Let’s read a verse before we start. This is Psalm 24:3:
Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord,
Or who may stand in His holy place?
Let’s pray.
Lord, we do want to come to You this morning and again thank You that You’ve opened a way for us into Your presence. And Lord, we do by faith come into Your presence through that way, the Lord Jesus Christ. We take our stand in our place in Him this morning.
We ask You, Lord, that You would open Your Word to us; that it would be true that the Word would not be something manufactured here that we talk about, but Lord, that everything in Your Word would be true. It would be true to us and would have that effect that You want it to have in our hearts and in our lives.
Lord, we thank You that You have not left us to go by our own thoughts, our own minds; that You’ve given us Your Word and Your Spirit. Lord, we just tell You how dependent we are on You today for You to interpret Your Word to us, so that we might live before You and walk with You. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This morning, I want to continue speaking out of Ephesians, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll probably be doing that for a while, because we’ve just gotten through the first chapter and there are six chapters left.
I want to thank the many people who have encouraged me. I know it’s tough to listen to a monotone, but thank you for being gracious.
Before we start today, I just want to pick up by way of review, because we’re starting a new chapter. That does not necessarily mean that it is a whole new topic or anything, because this is a letter. But I wanted to review what we have seen so far.
What we have seen so far is salvation, looking down upon it instead of looking up. For example, in Romans, you look up: you see yourself as a sinner, then you look up and see the way to God. In Ephesians, we have kind of taken it from the other way. We have seen what we have in Christ, then we are looking down. We will come to the place, as we do in Romans, where we ask, “What effect is this to have on your life?”
Right now, we have seen it from how God sees it, and that is how we should see it too. We are seated in these places. What we have seen so far is that we have been chosen by Him, predestined as sons, sealed, and redeemed. All these things are what we stand in. We are not looking to say, “How can this happen?” We are looking and saying, “This has happened. This is our lot.”
We have been redeemed. We have been sealed. We have been given the Spirit of promise. Then last time we saw that Paul prayed for further revelation. He prayed three things: that believers would see what is the hope of their calling; why we have been called; what are the riches of His inheritance in the saints; and the exceeding greatness of His power toward us.
Why have we been called? We talked about how our calling is to reign with Him. Then we were asked to see what are the riches of His inheritance in the saints, and what the saints mean to Him—why He redeemed them. They are the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field.
Then finally, that we might know the power—actually, it says the exceeding greatness of the power—His power toward us. Speaking of that power, it is not just resurrection power.
The Lord, after He died on Calvary and was three days in the tomb, He was raised from the dead. That is resurrection life, right? He could have just stayed on earth until now. But that is not the sum total of His power.
The sum total was that they took a Man, and He was able, by that life He lived and by the power of God in what He did, to ascend on high, to go above all rule.
You remember when Jesus was on earth: He submitted. He submitted Himself to the rule that was here. That is no longer so. He is above that. He is above all principalities and powers.
One of the things I was looking at—you know, there is a hurricane coming our way, right? It is supposed to be a really big one. What is it, 160-mile-an-hour winds going around? A principality has great authority.
I looked this up because I was interested in it, and I learned a new word, by the way: supramundane. Not “super mundane,” because that is what my students say: “That guy is super mundane.” But supramundane. It just means it is not worldly, but it has this great authority.
If we look at a hurricane, I mean, look at the authority it has over the air around it. It is very powerful. As a matter of fact, it is not just around the center of those hurricanes. You go outside, and what are they saying? When Hurricane Andrew was up here, what was the surf like in Virginia Beach? Was it eight to twelve? It is great for surfing.
But hundreds of miles offshore, away from us, it is causing eight- to twelve-foot surf over here. So the power is just amazing.
If you think about the tides, what controls the tide? You have the gravitational pull of the moon, which is 260,000 miles away, having this effect. But the Lord Jesus is above all those powers.
He is the One who has been given as Head to the church. He bows to nothing, and we are joined to Him. Paul wants us to see that, to really have faith in that.
Can you imagine what our prayer meetings would be like, and what the results of them would be like? How amazing. That just boggles my mind. So these are things that Paul wants us to see.
The power that is in Christ, all the attributes of Christ, are given to the body. He is Head over the body. One of the things I was thinking of: it says, “His body, which is the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” I was thinking, “Well, does that mean we complete Christ?”
But I found a good way of looking at it. If you look at a vine, you do not really look at the vine and say, “Gee, that is a wonderful vine.” I have been in Napa Valley, in California, the wine country. There is a season where they have already picked and pruned the vines, and all it looks like is sticks.
But you know when it is glorious? It is when it is all leafed out and those big clusters of grapes are on it. I think that is a picture of what the Lord is saying here: the fullness of Him who fills all in all. You have the fruit that comes out of the life of the vine displayed in all those who are attached to the vine.
Now, with that in mind, He tells us what is ours. That is what we have seen in chapter one. In chapter two, He begins to look at how these things become ours. How is it that we have been chosen? How is it that we have been predestined? What is the reason behind all these things?
Naturally speaking, you look at choice. I remember when I was in sixth grade. I was a pretty goofy-looking kid in sixth grade. Dana had said his nickname as a kid in junior high and high school was Watermelon because he was a round guy. But when I was in junior high and my first few years of high school, I was like a toothpick with an Adam’s apple.
I remember after school we were going to play basketball, and I was really, really uncoordinated. It was not funny at the time. I remember even as a freshman, I was so pigeon-toed. I have corrected it a little bit, but I would catch my foot every game—every game—right there. You know what happened then. Every game, freshman year, I think it was about twenty games. It would not fail. “When is it going to happen? Third quarter? Okay.”
But I remember they were choosing teams for basketball, and it was Paul Culpepper. Paul Culpepper was about this big, and he was one of the captains. He chose me over Ron Lopez. Now, Ron Lopez was a big guy. He was filled out. He looked like he had a driver’s license.
He picked me over Ron, and Ron was livid. “What are you doing?” It turned out that I had a pretty good game and Ron did not. You could say, “Well, Paul saw it through, and he chose me because he saw something.” Then you go, “Well, that means I am really good.”
But that is not why God chose. That would cheapen His choice, right? He did not choose me because I looked like a basketball player, because I told you what I looked like. So that was not the kind of choice.
Why did He choose? Our idea of choice has to be that there is something in us that would make that person want us. So we start looking inside: “Okay, God, what is there? What is it that You like about me that made You choose me?”
The Jews, as they were going into captivity, had that same feeling: “God chose us. We are beautiful people.” What was the reason for choice? I want to turn to Ezekiel 16. I know you are all familiar with it. You can see the earmarks in your Bible, all the underlining.
But this has to do with choice. When we look for self, we say, “Okay, how do I get from here to there? There must be something in me.” Well, in Ezekiel 16, my Bible has little subtitles, and mine says, “God Has Mercy on Israel.”
Starting in Ezekiel 16:3, it reads:
And say, Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem;
Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan;
Thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.
And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut,
Neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee;
Thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.
None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee;
But thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.
So you might say, “Well, gee whiz, who would want that?” Then the next verse says:
And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood,
I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.
That is what Ephesians 2:1-10, which we are going to look at today, is about. Why? Or how do we get here? Kenny talked about last week two things, two revelations we need to have: the “I am” and the “I will.” I think those play out right here.
Let us go ahead and read the first ten verses of chapter two. Remember, Paul has just prayed. In Ephesians 1:19, he says, “Know what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead.”
Then we go to chapter two:
And you hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;
Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world,
According to the prince of the power of the air,
The spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:
Among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh,
Fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind,
And were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us,
Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ,
By grace ye are saved;
And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:
That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Not of works, lest any man should boast.
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works,
Which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
As we look at this chapter, we have the reason how we are able to be in the place we are in chapter one of Ephesians—how we can be chosen, how we have been predestined, how we have been sealed. What is it that has made this so?
What we learn in here is that it is all God. It is nothing of ourselves. That is what we want to look at. I know this is something we all know, or we all believe. But the question is: how far do we believe it?
How far is it just, “Oh yeah, yeah, I know that”? Because some of us, in knowing that, still have not tied into it.
In looking at this, we have to see where we were, and we have to see how we get to where we are. Paul starts out by saying, “You were dead.”
Now, what is it like being dead? I have no experience in being dead myself, as far as physically speaking, but I have lots as far as being dead spiritually.
If we look at being dead physically, what is that like? If we had a corpse right here on the floor and we started to speak to it, would it speak back? No. What if I nudged him a little? Just a little bit. Nothing. What if I gave him a great big nudge? Or what if I just flat-out kicked him?
What I am saying is there is no response—no response to God. That is what dead is. A dead person cannot respond. It cannot, because it has no life to respond. No life in it. It cannot sit up, cannot open its eyes, and cannot even breathe.
That was our condition before we knew Christ. If we do not know Christ, that is our condition as far as God is concerned. That is being alone, which was shared this morning. That is being separate from God.
Paul later says no longer be alienated from the life that is in God. We get to the practical part of this, but when we are in the world without Christ, we are dead. That is it.
What killed us, or what made us this way? We were dead in trespasses and sins. Sins, I am just going to say, are a habit of life. It is the habit you have grown up in. You have been alienated from God and from the life of God. You have had the habit of living away from God, and because of that, you are dead.
You cannot know God. You might know about Him. You might think that is cool or that is not cool. You might want nothing to do with it. But the thing is, you cannot know Him because you are dead.
Trespasses would be your acts, the things that you do. Besides the habit of your life of living apart from God, it is just like it says in Judges: “And at that time everyone did what was right in their own eyes because there was no king in Israel.”
When God is not in your life, when God is not a part of your life, when you are not alive to God—made alive to Him through Jesus Christ—you are dead. Therefore, what do you do? You live as you think you should. You live in darkness, away from the light of God.
It says, “In which you once walked.” In other words, he is saying that this was our way of life. We are not any bit different, not one bit different, than anybody in the world as far as that goes.
How are we different? We are no different. We were just like that. The only thing that has made a difference now is that we have been born again. If we are Christians; if we are not Christians, we are still in our sins.
What happens is that we walk according to the course of this world. In other words, we just conform ourselves to the way the world lives. We agree with the way it is. We have nothing against it. We might say, “Well, that is not just,” but that is just the way it is, and we go on with life. That is it. We went that way.
That does not mean that we just sold ourselves out to sin. When it comes down to it, I do not think I was that bad. I was not committing adultery. I was not really heavy into drugs. I was not burning my draft card.
But I was not living in the knowledge of God either. I was doing what I thought was right. A lot of things take the place of God. Today, it might not be that you are caught in pornography or something like that; maybe you just sold out to the computer. Maybe you are caught up in computer games, emailing, instant messaging, and everything like that. That just is your life. That is what you are doing, cut off from God.
It says, “According to the prince of the power of the air,” which is just Satan, who rules. Now, he is not an earthly king, but he has a spiritual dominion that does have dominion over the people of the earth. Make no doubt about it: he does have dominion over people.
Reggie Jackson once said, when the Yankees were good—well, they still are good, but remember in the seventies?—“I am the straw that stirs the drink.” Well, Satan would say, “I am the hand that holds the straw that stirs the drink.”
We were just caught up in this. This is the way we lived. We were controlled by the lusts of our flesh. The lusts of our flesh do not necessarily mean that you are looking at nude pictures and things like that. It just means whatever you desire.
What do you have a desire for? Do you have a desire to sell out for sports, and you are going all out for sports, and that is your god? Is that what it is? You are sold out to it. You are controlled by your own lust.
By nature, then, we are children of wrath, just as the others. In other words, you are no different.
What makes the difference then is verse four: But God.
In other words, we are just like that little child in Ezekiel, and God came alongside and said to us, “Live.” That is the difference.
God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses—although we were dead in our trespasses—it did not stop Him.
He did not say, “Well, clean yourself up a little bit, and then I will think about it.” Or He did not say, “Do some penance over these bad things, and then I will accept you.” But even while we were in our trespasses, He made us alive together.
Some of us come here wearing masks. We think that we have to wear a mask because there is no other way God will accept us. You know something? That is just not true.
As a matter of fact, you are going to find out that it is wearing the mask that holds you from knowing God. You think you are hiding something, but God knows.
You are never going to know His love if you have the mask on. You know His love when you take the mask off and see that He sees who you are, and He does not go, “Oh.”
But He comes to you, and He looks at you like that little child in Ezekiel, and He says, “Live.” He says, “Live.”
Is it not funny that in that little part there, He did not come and say, “Well, these are the things wrong with you, little child, and if you do these things, then you will live”? He did not say that. He just said, “Live.” He spoke the word to it. We will talk about that a little bit later.
Even when we were dead in our trespasses, He made us alive together with Christ. That is what we read about in the prayer. We were raised up with Him and made to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
There again, we now can be at rest. If we are sitting, we are at rest. We have been raised up out of our sins to a place where none of these things, none of these principalities, can now touch us, nor can they have power over us, because there is a different power. There is a greater power in us, and these powers just cannot overcome it.
Now, this is the gist I really want to talk about. It says that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. This morning, I want to talk a little bit about grace.
It says “the exceeding riches.” I want to change that phrase to this: “That in the ages to come, He might show the value of grace and His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
Grace, among Christian circles, is something that we all know and we all say, but it is almost like we gloss over it. Some of us look at grace and say, “I cannot believe that.”
It is either something we just take for granted, or it is something we just do not believe. We adhere to the doctrine of grace, but when it comes down to it, we do not believe it. We know we do not believe it because it shows up in what we do. We are still trying to make ourselves points with God.
It says that we have been saved by grace. Now, grace—what is grace? Come on, come on, come on. Unmerited favor. We all know it. It is unmerited favor.
But it is unmerited favor that is going to have an effect on your life. You cannot just say it is unmerited favor, because grace has an effect, which is still the definition of grace. It cannot be separated from that definition.
The question is, how do we view grace? I want to give a couple of stories about viewing grace.
First, in Matthew 18—I am not going to turn to it and read it because I do not want to keep the kids that long—this is the story where Peter comes to Jesus and says, “How often must I forgive my brother? Seven times?” Jesus spoke a parable.
He said there is a man who has a huge debt, and he is brought in before the one he owes the debt to. He falls down and pleads, “Oh, please, just give me some time.” It says the man had compassion.
Now, I want you to understand that we are not looking at the man who had compassion. We are looking at the man who is calling for it. When he came to God, he did not come looking for grace. He came looking for a reprieve.
A reprieve is a postponement of a penalty to be paid, set aside so it will be carried out some other time. What he came asking was, “Give me some more time, and I will work it out.”
You know that this was not grace because of the effect it had on his life. When he came out, after the lord had forgiven him the debt—notice, it says He forgave him the debt. He did not say, “Okay, I will give you until next Tuesday.” He did not say, “I will give you seven years, and after seven years, if you have not paid me back, I will throw you in jail.”
But it says he had compassion on him and forgave him his debt. Then the man went out and throttled a guy who owed him chump change and threw him in jail until he would pay him back.
You can see that is not grace. Sometimes we look at grace as just being a reprieve: “God is saying, ‘Look, I am going to give you a little more time to straighten up, and then I am going to check on you. If it is not better, we will talk about it.’” That is not grace.
If we believe that, we are believing a lie, because our standing with God has nothing to do with how we perform, as far as earning some kind of favor with God. He is not up there with that big electronic blackboard. You just can never make it.
Another way of looking at grace: grace is not random kindness. I have been hearing this term, “random kindness.” I do not know where I am hearing it from. But grace is not a random kindness. Grace is a specific act, and you need to understand that.
The story is in John 5:1-15, the story of the paralytic, where Jesus came to a specific man and asked him a specific question: “Do you want to be well?”
For those of us who are struggling in our walks, and we kind of put ourselves out and say, “Well, I am just going to be the way I am because I cannot do it,” when it comes to, “Do you want to be well?” we come up with a list.
Like this man in John 5, he says, “Well, I want to be well, but there is nobody to take me into the water, and someone else gets there before me. The other guys push in.” We do that too.
“Lord, yeah, I want to be well, but look at all these things that are against me.” Is it not interesting that the Lord did not sit there and go, “Wow, I never thought of it that way. You have got problems.”
But all He said was, after the man made all his complaints, He looked at him and said, “Rise up and walk.” Just that.
Not, “Better luck next time,” or, “If you move closer to the water, I think you would be able to get in.” He just said, “Rise up and walk.”
Grace does that. Grace allows us to get up from where we are. From where we are, if we are in sin, if we are in apathy, grace allows us to get up from where we are and walk.
The man is found later on in the temple, and the Lord Jesus says, “See, thou art made whole: sin no more.” There is an effect He wants grace to have: go and sin no more.
But the thing is, he did not have to do anything to get to the place where he could walk again. That is what the Lord is calling us into: to walk, to walk with Him.
All He says is, “Rise up and walk.” Specific: “You, rise up and walk.” It is because I have told you to. It is because I said you can. That is grace.
Here is another situation. In Mark 5, the beginning of the chapter, it talks about a demoniac. It is not just any demoniac. It says this guy had a legion in him.
A legion of Roman soldiers was a couple thousand. So imagine this guy had a couple thousand demonic beings in him. Demonic power is very powerful power, because if you remember the seven sons of Sceva, one demon put seven to flight. Imagine two thousand demons living in you.
It said that this guy was chained up, and he would just rip the chains off because of the strength of the demonic activity in him.
Grace has a drawing power. When Jesus got out of the boat to go on the shore, this man—not the demons, this man, I think—somehow saw it, and he ran. The demons talked: “What are You doing here? Do You want to get rid of us?” But I think it was the man who saw it and ran, because grace draws.
Brothers and sisters, if you are in that place where you are wearing a mask, grace will draw you to it. It will not keep you away from it. It will not keep you with your mask on.
That is what grace does. Grace does not make you put on a mask. It makes you release it, so that you can be seen and the light can come on you—not in the sense to explode, but in the sense that you know the love of God for you. That love of God is what saves you.
This man had this huge amount of demons in him, and the Lord Jesus cast them out. The man came with demons. Grace says, “You can come to Me that way. You can come to Me with all your sin. I am not going to cast you out.”
Because if you are coming to Me with your sin, you are saying, “Lord, I need this dealt with. What am I going to do?” Then the Lord will exchange the life. He says, “I will take that on Me, and I will set you free from it.” Now that is grace.
This man said, “Lord, just take me with You.” The Lord said, “Uh-uh. I want you to go back home, because I want you to tell people what good things God has done for you.” There is an effect that grace has.
The next time Jesus came to that area, crowds flocked. I think it was because of the testimony of this man who had touched the grace of God.
So often we want to think that we have to do so many things, and all we really have to do is encounter the grace of God. That has an effect on us.
I want to give another illustration. This is not biblical, and I might have shared this before. I do not know. This story is so beautiful to me that, as often as I can tell it, I tell it because it is just so beautiful.
I do not know how many of you have ever read the book Les Misérables. That is the most wonderful story, though get the abridged version, because when Hugo goes into describing chests and chairs, it is a little tedious.
But the story is this, and this is how grace is. You have this convict. He was a criminal, and he comes out looking for a place to stay. No one will take him in because once he shows the paper that he is a convict, people say, “Down the road, Jack.”
He comes to a house, and they say, “Well, you ought to go there. He never turns anyone out.” It happens to be a bishop. The bishop invites him in and feeds him.
That night, Jean Valjean, who is the hero in the story, sneaks out, takes the silverware, and hits the road.
The next thing you find is the police coming up the road with Jean Valjean and a sack of silverware. They come to the bishop and say, “Bishop, this guy says that you gave him the silverware.”
The bishop says, “Yeah, I did. As a matter of fact, Jean, how come you did not take the candlesticks? They are the most expensive thing. I told you that you had a good price with this.”
But the thing about grace is this: it disarms your accusers. Those police who came ready to say, “We have got the goods on him,” were disarmed by grace.
The bishop said, “You have forgotten the candlesticks.” Then the police leave, and Jean Valjean is left with this bishop.
Then the bishop did something that was so wonderful. He did not say, “Give me back that silverware now, and get out of here.” He gave him the candlesticks, and then he said, “Jean Valjean, I give you back your life. Now you give it to God.”
The other thing that grace does is it allows you to give yourself to God. That is so important for you to see: you can give yourself to God. I do not care where you have been or what you have done.
Grace—what God has done in Jesus Christ—this grace allows you to give yourself to God, and for God then to do something in your life. This is just the beginning of grace here.
This unmerited favor: Jean Valjean did not deserve this favor. Yet we see him taking this favor. When he first took it, he went out and stole a little kid’s coin. But you know what? He came back looking for the little kid because he felt bad.
God then, since He now has you through this grace, through this unmerited favor, will do this: “For we are His workmanship.”
Brothers and sisters, this is really important, because some of us think we have grace, and now we translate, instead of grace, we translate it “grease.” God lets us slide through life. “Oh, that is okay, because He lets me slide.” That is not true.
Grace is not grease. But grace is unmerited favor. It touches you at the very center of your being so that you are disarmed, and you want, like that demoniac, to say, “God, I want to go with You wherever You are going.” That is the effect that grace has.
Now, workmanship. How can I describe this? I want to describe it in a verse from Psalms and a verse from Isaiah. I am going to quickly run this through, but I want you to understand this.
Here is a verse I think I used to misunderstand. In Psalm 37:3-4, it says:
Trust in the Lord, and do good;
So shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.
Delight thyself also in the Lord;
And He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Do you know which part of that verse I misunderstood? “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I thought, “All you have got to do is be happy with the Lord, and He is going to give me what I want. That is pretty cool.”
Actually, that is not what it means. The Hebrew word for delight, which I have got written down here in a good Hebrew pronunciation, is anag. Anag. The primary root of that word means to be soft or pliable.
Be soft and pliable to the will of the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Because what are your desires once you get saved? “I want to please the Lord. I want the will of the Lord in my life.”
Grace has this effect that makes us pliable, that makes us soft before the Lord when He is working with us. We are His workmanship. In other words, He is going to take us and form us into the image of Christ.
He is going to do that with us individually, brothers and sisters. He is doing that with us as a company. Both. You have to understand that. The things happening in your life are for the benefit of the company. The things happening in the company are for the benefit of you. It is double-edged, and it is for us all.
Notice that when it says delight, how do we get to be pliable? Look at the verses ahead. It says, “Trust in the Lord.”
I have to trust that what the Lord is going to do in my life, and the way He is going to do it, is going to be beneficial to me. It is not going to hurt me. There is not going to be damage to me. I am going to come out okay. I have got to trust the Lord for that.
It is like going to the dentist. When you go to the dentist, it is really nerve-racking, because they are in your mouth with drills and stuff, and you feel like they are going to hurt you. At least, that is the way I look at the dentist.
But after you have been to a dentist for a while, you find out that he does not hurt you. Pretty soon, you are able to relax a little bit because you go, “Well, I can trust this guy. He has not hit a nerve. He has not damaged me. I can relax a little bit.”
It is the same with the Lord. We come through experience finding out that the Lord is trustworthy, that we can entrust our way to Him. “Lord, I want to be what You want me to be. Lead me that way.”
Not, “I am going to look for the best way and choose that one,” but, “Lord, You lead me that way. I can trust You.”
Then it says, “Dwell in the land.” In other words, do not try to get out. Just dwell. Another word would be abide or live.
A lot of times—and Katie, I am sorry, I am going to really embarrass you—I remember we were getting flu shots one day. The girls were about six or seven years old. Nobody likes shots, but Katie really did not like shots.
We did bad things. We told them when we got into the car, “Oh, we are getting shots.” You do not do that, right? You tell them way before then.
We get to the doctor, and she is okay, but a needle comes out and she is like dancing on my head. “Oh man, I have got to get out of here. I have got to get out of here.”
The thing is, if you get a shot when you are struggling to get out, you are going to have a problem. Finally, we got her calmed down. The doctor or the nurse was really upset: “You are going to have to bring her back again.” Finally, we got her calmed down. She gets a shot and goes, “It’s over?”
We have this feeling that the Lord is going to do something that is just so horrendous, and we try to get out of it. What He is saying is, “Stay here. Just stay. Trust Me. What I am doing, in the end, is going to be beautiful.”
Then it says, “Feed on His faithfulness.” In other words, take your sustenance, take what is going to build you up. Your food, when you take it in, replenishes your body. It makes your body stronger.
Feed on His faithfulness. When you look, do not look at the thing and go, “Oh my gosh, that is just too much.” Do not feed on that. Do not feed your fear. Feed your faith.
What is faithfulness? “Oh, I remember when this happened before, and the Lord did this. If He did that before, will He not help me here?” Feed on His faithfulness.
We are His workmanship. He is going to be working on us. Then He says, “For good works prepared beforehand.” This is what I am going to end with.
Good works prepared beforehand: you have to look at good works as an apprenticeship. If you are an apprentice, when my brother became an apprentice at a carpenter shop, the first year he just swept. That is all he did. He swept the shop and cleaned the machines.
Every once in a while, a guy would say, “Hey, Mike, I want you to do this. Mike, I want you to clean these,” and explain to him what the tools were.
You younger guys do not know, but those of you who are my age remember having shop class. It used to be required. You would have shop.
Now, you can ask my wife, I am not a tool man, but there is something about power tools that attracts. You had those lathes and those saws, those bandsaws. Oh man, it was like you died and went to heaven.
But the shop teacher, for the first two weeks, would not let you touch the machine. You had to learn what they did and what the tools did. It was really hard to do that.
But he is not going to trust you with something you do not know how to use, because what is going to happen? You are going to hurt yourself.
It is the same thing when you are raising your kids and teaching them to do the dishes. You do not have them try out on your best china. Paper plates, maybe.
You understand what I am saying? The Lord, when you start saying, “I have works prepared for you,” is not going to say, “Okay, there is a crowd of fifty thousand over there. I want you to preach the gospel.” No.
You can start little. “Hey, tell your mom and dad what I have done for you.” Something simple. “Tell your best friend.” All right, this is going to be something really hard. Then as you go on, there will be other things.
As you prove faithful, as you respond to His workmanship on you, He can trust you with other things, and you go on and go on and go on.
What are these good works? There are good works that go to the body, and there are good works that go outside the body.
For example, my body here: one time I stepped on a needle, and there was immediate body ministry to my foot. My head said, “Ouch.” My foot came up. My hand went down and plucked the needle out. Immediate.
Brothers and sisters, we have work prepared for us as a company of believers and as individuals that are body-centered. What do we do?
For example, I am not going to give this away, but Group F, we are shorthanded. Yesterday, we came in, had our prayer and stuff, and came into the room and all the chairs were set up.
Someone knew that we were shorthanded. I know who it is now, but someone knew and did this for us. That is a good work. Who inspired that good work? The Head.
Brothers and sisters, there is a section in Matthew where the Lord separates the sheep and the goats. He says, “When I was in prison, you came and visited Me. When I was naked, you clothed Me. When I was hungry…” They say, “When did we do that? We never saw You like that.”
He says, “You did it to the least of these.” Brothers and sisters, we have a brother who is in prison. Body ministry for him. We have brothers and sisters who are hurting physically. There is ministry that goes to them.
Are we aware of that? We are so attached with our Head that we are aware of these things, and then not just aware of them, but moved—moved by the Head.
Secondly, there is ministry to the outside world. I am not talking about a social gospel where we are trying to feed everybody in the world, but once again, I am going to harp on this: where are the evangelists?
You see the heat outside, and it is tough. Where are those who are salt and light, who go and just touch other people so they can taste Christ?
Maybe they do not say anything, but it is the act. It is the specific act of grace—specific—that touches them and says, “God loves you.”
Those are things that God is doing. A city set on a hill—that is a corporate expression. Its light cannot be hidden.
Where do you put something that is lit? You put it where it can be seen. Brothers and sisters, there is no secret ministry.
You might do it in secret so they do not know your name, but it is not a secret thing. Let them so see that they glorify your Father.
For corporate, for individuals: some of us think, “Lord, I have lost my saltiness. I have been involved with too many other things, and I have lost my saltiness.”
Brothers and sisters, that is where grace comes in, does it not? Where you come to Him and confess, and say, “I have lost my saltiness because of this and that.” You repent—and repent means you change your mind.
“I have been wrong in following this path, and I want what You want for my life.” Then He takes you back into the apprentice shop and says, “Let us continue the lessons.”
The value of grace is this: that He brings many sons to glory. That is the value of His grace—that many sons come to glory.
These sons not only are conformed, but are united and become as one man. That is the value of grace to God.
The value of grace to us is that now we can come to God and be changed into His likeness. Because when we come to Him even as we are, we come into His workshop and become His workmanship for the good works He has for us.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we just want to come today and tell You, Lord, that we thank You for grace, and we want to know more of it.
We want to have this grace in our lives that changes our lives so that we become, Lord, those that have Your image stamped on us—not because of our great knowledge or anything else, but just because it allows us to come to You.
Lord, let that grace overcome in our lives. Lord, if there is anyone in here who is wearing a mask and thinking that they have to wear one, Lord, unmask them. Let them see that the mask does not fool You.
But Lord, let Your light shine into their lives and draw them to You. Father, for us who have lost our salt, would You help us come and find that there is grace even for us if we turn to You.
Oh, Father, we thank You for how You have made provision, how salvation is all Yours, and that we step into it. Lord, we thank You that You said to us, “Live,” when we were in the condition we were in.
You said, “Live.” So, Lord, we ask this morning: help us then to live because You have spoken to us, not because we have some great capability, but because it is the power of Your Word to us: “Live.”
Lord, we thank You for grace. We ask for Your help in Jesus’ name.