mystery stories, and there was one particular program where there was a woman in prison serving a life sentence, and she had become friends with the caretaker of the prison. The caretaker had many jobs, one of which was to, whenever a prisoner died, ring the bell, letting the prison know that somebody had died, take the body, put it in a casket, go and fill out the paperwork, the death certificate, return to the casket, nail the top shut nice and tight, put the casket on a cart, take the casket outside the walls of the prison, and bury it in a graveyard. So she worked out a deal with the caretaker that the next time a prisoner dies and the bell is rung, that she would sneak into where the casket was, lie on top of the corpse, get the lid nailed down, she would have enough air to breathe, she would be taken out and buried with the corpse. Later on, she would be taken out and buried with the corpse. Later on, the caretaker would return, undo the dirt, and she would be set free.

So they had this worked out. So as months went on, in the middle of the night, she heard the bell ring. She figured out a way to pick the lock in her cell, got out, she escaped, and snuck into the room where the caskets were, found the corpse she felt for it. She climbed in the casket and waited until she heard footsteps of somebody coming down and putting the nails in the lid. She felt being hoisted onto the cart, being taken outside into the graveyard and being buried. She heard the dirt as it was being put on the casket. She got all excited. She started laughing in the casket. And so she decided, while she waited, to just light a match and see which prisoner it was that died. So she lit the match and looked down, and to her horror, it was the caretaker.

So her plan was foibled, and the whole episode ends as it fades to black, and she's screaming in the casket. There's no way out. Listen, you do not want to get this choice wrong. You don't want to hedge your bets on the wrong plan. When the dirt is tossed onto the coffin, there are no other options. It's too late to say, oops.

And yet, most people do get this wrong. You talk to people about salvation. Oh yeah, I'm saved. Really, how do you know you're saved? Well, because I professed it.

Yeah, I said some words. Therefore, I'm saved. Or, I'm saved because I go to church. Or, I'm saved because I carry a Bible. Or, I'm saved because I like Christians now.

And it's usually a performance reference. They're referring to something they have done, a ritual they have performed, a prayer that they have said. But listen, listen, you are not saved just because you say you are. You are only saved because you've received a savior.

Somebody has saved you and declared that you are. So with that in mind, I bring you to Ephesians chapter 2, and we're going to look at the first seven verses, really. We'll read down to verse 10 for context. And Paul has such a knack of giving us a panorama of salvation, past, present, and future.

He says, you, he has made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath just as others. But God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up together, made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone shall be saved.

Not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." This is Paul going from the graveyard to glory, from Death Valley to Graceland. And what I'm going to do with you is show you five different stages of salvation.

These are stages everyone goes through who comes to Christ. Every human being goes through at least the first three, redeemed one go through all five. Let's begin with the first one, dead. Dead is the word that describes everyone.

For he says in verse 1, "'And you he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins.'" This is every single human. You either are dead or you were dead. How did you get dead?

How did you get dead? You were born that way. You were born dead, DOA, dead on arrival. That is, separated from God, possessing no spiritual life of your own, unable to understand spiritual things.

David said of himself in Psalm 51, "'For I was born a sinner, yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.'" Now, we all know that we live in a troubled world, and you have pundits and philosophers who tell us every generation what's wrong with the world and how to fix it. Some will say the real problem with humanity is a social problem. We haven't figured out how to get along with each other. We have racial tensions. We have to understand each other socially, and we haven't learned how to get along. That's our real problem, social issues. Others will say, no, that's not really our problem. Our underlying problem is not a social problem, but it's a psychological problem. We have to understand ourselves before we can ever understand others.

We have to get along with ourselves, accept ourselves, have self-esteem and self-acceptance, and then we'll be able to socially adapt. Others will say that's really not the problem. The problem is environmental issues. We have pressures in our environment.

We have parents who told us we'll never measure up or uncles who were mean to us or teachers who put us down, and so we are victims of our environment. None of those are the problems. They may be symptoms of the problems. The problem is not a social issue. The problem is not a psychological issue.

The problem is not an environmental issue. The problem is we're dead. We were dead, dead in trespasses and sins. Unbelievers aren't sick.

Unbelievers are dead. They don't need a self-help course. They don't need a personality adjustment. They need to be saved.

That is the most important issue. If you put a person in the best schools in America, you will have at the end of the process a very well-educated sinner. You can put a person in the best therapy environment and psychological counseling in the city, and you will have at the end of the process a very well-adjusted sinner. You can put a person in religious schools, religious institutions, churches, and you can have at the end a very religious sinner.

It's only when a person is under the grace, mercy, and love of Jesus Christ that you have a saved sinner. Now this is something that God said would happen. Way back in the book of Genesis, God told the first people on the earth, in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die. The soul that sins, it shall die. The wages of sin is death. So the moment Adam and Eve disobeyed God, death happened immediately. There was an immediate separation with God, and there was that spiritual death, and there was an eventual physical death.

Now what Paul said is what happened then continued all the way until now. For Paul says in Romans 5, through one man sin entered the world, and death entered through sin, thus death spread to all. This is why unbelievers do not understand spiritual truth. They don't understand spiritual things. Paul said, 1 Corinthians 2, the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, nor can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned.

So an unbeliever will say, yeah, you're telling me about these spiritual things. I don't see it. I don't get it. I don't understand. Of course you don't understand it. You can't understand it. It's what Jesus described when he said, a sower went out to sow seed, and some fell on the pathway, the wayside, and as soon as the seed went down on the hard path, the birds of the air came and stole it away. Jesus said, so is everyone who hears truth, and Satan immediately snatches it from their hearts.

It's hardened. They don't get it. Just as a physically dead person cannot respond to physical stimuli, a spiritually dead person cannot respond to spiritual stimuli. Listen, a corpse cannot hear the conversation going on in the funeral parlor. A corpse has no appetite for food or water.

A corpse feels no pain. So that's the condition dead. That's why Jesus said a man must be born again. There must be a spiritual birth that occurs because outside of Christ, everyone is dead. That's the first condition.

The question is, how do we get dead? Well, there's two things that are mentioned in verse 1, trespasses and sins. One is a condition. That's sin.

One is an action. Those are trespasses. Our condition is the sinful condition that is part of our nature from Adam. The other are things we do, trespasses. Now let me describe that word sin.

You've heard this before, some of you. It's the word harmatia. It actually means to miss the mark. It's an archery term. It's a term used 173 times in the New Testament, and it actually refers to aim at something and to miss it. You shoot your arrow, but you fall short of the target.

So here's one example. We're all standing today at the edge, let's say, of the Rio Grande River, and the goal is to, in one jump, jump all the way across. Now let's say it's springtime because today you could probably just walk across it, but if there's water in it, the goal would be to jump from one side to the other. Now, if you're a little child or an older person and you jump, you're only going to make it a few inches or a couple feet, perhaps.

That's about it. If you're a little older child, you might make it a few times more than that, but if you're a little older child, you might make it a few times further than that. If you're a very accomplished athlete, you're going to make it even further out. All of you will only succeed relative to one another, but you will all fail, self-included, in reaching the goal to go from one side to the other.

We will all fall short of that goal. Now that's sin. We've all fallen short of the glory of God, but look at this other word, trespasses.

Now that's different. That means to cross a known boundary. That is a deliberate, willful act of disobedience. That's when you put down a line and say, don't cross the line, and somebody goes, that's a trespass. So the first time you wax your floors and you tell little junior, don't walk on the floors, and he forgets and starts walking out there, that's sin.

But when you correct him and then he looks at you with that little gleam in his eye to see if you're going to do anything about this, that's a trespass. Or, for example, when I was a little boy, my parents took us to Disneyland. This is when it first opened in history, and I remember going through Disneyland. There were only just a few things, and I'm kind of just walking around going where I shouldn't go. My parents had to bring me back. That's sin.

But later on when I was a teenager and I jumped the fence at Disneyland by the five freeway and snuck into It's a Small, Small World, now that was a trespass. We were dead, separated, because of sins and trespasses, or as he puts here, in order, trespasses and sins. Stage one.

Stage two. Not only that, we were drifting, verse two, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. Now, this is a bit of a conundrum, because on one hand, Paul says, these people are dead and you were dead, but while you were dead, you were walking.

So how does that work? The walking dead, right? You're looking at an unbeliever. They seem very much alive, very vivacious, very vibrant, intellectually stimulated, very well accomplished. Can we rightly say that those unbelievers are dead?

Absolutely. In the sphere that matters supremely, which is not the body, which is not the mind, but is the soul, the spirit, they have no life. They are dead and they are drifting. And that takes us to the word in verse two, walked.

I want you to notice that. In which you once walked. Now the word walked, peripeteo, is a Greek word that means to order one's behavior or to move about or to walk about.

But one commentator suggests the best translation. In fact, one translation uses the word wandering or meandering. That the word means to browse or wander about loosely with no goal or purpose. You know the difference if somebody is walking, you see him walking on the street, they have a gate, you look at him, you go, that person's going somewhere.

He knows right where he's going. But then you have people who kind of saunter and they just kind of walk around and they're meandering, they're browsing. Have you ever gone into a store with the intention of not buying anything and you walk out with two or three bags of something? You know what happened? You browsed.

You browsed your way into buying something. Now listen to how Isaiah describes our life before Christ. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have all wandered and gone our own way.

So not only were we dead, we were drifting. And we were drifting according to a pattern, a path, a course, Paul calls it, according to the course of this world. Now just a note about that word world. The word world here is cosmos and it means ordered system, something that is ordered. The unbelieving world is very organized and ordered. Mankind is an organized creature. So cosmos world ordered is the opposite of chaos, unordered. So the idea of the world is a world system, an organized world system, a world order, a value system led by a common leader called here the prince of the power of the air.

Anybody know who that is? It is Satan. It is another description of Paul for Satan. So to walk according to the course of this world is to think and to live and to act according to the ideologies and standards dominated by Satan and demons.

That's Skip Heitzig with a message from his series 2020. Now here's Skip to tell you about how you can keep encouraging messages like this coming your way as you help connect others to the good news of Jesus. God's truth is the best foundation you can build your life on.

And our goal here is to empower your life with his truth through these Bible teachings. So would you please consider giving a gift today to keep the messages coming to you and to help more people build their lives on God's word? Here's how you can give a gift to help more listeners like you build an unshakable faith. Call 800-922-1888 to give today. 800-922-1888 or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate.

Your generosity helps keep this biblical encouragement coming your way and help change many lives around the globe. Now before we go, did you know you can watch Skip's messages from the comfort of your home with your Roku device or Apple TV? Just search for his channel and watch thousands of powerful Bible teachings and live services. Find more information on the broadcast page at connectwithskip.com. Join us next Monday as Skip Heitzig shares about the future eternal destination Jesus gives you. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times.