Believing the gospel is massively inconvenient. I mean, it makes all kinds of demands on you. It makes you do things with your money you wouldn't wanna do. It makes you reach out to people sometimes in ways that make you feel uncomfortable or unsafe. If you don't understand the absolute necessity of the gospel, it will be nothing but a burden and it will be cumbersome in your life and you'll resent it.
Hey friends, welcome to the Summit Life podcast. I'm Molly Vitovich. Whether you're listening on your commute, at home, or somewhere in between, it's a privilege to bring you clear, gospel-centered teaching each week, walking with you as you grow in your faith. And if you're looking for ways to stay encouraged beyond this podcast, one simple option is to connect with Pastor JD on social media. On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, he regularly shares scripture, short reflections, and timely reminders of gospel truth designed to meet you in the middle of everyday life.
You can find him on Facebook by searching for Pastor JD Greer and on Instagram at Pastor JD Greer. And if you'd like to learn more about this ministry or access past messages, you can always visit us at jdigreer.com. Today, Pastor JD helps us see that until we fully understand the problem of sin, we can never fully cherish the gift of grace. I think this is a message that we need to be constantly reminded of.
So, grab your Bible and a pen, and let's get started. All right, well the passage that we are going to dive into deeply today is regarded by many theologians to be the single most important passage in the Bible. I would say, in many ways, this passage serves as kind of a litmus test for whether or not you understand what the Christian gospel, the good news, actually is. The passage is Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 to 10. In this passage, you're going to see Paul introduce a word that a lot of Christians today use as a kind of shorthand for how they summarize their relationship with Jesus, but it's a word that really confuses outsiders, sometimes even scares people on the outside, and that word is saved.
Saved. I have admitted to you that I sometimes cringe when I hear that word because I get this image of a pudgy Southern Baptist preacher wearing a too small, out-of-style suit, yelling the word at the top of his lungs with his eyes kind of bulging out and the veins in his neck popping out, and he says the word in four syllables. Saved! You know, and you just like, I just, it makes me cringe. Or I think of awkwardly placed billboards along.
Interstates throughout the Southeast or confrontational tracks left in public bathrooms, posing the question: you know, are you saved? But what I hope you will see from this passage is that while it is a word that might make you and me cringe. There really is probably no better word that summarizes what happens to us when we meet Jesus. In fact, one of the reasons it makes us cringe, I think, is because it encapsulates the helpless state. That Jesus had to rescue us from.
It's where Paul starts his explanation of the gospel. What is true about us that made Jesus' rescue operation necessary? In Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, the Apostle Paul is going to dispel two very deeply ingrained myths in our culture that nobody really even questions about evil. The first of those myths is that the main problem in the world It's other people. I mean, everybody recognizes that the world we live in has evil in it, but we always assume that other people are the primary problem.
So we put locks on our doors and filters on our internet to keep evil out. Or we think it's people unlike us that are the main problem.
So conservatives, of course, think that liberals are the problem. Liberals are destroying family values. They're undercutting the backbone of society. They're trying to remove gluten from everything that we eat. They're the problem.
Liberals repay the favor by thinking conservatives are the problem because conservatives, they say, are prideful and bigoted and they don't recycle.
So they're the ones who are the problem.
Well, see, all that goes hand in hand with the second myth. And the second myth is that deep down, we're not really that bad. We're not really that bad. We're basically good people who just get confused, or we get in the wrong political philosophy, or we lose our way, or we're just weak. The famous psychologist Carl Rogers expressed the predominant thinking that has shaped our culture's view of man pretty much throughout the last century.
Carl Rogers said that man was basically good in his heart and that our main problem is that we've lost touch with our inner goodness. It's oppressive and distorting societal structures that have obscured our access to our inner goodness. Of course, Rogers never really stops to consider where those societal structures came from or who invented them. But that's what we think. We think man is basically good.
He just is a little confused and he needs some external changes. Paul is going to blow up both of those myths, both of them. In the first sentence, in fact, the first part of the first sentence. Here's how Ephesians 2 begins. And you.
Or dead in trespasses and sins. First thing you should notice right there, staring you in the face, is the word you. You were dead in trespasses and sins, not other people, but you. There's only one category of people: sinner. Sin is a fatal disease that exists in the heart of every single person.
And that is the second word that challenges how our culture thinks about itself, the word dead. You were dead. Our problem is not that we're good people who occasionally lose our way. Our problem is not that we sometimes do bad things because we're weak. Our problem is not our environment or our parents or our privilege or our lack of privilege.
Our problem is not our politics. Our problem is we're spiritually dead. Many people think of sin as bad actions that we do, right?
So we talk about sin, they're thinking about the act of stealing or lying or adultery or something like that. But the word dead shows you that sin is not so much an action. as it is a condition. In fact, our bad actions are simply symptoms of our dead condition. Right you get that you don't have the flu because you cough and sneeze and run a fever You cough and sneeze and run a fever because you have the flu.
Well, in the same way, we're not sinners because we sin. We sin. Because we're sinners.
Now, I've explained to you that every parent, of course, sees this in their kids. I've explained to you that nobody had to teach my kids how to be jerks to each other. I didn't have to teach rebellious or selfishness to them, they didn't get that from their environment. When my youngest daughter was two years old, when she didn't like what we'd put down there for her to eat, she would take the bowl of whatever it was, she would look us right in the eyes and just dump it on the floor. She was cute, but she was born a sinner.
And that's because all of us, Paul says, are spiritually dead.
Now, I know what you're saying. You're like spiritually dead?
Well, that makes us sound like we're a bunch of moral monsters and we're not really capable of doing anything good. And I know that's not true. But that's not what being spiritually dead means. Spiritually dead doesn't mean that we're all as bad as we could be. It doesn't mean that we all sin in the same ways.
Think of it like this: if you walked onto a battlefield and there were 20 dead corpses all around the battlefield, some may look worse than others.
Some of them may be severely damaged, barely recognizable anymore. Others may show little to no signs of damage at all.
Some of them may be advanced in the decay process.
Some of them may look like they could still be alive. But in the end, it doesn't matter if they look okay. The important detail is they're all dead. I read a groundbreaking study recently. I think it came out of UNC.
New research, brand new research shows. That 100% of people who die, 100% of people who die. are dead. Not partially dead, not sort of dead, not theoretically dead, just dead. 100% of dead people are totally, completely, and entirely dead.
And see, because we're dead in our sins, no amount of religious behavioral change can fix us. Because behavior change only affects the behavior on the outside. It doesn't deal with the condition on the inside. You ever see that Tupperware container at the very back of your refrigerator? And you're like, how long has that been there?
And you pull it out, and there's a piece of chicken in it, and so you kind of slowly open it up, and you smell. And then, like, four hours later, you wake up, and you know, like, you just, right.
So, how many of you in that moment, when you have obviously a piece of rotten meat, how many of you, you know what that needs? It needs some Lowry's seasoned salt and some Frank's red hot sauce, and that thing will be good to go, because then you can cover up the taste of the rotten meat. No. No, the problem is that it's dead and it's decayed. It was dead when you put it in the refrigerator.
You can preserve it for a little while. But because it is dead, it has already started the decay process. We are, the Apostle Paul says, in our nature already spiritually dead. And we are decaying. We may smell okay for a while.
We might even learn to cover up the areas of stench in our lives with religion or manners or culture, but. At the core, we are dead. You say, well, this sermon has started awesome. Just wait. It gets worse.
Verse 2 and 3, Paul begins to unpack for us what spiritual deadness actually looks like.
So let's go back here. And which you also once walked, following the course of the world, watch this. Following the prince of the power of the air, that's a reference, by the way, to Satan, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Let me translate that for you. Not only are you dead in sins, you are followers of Satan.
The core of Satan's rebellion is: I'm going to do what I want to do instead of what God wants me to do. Isaiah 14 records the fall of Satan from heaven, and what it records that Satan said is five different phrases that all start with the two words: I will. I will be like the most high, I will ascend to the mount of the assembly, I will be above all the stars of heaven. Sin's core, I've explained this to you. It's the way I explain it to my kids.
Sin's core is that I want to be in the middle instead of God. You can see it in the very word sin, S-I-N. It's that I want to do what I want to do instead of what God wants me to do. I want to be the point. I want to call the shots.
I want to do things my way. I want this whole thing to be about me and not him. And when you and I joined Satan in that rebellion, look, you see it? You became his son or daughter. You became his son or daughter, and even more, his spirit went to work within you.
His spirit, when you were a follower of his, went to work in the sons and daughters of disobedience. You may not be demon-possessed, but his spirit was working in you and shaping you. From there, Paul says we began to live in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and of the mind. What that means is that something besides God became our master. We were created so that we could carry out the desires and the will of God.
And what happened is we began to let other things hold ultimate sway in our life.
So our body, the desires of our body, said, have sex. And we said, okay. Our body says, eat. Our body says, be the best. Our body says, get angry, and we obey.
Our mind says, do things your way. You should call the shots. You should be the best, and we obey. And because of this, Paul says, because of this, we were by nature children of wrath. just like the rest of mankind.
Now you say, JD, wait a minute. Surely, surely you, and I guess Paul the apostle here, surely you guys overspeak. I mean, I've made some mistakes, I get that. My kids make mistakes, but dead, spiritually dead, followers of Satan, his sons and daughters, his spirit at work in us, children of wrath. I mean, come on, I know people who don't even believe in God and they still do a bunch of good things.
I mean, what about the guy who throws himself on a grenade in the foxhole to save the life of his buddy? Even if he doesn't believe in God, that's a good thing, right? How about the mom who's not a Christian, single mom, but she sacrifices everything to give her kids a shot out of poverty and she's not a Christian? Aren't those good things?
Well, sure they are. But see, the point is, in light of our biggest sin, In light of our biggest sin, and that is replacing God's authority in our lives with our own and living for our glory instead of His. Because our core sin is following the satanic rebellion of I will instead of God wills, our good things, even our good things, don't really seem that good. Think of it like this. Imagine that you were able to have a bird's eye view in an ISIS camp.
Where you were watching some ISIS fighters that were plotting to commit some act of terrorism where they blew up a school bus and killed a bunch of innocent children. But you noticed that as they were playing this thing, they took a break for lunch, and one of the ISIS fighters notices that his friend doesn't have anything for lunch.
So he takes his sandwich and he divides it in half and gives half of it to his friend.
Now, that's a genuinely generous thing to do, right? It's a genuinely good deed. The problem is, it's in the context of something so horrifically evil, it's hard for you to even see that as good. Does that make sense? What if our cosmic treason against God was like that, but a billion times worse?
What if our rebellion against God was so evil that it's even hard to call our goodness good? And by the way, just because you haven't experienced the full outworking of your depravity. Doesn't mean the seeds of that depravity aren't present in you. The capacity to do evil is in all of us. And a lot of times conditions outside of our control, like your family situation or the things that you've experienced, keep that depravity from growing out into full fruition.
There's a few TV shows on right now that I think have some actual great insight into human nature. My wife and I were watching one the other night, it was a documentary on Lance Armstrong.
Now, you know Lance Armstrong's story. We did. I know how his life. I know how things turn out. And you kind of look at the end of his public life and you're like, how does that happen?
I mean, who would do that to their friends? And who would live a lie like that and become a fraud in the face of a disease and that he's trying to you know, who does that? How do you get to that level of deception and depravity and wickedness? And then you watch the documentary and at least to me it starts to make a lot more sense. You got this drive to succeed that causes you to, I'm just going to cut a little corner here.
Well, I can see myself doing that. And then, you know, once you start doing it, you got to start lying to cover it up because you don't want to be exposed. And I can see myself doing that. And then all of a sudden, the money gets bigger and the reputation and all that stuff gets bigger.
So now you got to lie in bigger ways to cover up this path. And then you go from one step to another. And now you got to smear even your friends who are threatening to expose the lie.
Now you got to isolate everybody. And at every point in the way, I'm saying, I can see myself doing that and that and that and that and that. My wife said, it feels like we're watching a live episode of Breaking Bad. We watched another one on Alan Iverson. If you know anything about him, a professional athlete who ended up in a really bad place.
My philosopher wife said, She said, You know, if I had grown up in a situation like that and I'd face temptations like he did, who's to say I wouldn't have become exactly like that? We shake our heads at these people, but honestly, who am I to judge? In those circumstances, I might very well have turned out the same. The point is what the old Puritan John Owen used to say: the seed of every sin is in every heart. Recently, I had somebody in our church tell me.
About a trip she took to Rwanda. If you know anything about recent history, Rwanda was a place of unspeakable genocide carried out by the Hutus against the Tutsis. And on her trip, this mission trip, she said, we drove into the mountains of a Tutsi village. that had been wiped out during the 1994 genocide. Our Rwandan ministry leader stood at the very spot, the very spot, where his family, his children.
and hundreds of people. His friends and neighbors had been slaughtered in front of him. Through a translator, she said he described the horror of what he had experienced that day. She said, I literally felt sick. Afterwards, we held hands on that spot and we prayed.
I'll never forget when our ministry team leader opened the prayer this way: God, listen to this, forgive me. The wickedness that drove these men to commit these crimes is the same sin in my heart. I am no better, I am no closer to salvation, but for your grace. Our church member went on to say, she said, I always thought that I had a pretty boring testimony. But standing there on that scene of that massacre, I realized that I have been saved from the same depths of depravity as a mass murderer.
You. And I. Deserve the wrath of God. We really are dead in our sins. Our blasphemy against God deserves the eternal punishment of hell.
Hell is a terrible place. And educated people don't even like to talk about it. But Jesus believed in it and he talked about it all the time. Even more than he did heaven. And Paul starts his explanation of the gospel here because, in order to really understand the gospel, In order to place any value on the gospel, you have to understand what you were saved from.
You see, a lot of times I think we try to jump right to the good news of the gospel without really grappling with the bad news. But every physician knows that if you misdiagnose the disease, you're also going to misprescribe the cure. And if you don't really understand the problem as the patient, you're never going to embrace the cure. Brad Hambrick, who's over our Oliver at counseling here says he sees this all the time in marital counseling. He says people come in and marriage problems and they want the solutions.
Fix it. But what they really don't want to talk about is the problems. Because, well, that's uncomfortable.
So just fix it. Paul's point in Ephesians 2 is that this is what we do with God. We want the answer, but we really don't want to hear about the problem. But if you don't wrestle with the extent of the problem, by the way, not just your problem, but he says the rest of mankind's problem. If you don't wrestle with that, then you're never going to love the gospel.
You're never going to be committed to the gospel. You're certainly not going to be committed to spreading the gospel. Listen, I'll just go ahead and tell you this, this past moment of pastoral honesty here. Believing the gospel is massively inconvenient. I mean, it makes all kinds of demands on you.
It makes you do things with your money you wouldn't want to do. It makes you reach out to people sometimes in ways that make you feel uncomfortable or unsafe. If you don't understand the absolute necessity of the gospel, it will be nothing but a burden and it will be cumbersome in your life and you'll resent it. I kind of think of it like this. Imagine you were getting on a Delta flight and you had to sit in economy.
You know, they give you about four and a half inches of legroom back there, so you're kind of crammed in there. And the other thing that you gotta do in your seat is you gotta wear you gotta wear a parachute. How many of you have actually worn a parachute, like had a parachute on your back before? Gonna raise your hand. All right.
Okay, so they're not little tiny backpacks. They're like huge. They're very cumbersome.
So you gotta sit in economy with a parachute. You're annoyed. You're complaining. But let's just say that you knew that 30 minutes into the flight, that flight was going down. All of a sudden that parachute doesn't seem nearly that annoying, does it?
it becomes your favorite possession. You begin to brag about it. You begin to try to persuade people around you, if they have a parachute, that they need to put theirs on also. You see, if you understand really what you're saved from, then suddenly being devoted to the gospel starts to make a lot more sense. Many of you don't love the gospel.
And you don't spread the gospel because you have never really wrestled with The extent of the problem that you and I were under when Jesus came and rescued us. Until you understand the problem, you will never cherish grace. Until you understand the problem, you never really love Jesus. I love what Charles Spurgeon used to say. He said, you know, those who think too lightly of the Savior do so because they think too lightly of sin.
You show me a man who has felt the noose of God's judgment around his neck and been delivered from it. That's the man who will weep for joy at the pardon he has received and then will hate the evil that he has been forgiven of.
So my friend, hear it. All right? Hear this you are dead in sin The problem is not your environment. The problem is not your parents. The problem is not your poor self-image.
The problem is not confusion. The problem is not temptations. You didn't get around a group of bad friends. You are dead in sin. You're by nature a child of wrath.
You're a son and daughter of disobedience. You're a follower under the influence of Satan. And yes, I know that you're not going to hear that verdict on humanity from Oprah or Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz, but Paul says it's what's true and it's why you needed to be saved.
See? By the way, that's why I can't get away from the word saved. Do you understand? What's a better equivalent? I didn't need to be improved, edited, updated, rebooted, or enhanced.
I needed to be forgiven, restored, redeemed, and resurrected. I needed to be saved. Because sin didn't knock me down onto God's JV team. It didn't put me on probation. It didn't put me on a slower track to get up to my mansion in heaven.
Sin wiped me out, it killed me.
So, I didn't need a Jesus who would come as a life coach who would help me turn over a new leaf. I needed a resurrected Savior who would give me new life. Verses 1 to 3 is a lot of bad news. There was a lot of bad news, and it could have stopped right there. Verse 4 contains probably the largest conjunction ever uttered in human history.
But God. But God, that's it. John Stock calls those the two most significant words ever uttered in the English language, but. God, would you just let the force of that hit you for a minute? You were dead.
You were helpless. But not. Hopeless. Because hope wasn't going to come from inside of you by your ability to help yourself. Hope was going to come from outside of you when God in mercy looked at you and bared his mighty arm and began the process of salvation.
When you were dead in sin, but God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us. Let's talk about those for a minute. Great love.
Some theologians, some Christians talk about salvation so coldly and mechanically, like it's just this doctrinal thing that's being worked out. But our salvation was birthed in the love of Jesus Christ for sinners that He didn't want to see die. Ah! Right now, the church in North America is facing a critical moment. More people than ever say they have no faith at all.
Many churches are struggling and fewer than 1% are truly sharing their faith.
So what's the answer? It's not bigger events. It's not bigger marketing. It's the same way the church has always grown. Multiplication, disciples making disciples.
churches planting churches. Ordinary believers taking the gospel seriously, right where they are. And that's the vision behind Summit Life. Through clear, gospel-centered teaching on radio, podcasts, and other digital platforms, Summit Life exists to equip believers and churches to multiply so the gospel can reach neighbors, cities, and nations. When you support this ministry, you're not just funding a broadcast.
You're investing in the future of the church. You're raising up new leaders. You're joining with God and fueling a movement of disciple-making disciples. It's time to be part of something bigger, something better, and something eternal. Join with us today by giving a gift.
Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220 or visit jdgreer.com. Read a story recently of Robert Coleman, who's a pastor. Lived about 50 years ago, talked about in his congregation. There was a little girl, eight-year-old girl, who contracted a disease that the doctors believed were going to be fatal.
They discovered, though, that her brother, who was two years older than her, had had the same disease the year before and had miraculously recovered. The doctor went to the parents, and this was all happening super fast because it was progressing really quickly. And so they went to the parents and said the only chance she's got to live is if she could get a blood transfusion from him. Because if they got the same blood type, and if we can get his blood's got some of the resistant antibodies or whatever, and we think that it might save her life. And so they went to the 10-year-old boy and said, Would you be willing to give your sister a blood transfusion?
He said, Well, of course, I'll do it. And so the little 10-year-old boy goes into the hospital room where his sister is just barely conscious. And Robert Coleman says he watched this little boy look at her, smiled, and gave her a thumbs up, and he laid down on the gurney. And the doctor took the IV and put it the... The needle into his arm and saw the blood begin to come out.
And he says, When he saw that, his face just immediately went blanched, and he just began to tremble. And he started to cry. And he looked up at the doctor and he said, Doctor, how long does it take? He said, What do you mean? How long does it take?
How long does it take until I die? I said, no, no, no, you're not going to die. We're just a blood transfusion. We're just taking a little bit. But the little boy had gone in there thinking that he was basically gonna give his blood to his sister so she could live.
That kind of love is rare. And what God is saying is he didn't even show it for his siblings. He showed it for his enemies. When we were still in sin, Christ died for us. He gave his love.
It was mercy, rich in mercy. It's a mercy that honestly you and I would never have showed. I know we like to flatter ourselves and think, well, if I were God, I'd just be more merciful than God and I'd just forgive everybody. And that's just what I do because I'm awesome. I hate to burst that kind of bubble.
That is not true. every single time without exception that somebody in the Bible Is in a situation where you compare their mercy and God's mercy every single time. Jonah, Abraham, David, God is always way more merciful than the human being. Every single time. I love how Martin Luther said it, the reformer.
If I was God, and the world had treated me like it has treated him, I would have kicked the vile wretched thing to pieces. You see, I've heard it said like this: until the gospel seems too good to be true, you haven't really understood it. It was mercy, a mercy that you and I could barely comprehend, but God. The greatest words in all the Bible being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us when we were dead in our sins. He made us alive together with Christ.
Watch there. You see the tenses of those verbs? Tenses in the book of Ephesians are very, very important. He's not talking about something that's continually happening. He's not talking about you're made alive by this gradual religious process where you slowly become a good, God-fearing person and your church attendance gets more regular and you start to read the Bible and you quit cussing his mouth.
He's not talking about that. He's talking about something that Jesus did for you all at once in the past. On the cross, Jesus became your sin. He died a sinner's death. He was treated by God like he was a follower of Satan.
He was treated by God like a son of disobedience. He was treated like a child of wrath because he was burying our sin in our place so that we could be made alive together with him.
Sometimes people wonder, like, well, why did Jesus have to die for us to be forgiven? Why would God need Jesus to die in order to be able to forgive us? Why can't God just wipe the slate clean and be like, all right, you know, blow the whistle, everybody back in the pool, everybody, you know, all skiing going the same directory? Why can't He do that? Think of it like this.
You know, say that you borrowed my car. And you took it out and you wrecked it, totaled it. You come back to me and you're super sorry about it. What are my options here? I can make you pay for it.
If you refuse to pay for it, maybe, I don't know, maybe I could take you to court. If I. Forgave you. What have I just agreed to do? I haven't just made the car rat go away.
I haven't just automatically erased the damage. If I forgive you for wrecking my car, Then, what I have done is I've basically said that I will absorb the cost that you incurred. I'll absorb it into myself, and I'll pay for the damage to the car. That's what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is absorbing the effects of sin.
When Jesus Christ died on the cross, this was God Himself saying, You sinned, I'll take the effect. I'm going to give you mercy. I'm not going to repay you for your sin. I am going to absorb the cost of your sin, and I'm going to give you life in its place, which is why around here we say that you can summarize the gospel in four words: Jesus in my place. He lived the life that I was supposed to live.
He lived the perfect life, and then he died the death that I'd been condemned to die in my place. That's why we say Jesus did not merely die for us, Jesus died instead of us. Paul continues, verse 6, and then God raised us up with him. And seated us. You see past tense?
You see it? He seated us already. He seated us with him in the heavenly places. Again, not will see this one day, but has seated us, past tense, in the heavenly places. Y'all listen to this.
In God's eyes, I am already seated with Christ at the place of honor around God's throne. I could not be in a higher place in heaven closer to God. Have you ever go to an athletic event and you see people in like the really awesome seats and you're like, who do you got to know to get in there? I am already in the greatest place in the world. I'm seated in the very best place.
I could not be in a higher place. Not if I gave a billion dollars to the church, not if I prayed for four hours every day, not if I visited every country on a mission trip, not if I went an entire decade never sinned, because he literally put me in Jesus' seat. Do you know what kind of confidence that gives you in life? Listen, I'm as sure of heaven as Jesus is. And when I say that, people sometimes are like, what?
They're like how arrogant is that? Who do you think you are? You think you're that righteous? No, that's the whole point. Jesus was that righteous.
And he paid my sin debt in its entirety. We traded places, and now I'm going to heaven on his account, not mine. And by the way, already, already I experience the benefits of that prayer. When I go to God in prayer, I know that God hears me as if I were Jesus. That's why we end our prayers by saying in Jesus' name We don't put that at the end as like a signal to God that we're almost done.
That's not why we say in Jesus' name at the end of the prayer. What we're saying when we say that is, I know that I'm God. I'm praying from his seat. I'm praying based on his record, not my own. Because sometimes what happens is when I come to God in prayer, I tend to start thinking that He's going to hear me based on how well I've lived.
Isn't that how you are?
So I just think, once a pound when I come into church, And we start praying.
Sometimes I've had an awesome week. Not every week, sometimes it's been awesome. I'm like, read my Bible every day. I shared Christ with three people. I was super nice to my wife, even when she was a jerk to me.
I was really patient with my kids. I just did awesome. And I can just feel the pleasure of God all over me. And I'm like, oh, I just, I know the God in heaven is like, man, I love being with that guy. And I feel like I can just ask him anything, and he'll be like, sure, sure, man, look at your week.
Here you go. Right? And then what happens is I go out from that and I usually have a bad week. And a bad week is, you know, I didn't hardly read my Bible, and I didn't lead anybody to Christ. In fact, I cussed a few people out and probably drove them further from Jesus when they had a little summit sticker in the back of my car.
And then my wife was nice to me, and I was a jerk to her. And then I kicked the dog, and it's not even my dog, it's a neighbor's dog.
So it was just bad. It was just bad. And I come in, and what do you do? You sort of in the worship time, you're kind of like, you just sort of like, uh, and so you start making promises to God. Oh, God, I'm gonna do better next week.
Oh, God, and it's like, I'm like, God. I need some stuff from you, but I'm going to try to buy them on credit. I'm going to tell you what an awesome week I'm going to have next week, and then I want you to answer my prayers based on that. You see, both of those are basically saying that you don't understand where God has already seated you in the heavenly places because when you come to pray, you're not praying based on your record, good or bad. You're sitting in his seat based on his record.
When you get to the end of your prayer, you say in Jesus' name, what you're saying is, and the reason I expect you to hear this prayer from me is because I fasted for 40 days this week. in the wilderness and resisted Satan to his face. And then I had so much faith that I walked on water. And then, when they crucified me, I just looked at them from the cross and said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. That's why I think you should hear me.
In Jesus' name, amen. Because I am literally praying from his place with his position. I couldn't get higher because his became mine. The way I describe it to kids sometimes is like it's a report card. When you get a report card, that's like your passport to wherever you want to go to college.
And so you gotta get grades if you want to go to college.
So imagine you wanted to get into Harvard University. You had B's and C's, and you've got a 750 on a 1600 scale in the SAT. You're not getting into Harvard. Right? Well, let's say that you had the ability somehow to have the smartest person in the world who had ever lived who got a pure, not just a 1600 on the SAT, they gave him like a 2,000 because you finished it in 10 minutes.
You know, so extra point. You got a perfect SAT score. You've never missed a single question on any test that you've ever taken, and that one becomes yours. That is the entry that you're going to use to get into Harvard. You're going in, no questions asked.
What God says is, I made Jesus sin who knew no sin so that you could become his righteousness, so that you could expect heaven based on his record and not your own. In verse 8, Paul is going to begin his great summary of the gospel. Verses, you should memorize, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not even of your own doing, it's the gift of God. It's not a work, so that nobody should boast.
There are four things I'm going to point out to you really, really quickly there. Four crucial things for you to understand about salvation. You see the basis of it, the instrument of it, the result of it, and the confidence that comes from it. You ready? Here we go.
Number one: the basis of salvation is grace. Notice this: by grace you have been saved. Notice that it's passive. You have been saved means it's being done to you. You're not saving yourself.
You're not gradually getting better. You have been saved. And the basis of that was grace. Grace means that it was based on nothing good or meritorious about you. It was a gift of God, not a reward for good behavior, not because you were less bad or had a good heart or had great potential or made promises to God.
It's not even, by the way, watch this. It's not even a reward for having faith. Let me show you how I know that. She has word this right here. This in the Greek language, this is hard to explain in English, but this, where it is in the sentence in Greek, what does it point back to?
What is the this that it's referring to? And this is not of yourself. Where it is in the sentence, it points to both this word, saved, and it points to that word, faith.
So this is not a salvation is not from you and the faith by which you laid hold of salvation is not from you Even the faith itself was a gift of God. It's like we've looked at throughout this series, right? Ephesians 1. God is the one that chose you. God is the one that drew you.
God is the one that awakened you. God is the one that put it in your heart to believe. God is the one who gave you the ability to choose. God woke you up in the ambulance and just said, I'm saving you. And then let you consent to Him.
That's basically what the salvation process was. It's by grace. You understand? And maybe you've heard salvation described like this. Yeah, I was drowning in a sea of my own sin.
And Jesus pulled up alongside. He was like the Coast Guard. And Jesus saw me drowning in sand and he threw me a life preserver and he pulled me into the boat and rescued me and saved me. Hallelujah. That sounds awesome.
It's not the gospel. The gospel? Is that when Jesus pulled up in his Coast Guard boat, you were face down. You'd already drowned, you were dead. And he reached out and he picked you up out of the water and he put you in the boat and he breathed into your lungs the breath of eternal life and he resurrected you.
It is by grace. from start to finish, number two. the instrument of salvation. is faith. The instrument of salvation is faith.
Paul says, by grace we've been saved through faith.
Now, what does that mean? Because Christians are so confused about this. I find they think of faith as like this general religious feeling.
Something that gets stronger throughout their life. It's your confidence and for how sure you are that Jesus is true. And that's really not what it is there. This is really important. Get this.
Faith is the instrument. Faith is the hand. That simply lays hold of Jesus. That's all that it is. It's the hand that lays hold of you.
The best picture of this is in the Old Testament, where all the best pictures are. When you brought a lamb to sacrifice for your sins, you would take it up to the altar, the priest would put it on the altar. And then what you would do is you would take your hand and you would reach it out and you would put it on the head of this lamb. and you would begin to confess your sinfulness. And as you confessed your sinfulness with your hand and this lamb, the priest would take the knife and he cut the throat of the lamb, and the blood would drain out.
And what the hand was showing was that. Your sinfulness was being transferred onto this innocent lamb. That's faith. When you become a Christian, watch. All that happens.
is you reach out to the Lamb of God. with the hand of your heart and say, I believe that you died for me. I believe that you came for me. I believe there's nothing I can do to save myself, and I am transferring the guilt of my sin onto your head, and I am resting in you. And Jesus, you are mine.
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. You see, people ask questions like: I don't know if my faith is strong enough to be saved. That didn't even, that's the wrong question. It's kind of like imagine you got a tribesperson and you've got a Harvard PhD aeronautical engineer both standing on the tarmac of a runway. Tribesperson literally has never seen a plane, never seen anything electronic.
And they're both looking at this huge plane, and the tribesperson has never seen anything fly, has no concept of how something that big could fly. The aeronautical engineer not only knows that it can fly, he could build a plane for you.
Well, the moment comes for You to get on the plane, and because this tribesperson has a friend that he trusts, the tribesman, with all his doubts, And with all of this confusion, gets up on the plane. And the smug Harvard PhD stands on the tarmac. Plane takes off.
Now what do you have? You got one Kai Filled with doubt, soaring through the air. You've got another guy filled with understanding standing on the ground. Who's going to get to the destination? Not the guy who knew everything, but the guy who chose to get on the plane.
Faith is not absence of doubt. Faith is choosing to rest the hopes of your salvation on Jesus Christ and what he said he did when he died on the cross. And you come to him and say, I got a lot of questions, and I don't know if I understand everything, but I am hoping in what you said you did is my salvation. And I may not understand how all this works until I get to heaven, but Jesus, you are my hope, and you are my Savior. That's the instrument of salvation: faith.
Number three, the result of salvation is good works. The result of salvation is good works, for we are his workmanship, Paul said, for Christ created in Christ Jesus for good works. For good works, we're not saved by good works. But the faith that saves will always produce good works because when God saves you, He unites you to Christ and he begins to infuse his power into you. It is inconceivable that you could encounter the power of the grace of God and the infusion of the Holy Spirit and not become a person who just does good works everywhere you go.
I think I've described it like this before. Imagine I was late for church and Time came, worship team was done, and You know, I'm not here. And so, like, they get up here and play some more songs and have a prayer time, testimony time. Then I come.
Okay, so I come up. I'm like, y'all, I'm so sorry. I'm late. Y'all wouldn't believe this. I was in downtown Raleigh.
I was trying to get here. And as I was getting in my car, a grand piano fell on my head. It was like a cartoon. It was like 10 stories out, and they're pulling it by pulling, and it broke and just landed on my head. Smashed me into the ground, you know, like broke everywhere, it hurt.
Then we had to clean it up. I had to get it up, had to help, and had to fill out the, and then I got my car drove here. That's why I'm late. Your response to me? Liar.
Right, liar, because there's no way. You could get a grand piano dropped on your head. and show up here at church and look like you look. You got hit with that kind of force, a grand piano from 10 stories, you'd look different. You'd talk different, you'd walk different, everything about you'd be different.
And Paul's like, yeah, that's what I mean when I'm talking about the gospel. You're not saved by good works, but a faith that saves will always produce good works. Because how could you access this kind of power and this kind of grace and not have it radically transform your life? How could you say you love Jesus? and still willfully Commit.
the very things that put him on the cross. You want to look me in the face and tell me, oh, yeah, I love Jesus. I believe he saved me from hell. And I continue to practice the things that I know put him on the cross and send other people to hell. You're saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.
It always comes with good works. You're not saved by good works, but if you're saved, you'll do good works. Number four. In that verse, you see the confidence. salvation and that confidence is that what God started, he's going to finish.
I love this. Watch this. For we are his workmanship. We'll come back to that word in a second. Created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand.
Prepared beforehand means predestined. It means that God has already laid out the good works. He's already provided the opportunity. He's already provided the resources you're going to need to do those good works. He's already predestined them all to happen.
So you can confident that what God has chosen you for, whether it's to be a good husband, whether it's to be a good dad, whether it's to get off the drugs, whether it's to have an upper, He's already provided all the things that are necessary, and you just got to go walk in it. Here's the other thing I love about here, for we are his workmanship. Workmanship, literally in Greek, is the word poema. Poemo where we get our word. Poem.
We are God's poem. We are a poem that God is writing, and God is writing a beautiful poem, and poems that don't end are not beautiful poems. And so, what Paul is saying is, you, you were this thing that God is writing for His glory and His beauty, and what God started, He's gonna finish. By the way, the only other place this word right here is used in the Bible, this is awesome, Genesis 1. We're talking about creation.
That creation was God's workmanship. Think about creation for a minute. God spoke into the expanse of nothing. And he created everything. He didn't start with raw materials.
He started with nothing. And he spoke light and life into nothingness. When God saved you. He took a righteousness that did not exist in you. He took a life that was absent from you and he spoke it into being.
He didn't start with raw materials. He didn't say, oh, there's still some good left in that one. He started with death. And he said, I'm going to speak life and righteousness. And the same powers that spoke the universe into existence began to go to work creating righteousness in you.
And my friends, the darkness in your soul is no more able to resist the transforming, creating powers of God than the darkness of the world was able to resist the sunrise. He chose you. He purchased you by his blood. He works in you now through his power. You didn't start this process.
You're not sustaining this process. He's not looking to you to finish this process. He committed himself from start to finish. He is going to finish what he started in you, which means that all you have to do is yield yourself to Jesus. and let him do these things through you.
Christianity, as I often tell you, is not about you doing anything for God. It is about letting Christ do everything through you.
So see What he's done is, he's woken you up in the ambulance. He's woken you up in the ambulance. He's not asking you to help him save you. Will you let him save you? Because see, if you'll say yes to him, Then he's going to seat you right now in this moment in the heavenly places in Christ.
And he's immediately going to start a process in you that can never be stopped, not by hell itself. Do you know for sure that you have Trusted Christ as Savior? Have you let Him have control of your life? Have you let this rescue process start? If not, then right now you can do it by simply.
Reaching the hand of your heart up and laying it on the head of Jesus and saying, Yes. I surrender and I believe. And you can just say yes. And in that very moment, he will forgive your sins. He will put new life in you.
He will seat you in the heavenly places. And he will start a process that not even hell itself can stop. How will your life change as a result of all we've learned today? We pray that God's word transforms each of us one day at a time. And if we can play a part in that story for you, then praise the Lord.
Now, if you'd like to see the message transcript or explore related resources, remember you can find everything free of charge at jdgreer.com. We'll see you next time. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries. Yeah.
