Mercy for the Ages #1

Beloved, this passage tells us why God saved us and what He saved us for, what the ultimate purpose of your salvation is, and where salvation originated from. Why did God save you?

Well, the answer is not something to guess at. It's right in Ephesians 2, and Pastor Don Green will take us there today on this edition of the Truth Pulpit. Hi, I'm Bill Wright, and we're continuing our series, Your Sin and God's Salvation, this time with a message titled, Mercy for the Ages. And Don, in a society that expects entitlements, coming to God expecting the same is out of the question. Well, Bill, what Scripture tells us is that we have forfeited any claim on God as a result of our sin, and that means we need to approach Him humbly and to appeal to Him on the basis of grace. God, deal with me on the principle of Your undeserved favor rather than something that I am entitled to. It totally reorients your whole perspective on the nature of spiritual life and how it is that men go to heaven. We trust that you'll gain a better understanding, my friend, as we study God's Word together today on the Truth Pulpit. Thanks, Don, and friend, let's join our teacher right now in the Truth Pulpit.

We're going to structure the message today around three points, which is what I usually do for some reason. We're going to look at the mercy of God, the action of God, and the purpose of God here in these four verses. And by the time we're done, the wonder and the excellence and the glory of God will be so imprinted in our mind that we will be forever grateful.

The mercy of God. Why did God save you if you're a Christian? I'm speaking today as to Christians. I'll have a word for you unbelievers at the end of the message. But here at Truth Community, what we've said from the beginning is we teach God's people God's Word. We order our services for the sake of Christians to be instructed and edified out of God's Word.

And Ephesians is a book that is clearly and specifically written to Christians. And so we're speaking today primarily to Christians, speaking and assuming the reality of your Christian conversion. And if you're not a Christian today, let me tell you what you're really like.

You're like somebody that's on the outside of a great candy store, and you've just got your nose pressed up against the window and you're looking in, but these things don't belong to you. If you're a Christian today, these things are meant for you to take, eat, and enjoy. But if you're not a Christian, what this should do is it should work in your heart a sense of isolation and separation that causes you to flee to Christ for mercy. This is not written to saved and unsaved people alike. This is written to Christians. And so I speak today as speaking to Christians, which I understand is the primary audience here in the room today. We get to rejoice together over what we're going to read today.

So here's the question. Why did God save you? Jeff, Amy, Brian, Amanda, Erin, Will. Why did God save you?

Andrew, Kim. Why did God save you? Were you somehow better? Were you somehow a little smarter, a little more spiritually sensitive than the other person who's not saved?

That has nothing to do with it. It's not about you. It's not about what you brought to the table to God because you were spiritually bankrupt, and so was I. Why did God save you?

Was it something that you did to earn his favor? Did you come waving the banner of here's my faith, God, now you owe it to me to save me? That is not it at all. That has nothing to do with it in terms of the primary moving force of your salvation and what the motivation that saved you was. It did not come from within you at all. It was something outside of you. It was something beyond you. It was something that you had no control over. It was something that you had nothing to do with, that you did not generate. Remember, you were captive to evil powers, and you were condemned to suffer the wrath of God.

It could not have come from you. Let's do away with that thought. I feel like a fireman up here trying to extinguish any spark of self-righteousness in your soul today. We have to put that away and recognize our prior guilt and condemnation before we can actually enter into the wonder of what this passage is saying. It's only when you're willing to sacrifice your pride and self-righteousness that you can enter into the joy and the understanding of true biblical Christian salvation. And that's what this passage is all about.

We saw your prior guilt and helplessness and your depravity and your inability. Now, Paul is not talking about you anymore. As we move into verse 4, he's talking all about God. He's talking about who this saving God is and explains how it is that you're a Christian today.

So those of you I named by name and those of you who feel left out because I didn't specifically identify you by name, but we include you all the same. Look at verse 4. Why did God save you?

Look at it here. In clear, simple language, the Bible declares that it came from God, not you. Verse 4. But God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us. The mercy of God.

That's our first point. Here is a profound contrast. There you were and some of you maybe can remember back just prior to your conversion when the conviction of sin and guilt came upon you. There you were, ruined and hopeless and condemned. But God accomplished something for you that you could not do for yourself.

And whatever we're going to see, we haven't gotten to the lead verb yet. That doesn't come until verse 5. Paul injects God into the situation of your guilt and condemnation. He injects God into it and before he can even say what God did, he says, I've got to tell you what this God is like. And what this God is like is someone wonderful, is someone exalted, is someone so good and gracious and marvelous that human words can't rightly praise him for what he is. Our lips, unaided by the Spirit of God, cannot rise to the level of praise that God deserves.

Here it is. Look at it with me. Look at it again in verse 4. That God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us. What you're seeing, Paul, laid the foundation for here is the motivation for Christian salvation. And where Christian salvation comes from is from the immense depths of the goodness of the character of God. Paul says God, being rich in mercy and great in love. God was motivated to save you, Christian.

Understand this. God was motivated to save you, not by something that he saw in you, but something that came from his own mercy and love. It flows out of his being, not out of yours. Paul says he's rich in mercy. The biblical concept of mercy is a wonderful concept.

We have more study of this in days to come ahead of us down the road. What does it mean to be merciful? Here in this context, it's saying that God had compassion on those who are in need. It's not just that he had compassion.

This is who he is by nature. God is compassionate on believers. God has had compassion on you in your need. There you were in your guilt and in your slavery, your captivity to your environment, to an unseen evil spiritual world, and to your own evil lust. You were in a miserable condition. And Christian, what happened is that God looked on you, saw you in your miserable position, and said, that moves me to compassion. I will act on behalf of that one. You who had shook your fist at God, as it were, or you who had put your head down and shaken your head as someone once again explained the gospel to you. Here we go again. I don't want to hear this. Either in your indifference or your outright rebellion or somewhere in between, in your total deadness to God, God, as it were, looked at you and said, that's a miserable condition, and I have the power to relieve it. You know what?

I'm going to. God was merciful. He reached out to you in order to relieve your present spiritual suffering and the certain future spiritual suffering that awaited you in death, condemnation, and eternal judgment. God saw the whole big picture laid out before him, saw you walking in sin, saw what that led to, saw the outcome of hell and condemnation upon you, and said, Manuel, I'm going to have mercy on you. Jerry, I'm going to have mercy on you. I'm going to express compassion. He showed compassion to you by name and exercised his power and his love on your behalf.

There you were, Christian, in your great need, and God, who isn't just merciful. He's rich in mercy. He's abounding in mercy. It flows out from him.

It overflows from the endless depths of his being. That rich, overflowing mercy compassionately rescued you from your captivity. When God had every right to execute the sentence of judgment on you, his mercy, as it were, acted on your behalf and saved you and rescued you and brought his love and power to bear on your soul in a way that you never could have forced him or obliged him to do.

Christian, we're on the receiving end of the rich mercy of God. If you're here today and you're a Christian, understand what your salvation is speaking to, what your salvation is testifying to as you go through life, what the outpouring of this position of grace that you find yourself in. What that is saying is that God had mercy on you because salvation, listen to this, you can write this down. You can write anything that I say down, okay?

But you can write this down. Your salvation is an expression of God's mercy, not of your merit. It has nothing to do with what you deserve because what you deserved was something far different. For you to be saved here today is an expression that God had compassion on you in your miserable, helpless state and delivered you unto something new, something good in exchange for the evil in which you were ensnared. Look at verse four with me again. He's rich in mercy, rich in this compassion that alleviates suffering. And he's not talking about an earthly physical suffering here. It's not mercy like you have on somebody who is in need of a meal. This is a mercy in the spiritual realm as shown by the context of the prior three verses. It has nothing to do with your earthly suffering.

It's all about your guilt and condemnation and God acted to relieve you from that far greater need. And it goes on and says, because of his great love with which he loved it. Don't you love the adjectives in this verse? Paul could have said, but God being merciful.

But he didn't say that. He said God being rich in mercy, not simply because he loved us, but because of his great love with which he loved us. And this is not a sentimental emotion that Paul is describing here. What he's describing here is a commitment from the mind and the heart and the intentions and the actions of God to act on your behalf, to seek your spiritual welfare, to commit himself, as it were, to your highest spiritual good. He loved you with a commitment to secure you. It's not about he had these fluffy feelings about you, like he was, you know, like he was some kind of spiritual boyfriend or something.

It's not that at all. He's rich in mercy and he has this immeasurable commitment to his people to love them, to be good to them, to secure their well-being. This great immeasurable commitment, this great immeasurable movement of his power on your behalf, this great expression, the stowal of undeserved favor upon your life.

That's what God had as his motive. Point number two, the action of God. We've seen the mercy of God, the love and mercy of God, which is the fountain from which the river of salvation flows, so to speak, speaking metaphorically here. It flows from him, not from us, his goodness, so much so that it silences any accusations we might make against him.

But what did he do exactly? What did he do for us in our dead spiritual condition? Look at verses five and six. This is a spiritual mouthful. This is a biblical mouthful that we're about to see here in verses five and six, even when we were dead in our transgressions.

Stop right there. He's finally going to get to his main verb here, but before he does, he just wants to remind you one more time that this was not motivated from anything inside you. This did not come from anything that you did, nothing that you can claim any, even a little sliver of credit for. Paul says, remember, I'm about to say something really important here, but remember one last time that you, we were dead in our transgressions. We were dead. There was nothing that we didn't move toward God.

He moved toward us. 1 John 4 says, we love because he first loved us. The priority motivation, the priority affection is always God towards sinners, not vice versa. Always in Scripture. And so Paul says, remember, you were dead in your transgressions.

In fact, let me just point one thing out here. In the original text, you see this a little bit more clearly. The verb forms could be translated this way in verse 4, but God being rich in mercy, verse 5, and us being dead in our transgressions.

There's a parallel there. There's a grammatical parallel that isn't immediately evident in the Greek text, but here's God rich in mercy and here's us dead in our transgressions in such a way, laid out for us in such a way that one final time Paul declares this had to come from God because it couldn't have come from you. It couldn't have come from us, Christian. You were dead. And so what did the living God do?

Well, there's no room to think that we somehow cooperated with God and God needed us as an equal partner in salvation or he needed us to push his desires over the finish line. No, you were dead. You weren't running the race. You had fallen down and you were dead and lifeless and motionless. You couldn't get to the finish line of your salvation. The ambulance couldn't come and revive you.

All that was left was to carry your lifeless spiritual corpse off the track and to dispose of it. That is where the mercy of God moved him to action. Look at it in verse 5.

We're just talking about subject, verb, and direct object. God, verse 5, made us alive together with Christ. God is the actor in this verse. He is the subject of the verb and we, who are now Christians, are the direct objects. We received the action.

We did not contribute to the action. God, in his mercy, while we were dead, made us alive together with Christ. And Paul parenthetically adds it's by grace you've been saved, not by anything that you did.

By grace you have been saved describes the ongoing results of a completed past action. You are now, as a Christian, you are in a present condition of being saved that is a result of what God did in the past in your life. God made you alive together with Christ. He regenerated you.

He imparted spiritual life to you and that life principle now explains how you can be a Christian. You are living in the overflow of a past action of God when he made you alive together with Christ. God brought spiritual life to you when you were dead. God resurrected you spiritually in the same way Christ called Lazarus out of the tomb.

Lazarus, bound in his grave clothes, four days there, so much so that they say, Lord, by now he stinketh. And God said, Lazarus, come forth. And in the effective call of God working in your heart, he said, you come forth to life now. God made you alive in Christ.

God imparted life to us when we were unable to respond to him. And you who were dead were now alive. Some of us can look back and remember such a clear difference that, yeah, I remember I remember how after my conversion, the word of God became alive to me where I read it before and it was just a dead letter and it really didn't capture my interest and I really couldn't even understand it. Now, after my conversion, I opened it and it rang with truth. It brought joy to my soul. I was now alive to the things of God in Scripture that previously I was dead to. Whereas before the name of Christ was an empty curse word to me, now it's the sweetest name on earth.

Now I love him, whereas before I resisted and rejected him. Those kinds of affections, beloved, toward God's son and God's word, toward the word written and the word incarnate, those kinds of affections are the mark of new life. It's the mark of what God did for you. And the whole point, let me remind you, the whole point of this broader passage of Scripture from Ephesians 1 verse 15 all the way down to Ephesians 2 verse 10 is making the point that what is for us to understand that the power that physically raised Christ from the dead is the exact same power that raised us from spiritual death. And so a power, listen to this, God's power that raised you to life is also the power that imparted new desires to your heart that you never had before. A spiritual capacity to receive truth that you never had before. An affection for Christ and his word that you never had before.

These are the marks of spiritual life and they did not come from within you. God made you alive together with Christ. We, you and I, brothers and sisters in Christ, you and I share in the very life that Christ received when he rose from the dead. We have resurrection life that not only one day will physically resurrect us, but now today has spiritually resurrected us and done something inside us in our hearts, in our attitudes, in our dispositions that we never could have generated on our own.

God made us alive together with Christ. It has to be a spiritual resurrection that he's talking about because we were already physically alive. And so he's talking about a spiritual resurrection in keeping with the spiritual nature of the dead condition from verses one through three. He made us alive together with Christ.

And Paul goes on and explains even more of what that means. Look at verse six now. And, so he's joining together in verse six describing the action of God on our behalf. Verse five, he made us alive together with Christ and something more.

He raised us up with him. Again, speaking of a spiritual resurrection, there you were, dead in sin, captive to Satan and your own sinful corruption. And God raised you up in Christ. There you were, dead in your false religion, blind to truth, thinking you were doing good. Maybe some of you thinking you were Christian and then having your eyes opened that you were not. You have new spiritual life as God's son. You have a life that is different from what was yours in your unredeemed state. You have been raised to something that you did not have before. Just remember you're saved because of God's mercy, not your merit. And Ephesians 2 doesn't stop at telling us what God has done.

It tells us why he's done it. Pastor Don Green will explain that further on our next broadcast. And we hope you'll be with us then here on The Truth Pulpit. Meanwhile, we invite you to visit our website, thetruthpulpit.com. There you can download podcasts or find out how to receive CD copies of Don's radio messages for your personal study library. And if you want to go even more in depth, you'll also find the link Follow Don's Pulpit. That'll take you to Don's full length weekly sermons, not subject to the time editing we need for radio broadcasts. By the way, if you're in the Cincinnati area, check out the service times for Truth Community Church also on the website and plan a visit. We'd love to welcome you. Again, check out thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit.