Our scripture reading this afternoon is taken from Ephesians chapter two verses one through 10. Ephesians chapter two verses one through 10 as we continue studying the book of Ephesians together. So let me read God's word for us this afternoon. And you he made alive when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the zones of disobedience. Among these, well, we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That in the coming ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. Not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, that you, in your grace and mercy, has revealed this to us, your word. And we thank you, Lord, that you have given us also the Holy Spirit to give us understanding of spiritual things. We thank you that we have been saved by grace, and it is not our own doing, it is your work, and for that we give you all glory and honor. And as we meditate and consider this test, this portion of your word, we pray, Lord, that you will empower us, not just to have understanding of it, but to experience in our hearts the joy that comes from seeing what a wonderful God you are, to see your grace and your love for us. We pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen. This is one of the memorable passages from the scriptures because it has a very comprehensive description of the gospel. And probably most of us are very familiar with this test. We have read it. We have heard sermons of it. We have studied it. But one thing that we should never do is become too familiar with the test to the point that we are now impacted by the wonderful words that we are reading here today before of us, which is, a wonderful message of God's salvation for us. And I like to see this test and I think that when I think about this test, I think that this test is like an x-ray of all human souls in the world. And I say that it's an x-ray because it sees something that we cannot perceive with our physical eyes. It sees something that happens in the heart of every human being in the world that we don't see it. He sees that there are people who are dead even though they are walking, talking, and doing things. And it sees people that are alive, even we don't see them sometimes very alive, but it sees that because it sees what is happening at the heart of all humans. Those who have not been touched by the power of God and those who have been touched by the power of God. So therefore what we see here is a test that is talking about us, people. But we will be mistaken to think that the center of this test is us. The center of this test is God, because God is the one who does the work in us. Then at the end, there is only one conclusion that we can get after reading this test. It's solely the all glory. To God be all glory. Now as we look at these verses, Throughout the week I was hesitating if I should make three sermons out of this section or if I should keep it together. Because you have here material for weeks. But I decided to look at the big picture and not to take apart the test because I wanted us to see the whole work of God for us. These verses are I believe for all of us as Christians, very special. And if you are not yet a Christian, I hope that they will do a work in your life, moving you and leading you to put your heart before God and trust in him as your savior. So there are four things that I'd like us to see this afternoon from these verses. These four things are our old walk, our new life, our new hope, and our new walk. Let's start with our old walk. Paul starts with a very positive thing here. He says, you he made alive. But after he said that, he explained why he, God, made us alive. And this is because we were dead. Because we were dead. And of course, Paul is not referring here to we were physically dead, though this is something that is happening to all of us. You can see your life as you have one. more day of life, or you can have, you had one less day of life. You are moving towards that final day of your life. But Paul is referring here to a spiritual death. That's what he's referring here when he says you were death. John Stott will put it like this. True life is fellowship with the living God. Spiritual death is separation from God. Spiritually dead people are unresponsive to God as corpse. Spiritually dead people do not respond to the voice of God because they are spiritually dead. And that's the reality in which every single human being in this world find himself. That we were, if you are today a Christian, spiritually dead. And if you are not yet a Christian, that you are spiritually dead. Your ears and your heart is not responding to the voice of God. And he says that we were deaf through the trespasses, which is crossing the line, breaking God's law, and sin which is to fill the blank, which is basically our sins of commission and omission, we were dead. And he says, in which you once walked. This world that Paul talks about here is a Hebrew idiom. It's an idiomatic expression to refer to our manner of life, the way we live, the way we live. So by the way we live, we were dead through our trespasses and sins because everything that we did was coming from a dead heart. You might think about this test and you might struggle reflecting in how this is referring to your testimony because maybe your case is the case of someone who grew up in the church. And you don't remember that day when you didn't believe in Jesus. The reality is that whether you grew up in the church or you became a Christian later in your life, we all pass and went from being dead to being alive in Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. And we all, at some point, even we don't remember, we walked in our trespasses and sins. Now Paul here refers to three things which are the three enemies of every single human being that continue to be our enemy, but these were very present in the life of those who were dead. First thing is that they were following, or other versions would say according, following the course of this world. the ion of this world, which is the age of this world. And basically this is referring to the sinful structure that you find in the secular world, following the sin that is in this world, that is moving those who are spiritually dead people to follow these structures or these secular philosophies or ideas or values to break God's law and live against God. That was the first enemy that we had. The second enemy is that we were, as Paul says, following the prince or according to the prince of the power of the air. the spirit that is at work in the sons of disobedience. Remember when we talk about the heavenly places in which Christ is king, we refer to the spiritual world that is within us, is around us. Christ is the king, right now, right here, in this spiritual world. But also in this spiritual world, there is the prince of the power of the air, which is the devil, And demons moving, moving whom? Moving those who are the sons of disobedience, those who were dead or are dead right now, to tempt others to follow the devices of the devil. I think Paul does not shy by telling you that at some point in your life you were following by following the prince of the earth, following basically the plans of Satan. Also the plans of the evil powers in this world. So you were dead and you walk living following what? The course of this world, the secular world that offers to you values that are sinful and also following the prince of the earth. Also, Paul tells us about our third enemy in verse three, following the desires of body and mind. And our third enemy is flesh. So then you have the world, you have the devil, and you have flesh, your own flesh. And because you were dead, because you were not sensitive to the word of God, and you were walking in these trespasses, you were walking according to the plans of the world, of the devil, and your own flesh. It is interesting here also that Paul is basically introducing to you what he's gonna be talking about in the following verses, which is union, our union as the body of Christ. When Paul says, and he mentioned this before in chapter one, when he says, and you, Paul is referring to you Ephesians Gentiles. And when he says among, in verse three, among these we, he's referring to him as a Jew and the Jews. And Paul's purpose here is to As you will see, verses one through three is basically a summary of chapter one through three of the Book of Romans. Paul's purpose here is to prove that Jews and Gentiles, and as he says at the end of this verse, verse three, he says, like the rest of the mankind, we are all in this condition. We were all dead. We were all walking according to the course of this world according to our flesh and according to the plans of the devil. You could say that these are the bad news. You need to hear the bad news before you understand the good news. You need to hear your reality before you understand why the good news are so good. Now he gave you a little bit at the beginning when he says he make you alive because you were dead. Then we move to second, our new life. And here he introduces that with this but. And when he says but, what he's about to do is to make a contrast between what you were and what you are today. but God which is rich in mercy, out of the great love which he love us. I think that we have to start from there, that it's very important that it is not because we are lovable people, it is not because we are seeking for God, it is not because we are praying and asking God to reveal himself to us, it's just because God love us. And if you remember from previous verses, he loved us before the foundation of the world, before we were even born, before we have even seen done good or right. That's a very difficult thing sometimes to understand because you will wonder why. And that remains and is still a mystery for us. Why did he love me? The only thing that I can say is thank you, God, because you love me. Because that's the motivation that he is reaching mercy and out of his great love, which is God's essence, he loved us. Now to make it more dramatic, what Paul does here is he says even when we were dead through our trespasses, He loved us when we were dead. Think for a moment about that. How would you love a dead body? But he loved us. And what Paul does in this following verse, or half of verse five and verse six, is to to explain a little bit about our union with Christ. Our union with Christ. There are three things that he refers to us here in these verses. He made us alive, he raised us up, and he made us sit. He made us alive, he raised us up, and he made us sit. And that is exactly what God did to our Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, when we recite together the Apostle Creed, we are saying this, the third day, he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, raised us up, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father. What Paul is talking about here is actually about Christ's work. And how Christ's work becomes ours through our union with Christ, through faith in Christ. With Christ on the cross, we die with him. Our old self, our old man died there on the cross. Because the work of Christ is know that Christ does the work there and we by faith just received The benefits of that were, but by faith, we are united to Christ in his death on the cross. But also, he made us alive with, when Christ was resurrected, he raised us up to as well. He resurrected us. And this is referring to two things. It's referring to what is already ours and what is not yet ours. It's already ours is that we have been made alive, that we, when we were dead, now we are made alive is that we have been regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We are alive. Remember, this is an x-ray of all of us. And this x-ray can see that we are alive, that our spirit is alive. And what proved that is the fact that we can trust and obey, that we can hear God's word and rejoice and praise God for that. But he only made us alive, he raised us up with him and seat us with him in heavenly places. And you may wonder, you are still here. We're still here. So again, this is part of the already, but not yet. We are still here, waiting for that moment when we will be resurrected and we will be glorified, but right now, in the spiritual world, Christ is the king and we have been seated with him in these heavenly places. This is our new life in Christ. But as we have a new life in Christ, we also have a new hope. A new hope. A week ago we were remembering or looking at this inheritance that is awaiting for us in heaven. Well this is, this verse seven basically rehearse that again. Here in this world there is no hope. That's why, and I'm sure that you have been in a funeral of people who are non-believers and around people who are non-believers. And I have seen the cry and I've seen the sadness. Because there is no hope for those who are there at that moment. But this is our hope that in the coming ages, He might show his immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Now he has already shown this to us. This is why it is already ours. We have been already raised. We have been already made alive in Christ. But there is still more to come. And remember the whole creation The whole creation is awaiting for that moment when the sons of God will appear in glory. The whole creation is at the edge of its seat, just waiting for that moment, so we are still waiting for experiencing and seeing these immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness towards us. He will show us. As believers, we live in this life with this hope, You don't have, you might not have an inheritance right now here, but something for you is waiting there. And then we have our new walk. And if you look at the test, this is why this test is meant to be kept together. Start with walk and finish with walk. Once, you once walked and finished, that you should walk in them. Once you walk, what? In trespasses and sins. But now, there is a new walk in your life. And before we look at that, we have to consider this wonderful good news, which is that salvation is by grace, and is through faith. And then Paul says this, and when he says this, he's not only referring to faith, Because if you look at the Greek here, this is neural and faith is feminine. It's referring to the whole thing, which is by grace you have been saved through faith. The whole thing. This is not your own doing. It's not coming from you, including your faith in Christ. It's not that you put a down payment. It's your faith and God gives you everything. Everything is not your own doing, but is a gift from God. And because of that, no one can boast. No one can boast. Because of that is that we say, to God be the glory. Because it's all God's work for us. If it was up to us, we would never have assurance of salvation. We would be seated here right now, wondering if one day we will be saved. And that's what happened with many religions around the world. I asked an imam, which is like the leader of a mosque, if there was assurance of salvation in his belief, and he said, no, we never know. We have to wait until the end to see if Allah is gonna let us in, depending on how many good things we did versus how many bad things we did. But here you have full assurance that you are safe today and will be safe forever because it's not your own doing. Because it's God, because God give you even the faith to believe in him. Now, what about our walk, then, in this life? Is it something that depends on us? It's actually preordained by God. In his mercy, he says, for we are his workmanship, which is his masterpiece, created in Christ. And remember, he created us in Christ before everything was created, for good works. We are not safe because of good works, but we are safe for good works. We are made safe for good works. And these good works God prepared beforehand so that we should walk in them. It's the whole package. We were dead to our trespasses in which once in which you once walked and now you have been saved by grace and God has prepared beforehand. He has preordained good works so that you might walk in them. So even in the good things that we do in this life as believers, they have been all preordained by God and God is the one who move us with the power of the Holy Spirit to take those steps to give him glory and honor. Now I was telling you at the beginning that tests like this, a passage like this can become very familiar to us to the point that we become insensitive, that we read it and we say, yes, this is wonderful. but that not necessarily move our hearts. And I wanted to read to you one verse from Romans five. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into his grace in which we stand. And he says, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. My prayer for you and for me is that as we look at these verses, we are moved to praise God and to rejoice for what He has done. Because I believe that when Paul wrote these verses, he didn't only write it in order to teach you about salvation by grace, or about the unity of the body of Christ, which is what he's going to talk about in the following verses. But the way he structured the test, by showing you your condition, and then afterwards what he have done, even when you were dead, was to move your hearts to praise God. That after you read these verses, they will fill your hearts with love for him, and joy, and adoration. Let's pray. Dear God, we thank you that you love us even when we were dead. We thank you that in this love you have provided all that is needed to be reconciled with you. that if today we are here even realizing that we are alive in Christ, it's because it is your work in our hearts. We thank you for how merciful you have been and how loving and how gracious. And we thank you for the hope that we have that you will show us even more of this love and kindness Things that today we don't even realize how you forgive us and care for us. One day we will see when we will be in glory with you. Help us, Lord, to be moved by these verses that our hearts will be moved to give you all glory and honor. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.