Today from Chuck Swindoll. Since we were dead, we needed life and he made us alive. Since we were in the valley of death, we needed to be raised up. He did that. Since we were powerless and corrupt and hopelessly condemned in that realm of bondage, we needed a new position he provided then.
He did it all. Friday on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll gave us a picture of what it's like to be at the threshold of God's kingdom but not a member of it. Mount Whitney and Death Valley, two iconic locations in California, are polar opposites in both temperature and elevation.
And yet they're within 80 miles of each other. In similar fashion, the contrast between heaven and hell is striking. In fact, the ascension from hell to heaven is impossible were it not for the work of God. We're looking at Ephesians 2 today.
Chuck titled his message, You were dead, but God. I realized while I was flying this past week for several hours between California and Texas that life is made up of a lot of contrasts, isn't it? And while thinking that as we were 33,000 feet above sea level, it occurred to me that in the scriptures there are numerous contrasts. Light and dark, heaven and hell.
Accept, reject. Grace, law, spirit, flesh, freedom, bondage, life, death. And in almost every one of those contrasts, God alone makes the difference.
Think of that. But God. You were dead, verse 1. We were dead, verse 5. Not only were you Gentiles in Ephesus dead, we Jews in Tarsus, in Jerusalem, in our homeland were dead. Deadness was our, strange way to put it, our life. We were like zombies in our lost estate. We were dead, hopeless, helpless, entrenched, addicted, distant, inescapably removed from any hope of ever reaching the peak of Whitney, down in this valley of death.
If you like outlines, I hope this one doesn't complicate things, I hope it clarifies. Verses 1 to 3 answer the question, what was life like? Verse 4 begins with the question, or answering the question, what did God do? Or verse 4, what did God do? And then at the rest of verse 4, down through verse 7, why did he do it? Verses 8 and 9, how can it be?
What was life like? Verses 1 to 3, what did God do? Verse 4, why did God do it? 4 through 7, how can that be?
8 and 9, so what? Verse 10, now we won't get very far into verse 10, if at all, but just as a little preview of coming attractions, I will tell you that because of verse 10, we know today that we who are in Christ are poetry in motion. That ought to tweak your curiosity. The word workmanship, we are now his workmanship. Poi Emma is at the heart of it from which we get our word poem, and we have become, because of what God has done, his poetry, his work of art, his masterpiece. He is shaping us now, having delivered us then from our deadness. But back to the offending message, you were dead. What was life like? You were dead. Dead, verse 1, enslaved, verse 2, and if that isn't enough, condemned, verse 3.
That's what life was like. When I read dead, I think of powerless, unresponsive, incapable, devoid of life, unable to change things. Not only is the dead dead, lifeless, hopeless, and lost, he isn't seeking, and don't let anyone tell you, you do, because you don't. And had you and I lived in our dead estate in the first century, we would have taken up a nail to drive into his hands, we would have put him on the cross, we would have said, release Barabbas, crucify him. Because dead people talk like that, and think like that, and don't ever try to convince yourself otherwise. Or you'll miss the whole point of the delivering words, but God.
Let's analyze it a little closer. You were dead in your trespasses, which is the result of human powerlessness, trespasses, and you were dead in your sins, which is the result of human corruption. Notice the mark completely and totally, no pun intended, this is a dead-on accurate diagnosis of the human condition without Christ.
This is it, right on target. In verses 2 and 3, dead is explained, in which refer back to trespasses and sins. Okay, we're doing a spiritual x-ray of the anatomy of the human condition.
Not an earthly x-ray, but a heavenly x-ray. From God's perspective, in your lost condition, you were dead in trespasses and sins, in which, in those trespasses and sins, three things were true. You were enslaved to the ways of the world, that's verse 2. You were obedient to satanic and demonic influences, that's verse 2. And you were driven by base desires and uncontrolled indulgences, that's verse 3. That's what it was like to be dead. You were enslaved to the ways of the world. See how it reads? In those trespasses and sins without Christ, you formerly walked according to, which establishes the standard of your life, according to the course of this cosmos, this world system.
Pause there. The lost think alike because the lost think like the world thinks. The lost take their cues from the world system. They read their favorite newspapers and their favorite magazines and they watch their favorite media to get their directions for life.
They shape their opinion based on a world-controlled system. And it's ever-changing fashions, no matter how outrageous. Allow me to go to some outrageous yet acceptable fashions. Body piercing. Have you talked to anyone on the phone that has their tongue pierced?
It's a funny sound, I will tell you. Spiked hair. Tattoos. Tattoos are in, even for women.
I remember when I was a kid, if a woman had a tattoo, she'd never want, well, normally, she would never want anybody to know it. And brash, bright, blinding, unmixed colors that don't fit together. Gothic black is another with hood. Faces painted white with eyes painted black.
Heavy chains, maxi skirts, mini skirts. Shaved heads. One athlete shaves his. All athletes now think to be different.
I'm going to shave my head. And they all speak of independence and freedom and I think to myself, and I am my own boss, and yet they wear the baggy pants or the tight pants with, you know, ragged hems or no, no bottom. I didn't know what else to wear used to it. Which brings up today exposed underwear.
That's a new look, isn't it? Exposed bras and panties. Exposed clothing that was once covered or in recent past, no underwear.
And Doc Marten shoes and a dozen or two dozen other things, and if you think I'm making it up, you haven't had an argument with your teenager lately about what they're going to wear to school. I don't have a problem with that stuff. That stuff doesn't bother me in the least. I could talk to a person and go right to the soul. Thank God.
It was a time when I couldn't get past the external stuff. I remember being at Knott's Berry Farm one afternoon with our family and I was standing in the men's room washing my hands and a fellow walked in with no shirt and he had a big safety pin and he grabbed a part of his flesh and he snapped it closed and I thought, well, that must be fun. Blood's running down to his waist and he goes over to the toilet and I hear it flush and he's dropped his hair in the toilet and he gets up and he did a swirly.
I found out. My kids told me that's what had happened and he walked out feeling great, blood running off his chest and his hair washed in the toilet, but he's his own man. He's his own guy. He's thinking for himself. I'll guarantee you he didn't think of that.
Somebody else taught him to do that and now he's got a safety pin in his chest and he's happy because he's his own man. The fact is he's walking according to the course of this world. Now those are extremes. I could take you to the business realm and show you the greed and the competition of the business world where to hell with family and wife and children, let's get on with this business. That's another part of the course of this world and we walk according to it when we take our cues from the world and we really do believe that they are people in our way towards success and you know that and I've seen that. Enslaved to the ways of the world, Eugene Peterson renders, verse 2, you were mired in that old stagnant life. You let the world which doesn't know the first thing about living tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief and then exhaled disobedience. Isn't that a fine paraphrase? You sucked in the corruption and you breathed it out.
Then came oxygen for your brain. Group think. There's not a dime's worth of difference between the cultured, refined, well-educated, highly successful businessman on Wall Street and the struggling kid trying to find his way at age 16 or 17. They're lost and they embrace the system. They walk according to the course of this world, this age.
I own this age. According to the prince of the power of the air, if you think the first part of verse 2 is discouraging, look at this one. A prince sounds like somebody I'd like to follow, but look at how he's described. He's the prince of the power of the air. Power is exousia. We get our word exercise from it. It is often rendered authority.
Let's use that. He's the prince of the authority of the lower heavens, the lower air, the dark sinister world dominated by Satan and his demonic host. Yes, we believe in a literal Satan and literal demons.
No, we cannot see them. Yes, we sense their influence so that nothing is too outrageous. No lie is too brash to come out of the closet and announce as truth.
Manipulating minds and controlling wills so that primarily the evil influence is saying truth is a lie. Lies are truth. And you hear it enough in all the different garb of today's message across everywhere from the talk shows on television all the way to the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
It's there. Eat it up. I obey their urgings. I model their cravings. I march to their cadence because I am dead and I am among the ranks of the sons of disobedience.
You know what, men and women? When you see truth as we are beginning to see it in this letter, your discernment grows 50, 75 percent. You see it. You see right through it. And verse 3, among them, the sons of disobedience, we too all.
I love it that Paul doesn't remove himself from those who were once dead. We formerly lived in the epithumia of our desires. The word means just generally feelings, emotions, desires, some good, some bad, some wicked, some impressive. But we were driven by our emotions.
If we felt like it, we did it. I was listening in my vehicle the other day to a music station and for some reason the disc jockey plugged in an oldie and I listened again to the words of You Light Up My Life. Remember when you couldn't get away from that song back a few years ago?
Every station, every place you turned, you could hear her singing, You Light Up My Life. And while driving, I suddenly had a chill go up my back when I heard that one line, It can't be wrong if it feels so right. That's being driven by your desires.
What a lie! Sometimes it just feels right for me to grab a guy by the throat and hold him with his jugular, pulsing to get air to his brain. It just feels right to punch him in the kisser. It just feels right. But it's wrong. It's dead wrong unless you're a zombie. A living, dead person who lives in the desires of the flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind.
We were condemned, children of wrath. I say, you know, Chuck, you have, man, I got it. No, not enough.
I'm not through yet. I mentioned Kent Hughes earlier. Let me repeat a story he includes in his book. I have in my file a photograph of the corpse of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, father of utilitarianism. The photo shows his body sitting in a chair, dressed and hatted in early 19th century gentleman's wear.
The whole thing is the result of his dark humor. For when he died, he gave orders that his entire estate be given to the University College Hospital in London on the condition that his body be preserved and placed in attendance at all the hospital board meetings. This is duly carried out, and every year to this day, Bentham is wheeled up to the board table and the chairman says, Jeremy Bentham, present but not voting. This, of course, is a great joke on his utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham will never raise his hand in response.
He will never submit a motion because he has been dead for nearly 160 years. And I will tell you, every board meeting where the table is surrounded by the unregenerate is filled with Jeremy Bentham's. But you can't tell by looking. Because they're still talking and voting and deciding and even sharing their wisdom according to this world. Mesmerized by group think, captured by today's culture, driven from desires within that know no boundaries even to the point of having affairs one after another, knowing it will ultimately be to the detriment of family and home, driven because it feels so good, the dead live on, thinking it will get them past the jaws of physical death. And there, the awful reality hits. But God, is that a great two words or what?
I mean, we are flat out. We can't breathe a breath of spiritual air. We can't grasp a line of spiritual direction. And he, the subject of verse 4, he, rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead, made us alive. If you haven't done it yet, take your pen or your pencil, circle the word God, draw an arrow down to verse 5, made us alive, connect that to raised us up, and then connect it to seated us, and you got it. But God, seeing us in our deadness, made us alive, raised us up, seated us in the heavenlies, and in each case observe the companion is with Christ, with him, with him. He made us alive with Christ. He raised us up with Christ. He seated us as Christ has been seated, and there you find the core of positional truth for the believer, which is one of the misnomers of Christian truth today.
Tragically, most have never ever been instructed in their position in Christ. No wonder we live as though we're still zombies, dominated by the evil one, listening to the desires of the flesh and following the cravings of our minds. No, no, no, a thousand times no, but God set us free. Charles Wesley, one of his lingering 8,000 hymns he left in the legacy of his life, included in the fourth stanza of one of the great hymns, long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature's night. Thine eye diffused the quickening ray. I woke. The dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off. My heart was free. I rose, went forth, and followed thee. What fabulous theology. I want to scream.
I almost do every time I sing it. And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? I, dungeon-chained sinner, dead in trespasses and sins, locked in a prison I could never escape from. Thine eye diffused the quickening ray. I woke. The dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off. My heart was free. Sing it, Wesley.
Sing it. Give us more songs like that, men and women, songs to sing, the songs of Zion. He's describing what happens thanks to the words but God. Since we were dead, we needed life, and he made us alive. Since we were in the valley of death, we needed to be raised up. He did that.
Since we were powerless and corrupt and hopelessly condemned in that realm of bondage, we needed a new position. He provided that. He did it all. Another of Wesley's hens, another fourth stanza. He breaks the power of cancel sin. He sets the prisoner free. His blood can make the foulest clean. His blood availed for me, for me, for you and you and you, dead but made alive.
It's impossible to overstate the magnitude of this good news. Though dead in our sins, God made us alive together with Christ. You're listening to Insight for Living and the Bible teaching of pastor and author Chuck Swindoll. We're just getting started in an in-depth study of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Chuck titled this series, Becoming a People of Grace.
To learn more about this ministry, visit us online at insightworld.org. Well, as someone who listens to Insight for Living on a regular basis, you'll be glad to learn that Chuck wrote a comprehensive commentary on Ephesians. Your listening patterns are good evidence that you want to learn more about the Bible. Well, to that end, we'd encourage you to add Chuck's commentary on Ephesians to your collection of Bible study tools. In fact, this particular volume includes Galatians as well. It's more than 300 pages in length, and the format is laid out in a manner you'd expect from Chuck, clear, practical, and with helpful illustrations and ideas for personal application. So to purchase Swindoll's Living Insights commentary on Galatians and Ephesians, call us if you're listening in the United States.
Dial 1-800-772-8888, or go online to insight.org slash store. Grace is a major theme in Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and it's a motivating theme at Insight for Living as well. In fact, we've given our financial partners a name that celebrates this gift from God, monthly companions. Those who give month by month to Insight for Living Ministries have a ministry all their own, bringing God's message of grace to every country in the world through Vision 195. To become a monthly companion right now or to give a one-time donation, call us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888. That's 1-800-772-8888. Or you can also give online at insight.org. Join us again tomorrow when Chuck Swindoll continues the uplifting series called Becoming a People of Grace right here on Insight for Living. The preceding message, You Were Dead, But God, was copyrighted in 2000, 2001, and 2009, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2009 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
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