Good morning. You can turn in your Bibles to Ephesians 2, and we're going to look at the first 10 verses here this morning. So Ephesians 2, 1 to 10, once you've got it, then I'd ask if you'd please stand in reverence as we read God's Word, and I will ask for your congregational response once we have read our text. And these are the inerrant and infallible and authoritative words of God. And you were dead in 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 sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so 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 a result of work so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. And may God bless the reading of his word. You can be seated. So today marks the first of four sermons that we are going to be doing on church identity. We have a heavy emphasis in this church in sequential expository preaching, so if you are a visitor here this morning and you're here for that reason, I am sorry to disappoint you. We do topical messages very occasionally, but we are doing four now on the identity of this church, of who we are as a church body, and who we, by God's grace, desire to be. So today we're going to look at what it is to be evangelical. Next week we are going to look at what it is to be Reformed. the following week we are going to look at what it means to be Baptist, and then lastly we are going to look at the theology and the rhythm behind covenant renewal worship. So that will be the next four Sundays, and then we will be back in sequential expository preaching back in Matthew where we left off at the start of summer. So these topical sermons are a departure from our regular diet, but we still want to be expository even as we explore these topics. We still want to be in the text, and today Ephesians 2 fits well with the scheme. And by looking at the identifiers of who we are as a church, this is not in any way meant to be provincial or sectarian whatsoever. It's meant to be explanatory. We need to acknowledge that all churches stand in a stream of history, and there is nobody who is so blind to their tradition as the person who says, I have no tradition, okay? That person is completely blind to the fact that their tradition says this and not that. We all have a tradition, we all have a background, and so we desire to be aware of it and to conform that tradition as best we can to the word of God. So in our case, as Trinity, we can fairly describe ourselves as desiring to be biblical, evangelical, reformed, and baptistic. And these words all have historical and theological importance. And being biblical is obviously, of course, the most important of all these descriptive words. But the challenge there is if you've ever had a Jehovah's Witness at your door, What happens? Well, they don't believe in tradition. We're just doing what the Bible says, right? We're just saying what the Bible says. It's an unhealthy kind of biblicism because they are rejecting church history. They are rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity. So again, to be biblical in the rich sense is, of course, the most important of all of these, but that's why sometimes clarifying words are helpful, clarifying themes are helpful. Because to be biblical is at the very heart of what it means to be evangelical and reformed as well. And of all these identifiers, at least for myself, the hardest to define by far, and it's not even remotely close, is the word evangelical. How do you define this word? After all, Joyce Meyer and R.C. Sproul are both evangelicals. Does this word mean anything? When Larry King used to try to get pastors on his nighttime talk show to get the evangelical perspective, sometimes it was John MacArthur and sometimes it was Joel Osteen. Does the word evangelical mean anything whatsoever? That is a fair question to ask. I used to have a Catholic coworker who was not a nominal Catholic at all, he was a devout and serious Catholic, and when he would talk about evangelicals, it became clear to me with time, with usage, that when he used the word evangelical, he meant charismatics, and particularly those charismatics from the big box megachurches. Sometimes you'll hear Lutheran and Reformed people use the word evangelical in a negative sense to describe Christians who refuse to look seriously at church history or doctrine. The Christians who refuse to think, those are the evangelicals. But then, on the other hand, we sometimes know secular liberal people who use the word evangelical to write us off because we're a bunch of fundamentalists. So to them, the word evangelical means you're an angry fundamentalist. Maybe the best definition so far is the kind of half-joking and half-serious definition that the church historian George Marsden gave to describe an evangelical as anyone who likes Billy Graham. I can kind of work with that, I guess. But for myself personally, depending on who gets to define the word evangelical, it is one of those words that, depending on who's defining it, I will either happily take that label on myself, yes, of course I'm an evangelical, but by a different definition, I am also more than happy to reject the label of evangelical. By some definitions, I am not. Count me out. So this is a difficult word. I do not identify with the kind of evangelicalism that is found in the shallow theology or the sentimental and emotionalistic or charismatic kind of megachurch world, the flashy Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer stuff. I certainly do not identify with that. I do, however, identify with the kind of evangelicalism that has historically been grounded in the authority of God's Word in the emphasis on personal conversion and on the clear proclamation of the gospel. With that kind of evangelicalism, I am happy to identify. So the word in English, evangelical, is based on the Greek word evangelion, or evangel, or the good news. It's a good word. And it's intended to focus our attention on the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so in that sense, of course, it is richly biblical. And at the time of the Reformation, this word, the evangelicals, were a nickname applied to the Lutherans. Those people that emphasized sovereign grace and the gospel and justification by faith, they were called evangelicals. So in the early days of the Reformation, the word evangelical and the word Protestant were almost interchangeable. It basically referred to the same group of people. However, fast forward 300 and some years, by the late 1800s and the early 1900s, theological liberalism had very deeply infected many of the mainline Protestant denominations, so that many of these old Protestant churches had become very liberal. And if you think it's bad now, go back to the good old days, it was every bit as bad. And so a need for a counter-movement arose. And in the year 1909, a California oil man, and just a lay Presbyterian church member, he wasn't an officer, just a layman in the Presbyterian church, by the name of Lyman Stewart, decided to use some of his personal fortune to have a set of books printed and distributed to churches, to seminaries, and to Sunday school superintendents. And this set of books was called the Fundamentals, and it was produced between 1910 and 1915. And these books aimed at promoting the basic core of Christian doctrine that all conservative Orthodox Christians should share. So in 1910 to 1915, as these books were being printed, the five fundamentals, so there's five non-negotiables, and these were the things that the liberal churches had directly and explicitly and clearly denied. These books were aimed at correcting these errors, and these five, if you're a note-taker, these five fundamentals that Lyman Stewart published in his books were the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, penal substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Christ, and the authenticity of the biblical miracles. If you're a conservative Christian, there's nothing controversial there at all, is there? These things were deeply controversial. in the good old days of the late 1800s. And Lyman Stewart was able to get great giants of the faith, conservative scholars like B.B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen and G. Campbell Morgan, and these men came to be known as the fundamentalists. And that term was meant to distinguish them from the liberals who were denying the core elements of the Christian faith. Machen actually was a scholar at Westminster Seminary, and he wrote a book in the early 1900s called Christianity and Liberalism. And in that book, it's a great book, it's actually very easy to read, and I would encourage it, it's still deeply relevant 100 years later, Machen concluded in that book that while there are various forms of Christianity out there, the theological liberalism of the mainline denominations was a different religion. So Machen's main point is theological liberalism is not a form, or even a bastardized form of Christianity, it's an entirely different religion. And I agree with Machen, that is true. The Church of the United Church of Canada is not an expression of Christianity. It's a pagan alternative to Christianity. And this was Warfield's, or pardon me, Machen's conclusion. And so his book, Christianity and Liberalism, kind of put a target over these conservative evangelicals. And meanwhile, in a pulpit in New York, was a very liberal, progressive Baptist pastor by the name of Harry Emerson Fosdick. And Fosdick was not liking the pushback that these conservative fundamentalists were giving, and so he wrote a watershed book called Shall the Fundamentalists Win? And, depending on your reading of history, I guess we could debate who won that battle in the early 1900s. But at this time, the reason I'm sharing this is to say that fundamentalism was not a negative or a narrow word at the time. It referred to the core doctrine of orthodoxy that all Christians, whether they're Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian, should agree on. Even Roman Catholics would, of course, agree with these fundamentals. So in the early days, this was a broad term to show basic agreement with the core of the Christian faith. And of course, Christianity is more than these five fundamentals, but it certainly cannot be any less than that. So this wasn't a narrow or brittle term at all. Deeply scholarly men identified with the term fundamentalist at that time. However, by the 1940s and the 1950s, fundamentalism had moved away from a focus on the broad Christian faith and basic Christian orthodoxy, it had turned into a very narrow and separatist movement. And there was radical, radical, radical liberalism happening in the society at the time, and I know that's hard for us to imagine, because if you're like me, everything that happened in the days of black and white cameras was conservative, right? It was the good old days after all. Wrong. That is a poor reading of history. There was absolutely radicalism in the 1940s on this continent. And it showed up in the political arena in the face of men like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the US or in this country. Mackenzie King, radical, radical. liberal men, strongly progressive men who took a Darwinian view of history and of theology and of society and they implemented it nationwide. which caused the fundamentalists to retreat. And as they retreated, it kind of became a ghetto movement, and the word fundamentalist no longer showed a broad agreement on the basics of Christian doctrine. It became a narrow, separatistic, and somewhat angry and defensive movement. to the point where today many of us probably think of, maybe not all of us, but probably many of us think of that word in somewhat of a questionable or negative mindset. The fundamentalists withdrew from the seminaries and they replaced it with the Bible school movement, which was very popular in Canada and in the United States. And these Bible schools avoided things which caused people to go liberal, like studying history. Or studying philosophy, or studying theology. That was an especially bad one. You do not study theology, okay? You're gonna go nuts if you start, and you're gonna turn out to be like Fosdick. So rather than replacing it with conservative approaches, or biblically faithful approaches to these things, they just said, just get out. Just get out. And many of us who speak low German are maybe familiar with, ya yeleeda, ya fekeeda, okay? Don't learn anything, it'll just mix you up. You'll turn into a liberal if you learn anything. So just make sure, the less you know, the more vibrant your faith will be. And of course, I do not share that standpoint whatsoever. But this brittle and anti-intellectual approach bothered many, and so some conservatives started to emphasize, once again, the importance of conservative biblical scholarship, conservative academics, cooperation between Christians of different stripes, and personal evangelism. And so, again, now we're getting close to our time in history, so if you're one of the older people in this church, you will perhaps remember names like Carl F.H. Henry, or J. I. Packer or Francis Schaeffer. They came to be known with this newly invigorated form of evangelical Christianity. And so in our own time, the word evangelical is again up for discussion. Who gets to define this term? We see many in the evangelical world clearly pushing in a liberal direction. Even people who were faithful and trusted people at some point. Someone like Beth Moore, who was a trusted ladies teacher 15-20 years ago, is pushing very strongly in an egalitarian and liberal direction. Andy Stanley, whose own father was a prominent voice in the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist Convention. Andy Stanley is very clearly and very intentionally and methodically rejecting the conservative doctrine. of the older evangelicals, and even organizations which started to preserve a conservative evangelical voice. Organizations like the Gospel Coalition are very clearly drifting in a leftward direction. So again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And in the big tent of evangelicalism, we also have those advancing a more conservative and orthodox vision of the biblical faith. A new generation of leaders like Wody Baucom, or Jeff Durbin, and ministries that you might hear about in this church. Ministries and publishing houses like Canon Press or Ligonier Ministries or Founders Ministries are designed intentionally to be that conservative voice in the evangelical world. So whatever you do with all this history, whether you think the word evangelical is so compromised and so watered down that you're not willing to apply it to yourself anymore, I understand that. I personally, however, still think that there is historical value to the word, and so I would rather see this word being redeemed than discarded outright. And so this morning I'm going to try to give a positive definition that I personally could sign off on and I think that we as a church would identify with. To define it positively, I will define evangelicalism this morning as being a theologically conservative expression of the Christian faith that affirms the inerrancy and final authority of the Bible and the historic orthodox understanding of the gospel as summarized in the five solas of the Reformation. And we've looked at these in the past. These five solas, or five alone statements in Latin, are sola scriptura, by scripture alone is our final authority, sola gratia, by grace alone we are saved, sola fide, by faith alone we are justified, that's the instrument, solus Christus, by Christ alone there is no other way, and soli deo gloria, everything exists, everything that happens, including the gospel, is not primarily man-centered, but God-centered in its design. And you think, well, that's not quite fair. You're kind of mixing categories here, Matt. Now you're talking about Calvinism already and Reformed theology, and that's for next week. But I would just encourage you to remember that for the first generations of Protestantism, to be an evangelical or to be a Protestant for the first significant stretch of time meant you were a Calvinist. Luther was a Calvinist before Calvin was born. This is the theology of Augustine. This is the theology of Anselm. This is ancient theology. We, by a mistake of history, call it Calvinism. But this is just the old faith. And so Arminian theology, that is so popular today, came along much later to challenge the older orthodoxy. So in a historic sense, to be an evangelical is to be reformed and Calvinistic by a historical standard. So, with that definition, we're going to look at the five solas, we're going to look at the Evangelium from Ephesians chapter 2, and we read there in the first three verses, "...and you were dead in 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 sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind." And so Paul does not rush to the good news. Ephesians doesn't start with, hey, smile, God loves you. Jesus has a wonderful plan for your life. The biblical presentation of the gospel uniformly starts with the bad news so we know what the problem is that the gospel is designed to address. I've often said that the extent of the good news is directly related to the extent of the bad news. Amazing grace is amazing because the corruption is so amazing. Sin takes no prisoners. It captures the entirety of the man, and so we need a gospel that is just as potent. In fact, we would say more potent. Grace is only as amazing as the problem is radical. So if the extent of our problem is that we make bad decisions from time to time, and we kind of need a life coach to help us bump back on course, A life coach, a motivational speaker would, in fact, do. If, on the other hand, we are dead in sin and we are at war against our Creator with every part of us, then we don't need a life coach, we need a Savior. And that's exactly who the Bible presents us with, is a Savior, not a helper. Scripture addresses our problem as being dead. Paul says here we're dead. And of course this isn't referring to physical death, but to spiritual death. We're born under the curse of Adam, so we're cut off from God and we are cut off from all forms of spiritual life. And so, of course, this brings up the question, well, how are we born again? Does this happen by our free will? Do we have a free will? If so, in what sense is it free? And, of course, it's clear from Scripture that God holds us responsible for our choices, and that the choices we make are real, but does this mean we can choose anything? And if you listen to the voices in society, of course you can choose anything. You're this autonomous, wonderful thing, and you can do whatever you set your mind to. That is the catechesis of our world. But this ignores the biblical reality of who we are. It ignores the nature of fallen man. If we had absolute free will, we could just as soon choose something that we hate as something that we love. And yet, our choices are meaningful. Well, why are our choices meaningful? Our choices are meaningful because they reflect the disposition of our heart. And if we're dead in trespasses and sins, guess what your heart doesn't want? It does not want Jesus Christ. It does not want the humiliation of repentance. It wants more sin. It wants more me. Okay? That's what the fallen heart wants, and so this is why Ray's text in Ezekiel, this must be a heart transplant, and it must be the sovereign work of the Spirit of God to do this as He wishes in the timing that He sees fit. So it's an ironic turn that those who emphasize the liberty of human free will actually end up being the ones who have a hard time explaining why people choose what we choose. If we can choose literally anything, that leaves our choices to be spontaneous and random. If Arminianism is true, in other words, how could God hold you accountable for your actions? It's just a random thing. There's no reason. I didn't choose it because that's what I wanted. It just happened. It is the older faith that explains how our choices can be meaningful because they reflect the disposition of our heart. The text describes us as following the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. This is how scripture uniformly speaks of our decisions. They do reflect who we are. Our choices and our actions do reflect what's going on in here. And that is the basis on which they're meaningful. And this, of course, is consistent with Jesus' teaching on the relationship between outward fruit and the nature of the tree that is bearing that outward fruit. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, you'll recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? So every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. You see the relationship between what is and what shows up on the outside? Okay? It's not random what shows up on the outside. What shows up on the outside is deeply related to what's going on on the inside. A healthy tree bears good fruit, and a diseased tree bears bad fruit. And Jesus goes on. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, you will recognize them by their fruits. So we understand that we're a complex being, and we often have competing desires. Many of us have competing desires. But at the point of decision, it remains true that we always choose what we most strongly desire at the point of decision. Because, as Ephesians 2 points out, our choices are determined by our nature. And our nature is actually what is pinpointed as the heart of the problem here. And again, this cuts directly against everything we learn in the society. What do we learn over and over and over and over and over again? You're good. You're wonderful. It's the system, right? Systems and external factors to you. That's why there's corruption in the world. Well, one question, who made those systems? People, okay? People did. Okay? In the secular religion, sin resides in things because the human heart is pure. In biblical religion, things are just things. You're the problem. I'm the problem. The problem of the human heart is the heart of the problem. This is what it has to be addressed, is the nature of man. It goes right to the core. This isn't window dressing on externals. It goes right to the core of who we are, what our problem is, and what the gospel seeks to address. Without the gospel, we do exactly as Paul says. We follow the course of the world. We follow the prince of the power of the air, the spirit of the age. Why? Because we want to. It looks good to us. We want to do it. We're not being compelled against our wishes. We're following our wishes because we were by nature the children of wrath like the rest of mankind. So Paul starts with the bad news, and the bad news is actually bad. Imagine if Paul wrote this letter as an editorial page in Christianity Today. Imagine the letters to the editor about how ungracious he was, and his tone. Maybe you're technically right, Paul, but your tone is terrible. You're not going to be winsome. No one's going to believe you if you talk that way. You need to be winsome, Paul. But this is the Word of God. For the gospel of Jesus Christ to shine, for us to put the amazing back into grace, we have to confront how serious the problem is that we're starting with. We're dead. The Bible says you're dead. We're born dead on arrival. That's how we show up here. There's not some island of righteous mind is dead. Your will is dead spiritually. Of course, there's physical, biological life. But spiritually, we are dead to the things of God. So we need a Savior from outside of ourselves. We need an external Word of God. We need salvation from someone other than ourselves because a life coach will never deliver us. And then Paul switches here in verse four. Notice the words. These are the best words anywhere in your Bible. But God. Greatest words in scripture and it appears many times. These are the sweetest and most comforting words in all of scripture. But God. And so often, when we let the Bible speak for itself, it does confront us with who we really are. And the Bible pulls no punches in telling us that we do prefer to serve ourselves. We are narcissistic. We are self-centered. We want to live for ourselves more than God. And the biblical authors want their audience to feel the weight of that sin and to pull away all pretenses and all the lies we tell about ourselves, about our moral freedom and our moral goodness and so forth. They tell us that we follow our sinful hearts, but the Bible authors never leave us there. They take us there, yes. They take us through the slew of despond, to use Pilgrim's Progress language, because we have to see it, but they don't leave us to sink there. They give us the words of life, and here's where it turns. But God. And it goes on in four and five, but God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved. Dead men cannot raise themselves to life, is what this is summarizing. Go to a graveyard with a bottle of medicine and offer that medicine to everyone who's dead. Anyone willing to take it? No. There is not one person in the graveyard who is willing to take the treatment that would have prevented them from death. They're dead. That's what it is to offer the gospel to spiritually dead people without the Spirit of God creating life there. This is by grace alone, sola gratia, by grace alone, Paul is emphasizing here. God takes the initiative. God's not a responder, God is an initiator. And because of his great love, he makes us alive. It's not like Jesus is pulling and Lazarus is pushing and then by joint effort, life is breathed into Lazarus. Who does the work of Lazarus' resurrection? Christ and Christ alone. He did not wait for Lazarus' permission. He was not waiting for Lazarus to give Jesus permission to be Lord of his life. Jesus just did it and the lights come on. That's how our salvation works as well. Jesus just does it. He says, let there be light and guess what happens? A spiritual heart starts to beat. sola gratia, by grace alone. John repeats this in 1 John 4, 19, we love, why? Because he first loved us. That's why the lights are on. That's why there's a heart of flesh beating in your chest. Jesus turned the lights on. It is because God has made us alive that we are able to see, as saved people, that all the bad news in verses 1 to 3 is true, but it's in the past tense. Look again, you were, you were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked, and you were, past tense by nature, children of wrath. That's back there, Paul is saying, because this new spiritual reality has happened. And so we can see some of the reasoning behind God's actions in this verse. God does this because He is rich in mercy. And when He makes us alive, He makes us alive together with Christ. All of this is always in Christ, and that's another theme you'll see in your Bible. In Christ, in Christ. It's in Him, in Him. It's always in union with Christ. God's not doing this on the side of what Jesus did. He's grafting us into that union with Christ. And so God raised Christ from the dead after Christ defeated the power of hell, sin, and the devil. And Jesus is raised back to life after that as our first and oldest brother. And he leads the way for all those who are grafted into him, to all those who come to him in saving faith. And so his victory over death is the basis on which God raises others out of spiritual death. And God does this one by one. So we're not saved because of which church we show up at Sunday morning. We're not saved because your grandma was a Christian. And you're not even saved because your dad was a good guy. In fact, you're not even saved because your dad was a Christian. Rachel Minan reminded us last week that God has no grandchildren. We're adopted in one by one. God has no grandchildren. And at the same time, we shouldn't so emphasize that that it leaves us isolated. We shouldn't see ourselves as a bunch of greased BBs rolling around in the shoebox because God grafts his people together. And so we become interdependent on one another, like leaves on a tree. Each one is individual, but they're all grafted to the main root. And of course, that root is Christ. He connects us all. And so that our coming to life is only possible because we're an offshoot of that living trunk, that living tree. And so when we speak of salvation being offered only through Christ, through that living branch, or that living trunk, which keeps all these branches alive, people think that's narrow. And here we are at Solus Christus, by Christ alone. It's so narrow, we've heard that, haven't we? So narrow, there's only one way of salvation. Question, how many ways of salvation did God owe a rebellious creation? None. God owed us none. He owed us none, and he provided a way. And to say that there's more ways than Jesus Christ is to say that God is just as pleased with the dead works of Islam as He is with the perfect obedience of His Son, Jesus Christ. That makes no sense. To say that there's more ways than Christ is to say, yes, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, pedal hard enough, run fast enough, that God will eventually say, yeah, you know what, Jesus was option A, but you did such a good job, Matt, I'm going to let you in on your own basis. That's nonsense. God cannot be satisfied by anyone other than Himself, particularly in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ. Of course, Christ is the only way. The absurdity of any other way is utter nonsense. It's in Christ, solus Christus, by Christ alone is the root of spiritual life. How could we find it anywhere other than Him? And then Paul pauses his thoughts here to reinforce his point before moving on. There's these hyphens that you'll see in the text. And what's between the hyphens is a comment, which is kind of suspended over the train of his thought, which kind of, he just bursts out in praise. Paul does that. Sometimes you can see this thought is building, and the train is building momentum, and he just stops, gives God the praise. It's like he pours out in worship, and then he gets back into his train of thought. That's what's happening here. So the whole train of thought here is even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with Christ and seated us with Christ in the heavenly places. So our coming out of our spiritual death, out of our spiritual grave, follows the pattern of Christ coming out of his physical grave and then being seated as heirs with Christ. And so just, again, between the hyphens, there's a comment here on the whole thing. He just bursts out, by grace we've been saved. I'll just make it simple. I'll just summarize the whole thing between these hyphens. By grace you're saved. That's it. It's a reminder that we can't pull this off. We can't cooperate enough to make it happen. It must happen by grace or it will not happen. It is the grace of God and it is in Christ and nowhere else. Paul moves on in verses 6-8, and he says he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming age he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. So being raised to life and seated is spoken here again in the past tense. But then you go to verse 7 and you see, well, now it's in the future tense. So what's going on here? It's past tense and it's future tense. And of course, we know that salvation is in all three tenses, past tense, present tense, and future tense. The Bible says you were saved, past tense. You are being saved. Right now, this morning, if you are a Christian, you are in the process of being saved. You're being sanctified, okay? Christ declared you righteous, you were saved, you are being sanctified now, you are being saved and guess when you will finally be saved? At your glorification, when we press into eternity, you will be saved. All three tenses are absolutely true and we can discount none of them. So what Paul is doing here is he's pulling some of that future glory of the future resurrection and eternity with Christ in the new heavens and the perfectly renovated creation, the new heavens and the new earth, and he's pulling it back into the present, although it's not yet in its full form. We are seated with God in the heavenlies because we are reunited, we are united to Christ. And Christ ascended back to heaven, body and soul intact, just like we will be put back together at the resurrection, body and soul intact once again. And so there's a sense in which this power of heaven is already filling and fueling us now today. So we need not be consigned to defeat or to being slaves of corruption any longer. We have a taste of future glory now. And how much better will it be in the age to come? And I'm often struck by older hymnody and how victorious it is. Yes, it addresses suffering. Yes, it addresses the reality of a difficult life in a fallen earth. But there's one thing you don't find in the older hymnody, and that's a defeatist attitude. We sang it this morning. Faith is the victory that overcomes the world. Faith is not living on retreat. Faith is advancing. Faith is pushing out. Faith is the victory. Think of other songs. Onward, Christian soldiers. People used to understand that faith is victorious. We're not relegated to be nothing but sufferers and exiles and pilgrims. Those seasons happen, yes, but ultimately Christ is victorious. And Paul's pulling that future victory into the present and saying even today that is actually happening. In verses 8 and 9, it says, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. And so here again, we have the whole plan of redemption summarized into one familiar passage. And as if Paul couldn't be any clearer, he's going to remind you one more time that salvation is by grace, just in case you forgot. It's freely offered and it is freely given and there is no room whatsoever for personal merit in it. God is not moved by the things that he sees in us, but is moved only by the kindness of his own nature to be kind and merciful to redeem his fallen creatures. And this salvation happens through faith. Faith is the instrument here, sola fide. So faith is the instrument or the tool by which salvation is applied to individual believers. It's through faith. It's through trusting and resting in Christ. We talked about that in Sunday school this morning. Faith is not something we drum up. Faith is not something we offer to God. Faith is the open hand which receives the promises of God. Think of faith like the plug on your fridge. That plug produces nothing. What does it do? It ties you into the source of power. It receives. It receives the electricity and therefore, on that basis, it can go to work. Faith does not get. Faith does not grab. Faith receives. Faith receives. It's the instrument by which God applies salvation to individual believers. And this is emphasized when it says here, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. And here, I don't usually love doing language studies, because I'm not a great linguist to begin with, and I think it can be dry, but there's something very, very important here. In the Greek, when Paul says that this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, look closely in your Bibles, the this and the it that Paul is referring to are in the neuter sense. They're in the neuter tone, which is significant because grace and faith are both feminine. Charis and pistis are both feminine, okay? And the word salvation, that you're saved, sozo, is masculine. So the this and the it, when Paul says this is not of yourself, he's actually not singling out whether he means faith, grace, or salvation. What he's referring to is the whole package. Everything is the gift. The whole package is the gift, including the faith which receives the gift. The faith which saves you is part of the gift of salvation itself. The whole package, everything Paul is referring to, is the this, which is not our own doing, and which is the gift of God. So we receive these things by grace without our own additional contribution, and this must be what is in mind, because Paul could not possibly be any more forceful or any more clear in this passage. Paul says that it is not by our works, because even if it's partly by our works, we could do what? We could boast. And what does Paul rule out here? Boasting. If it's 99% Jesus, but I get on my hands and knees and I army crawl myself across the finish line, that last 1%, what could I do? Boast. I finished it. Yes, Jesus started it, but I finished. Yes, Jesus invited, but I chose. Yes, I'm dead in sin, but somehow there's this island of righteousness left in my head that can pull myself across. And Paul says, no, it's all gift. You have literally zero to boast about. You didn't offer any cooperation until after God gave you this gift. And so the great evangelist, George Whitefield, asks his congregation, a man get to heaven by works? I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand. That's how likely it is that you can save yourself even partially with your cooperation. Can't happen, won't happen. Whitfield says, go grab a bucket full of sand and make a rope ladder to the moon if that's the way you're going to try it. Paul is zealous to show us that the whole thing is by grace. The conviction of sin and the being born again with a new heart and new desires comes about by the rebirth, by being born again. And this is by gift. So we need to remember where God has placed the power of all this to happen. God uses secondary means. He uses the proclamation of the gospel. And so God packs this saving power in the proclamation of the gospel. And this is truly, in the greatest sense, what it means to be evangelical, to be people of the word, to be people of the evangel, to know that this is the power of God unto salvation. God has put all his power in the gospel. to be the means by which dead men come to life. Also, Whitefield used to go around and talking about the necessity of the rebirth, which we hardly ever talk about nowadays in the evangelical world, do we? You almost never hear about the rebirth. And yet, this was a major theme in the Puritan era. And Whitefield always used to say, well, you've got to be born again, you've got to be born again. And one lady kind of critically came up to him and said, Mr. Whitefield, like, I get what you're saying, but why do you keep saying you must be born again? Well, my dear lady, because you must be born again. You must be. And the gospel is the means that God uses to break that heart of stone out. And then verse 10 gets us to where this is all headed. And this is the one last statement in this section, and it further lays out what God has in mind when saving us. This is the ultimate drive. This is where the rubber hits the road. God doesn't just save you so you can personally get out of hell. The gospel is not ultimately about fire insurance, it's about God being glorified in his creation. And the only way me and you can bring glory to God is to be born again. To be made new so that we can obey from a pure heart. So the glory of God is actually the motivator here. This is more deep, this is a deeper level than personal conversion as important as that is, is the glory of God. This is God's ultimate aim, to be glorified in his creation. And for that to happen, he needs an audience that's actually born again to see what he is doing and to participate in his work on earth. So in saving us by grace through faith in Christ, God is showing us the glory of his kindness. as well as his love for his own son. And he saves us so that we bear fruit. He saves us so we can glorify him in the lives we live, that we can show that we are, in fact, his workmanship. And so the aim of personal salvation includes our joy, but ultimately it is oriented towards the glory of God and not of ourselves. Salvation is the means by which God is getting the glory in this world, of making all things new, starting with people, and using us as His agents in creation. The failure of our first parents in the garden marred the purpose for which the world was made and for which we were created. But God has not abandoned man and He has not abandoned the world either. Rather, now he is on a rescue mission. He's on a mop-up operation of taking that glory and dominion back by the proclamation of the gospel of his Son. And so as this potent gospel, as this hot gospel raises dead sinners to life so that they can bear fruit, God is being glorified, and the gospel is surely, slowly but surely, filling the earth with his glory until the Son comes to return and consummate it and perfect it. To set up His everlasting and final shalom, His peace on earth. To raise our dead bodies back to life out of the grave so we can all enjoy it again as our first parents ought to have. And this is the point at which all this high and lofty doctrine becomes immensely practical. Are we walking by faith? When you're making decisions, are you thinking of yourself, or are you thinking of the glory of God? Who's being glorified? Who are we here for? We sang also this morning, we are not on our own, okay? Don't waste your life on yourself. Invest it in the glory of God, that we can point all glory up to Him, that people will not see us and think of how clever we are, but of how great our Savior is. And this is the rock-bottom, foundational, controlling theme of all Scripture, and of creation, and of world history, is the glory of God. This is the controlling theme of everything. This is the heart of the Bible. And the gospel is God's answer to how men and women can be freed from sin in order to bring God that glory. So to be evangelical in the positive sense reminds us that we have the words of life. We have the evangel. We have the good news. And true evangelical faith desires to get these words of life to others so that they too can hear and live and be swept into the drama of God's redemptive purposes for His creation. Being evangelical ought to focus us on the Great Commission. to make disciples of all the nations so that the kingdom of God extends, as the psalmist says, from sea to sea to sea. And may this church and may each one here be truly evangelical in that sense, to trust the word of God, to desire to see his kingdom reach the far reaches of the earth and to bring all glory back through the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Lord God, we thank you that you have not left us blind. You have given us your word to show us the words of life, to show us the kind of mission you are on in history and in creation. Lord, thank you that you did not discard the whole project when we sinned, but you set about with step after step after step of redeeming it, of moving history to the advent of your son. And even today, you are moving things along as we await his second advent. Lord, I pray that we would see what we are here for. I pray that we would see what history exists for, what the physical creation exists for. And I pray that we would not sit on a bucket with these words of life that we have, that we would not hide them under a bushel, but that your church would once again be a city on a hill. Lord, that we would extend the words of life to our friends and our loved ones and those who need to hear these words of life. Lord, and I thank you so much that it is not up to our perfect presentation or our perfect behavior or our cleverness to get people saved, Lord, but that we can trust fully and finally in your spirit to raise dead sinners to life despite our imperfections. Lord, I pray that we would be evangelical in this sense, that we would trust in your spirit to do your work your way according to your word. And I pray that we would trust in the tools you have given us, which is the simple proclamation of the same gospel that has reverberated all through church history. Lord, I thank you for these words of life, and I pray that they would be potent in our lives and contagious to those around us. And we commit each dear one here into your hands. Lead us, guide us, give us joy in your word, and amen. Please stand. ♪ Grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt ♪ ♪ Yonder on Calvary's mount outpoured ♪ ♪ There where the blood of the Lamb was spilled ♪ Grace that is greater than all our sins. ♪ Sin and despair like the sea waves cold ♪ ♪ Threaten the soul with infinite loss ♪ ♪ Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold ♪ ♪ Points to the refuge, the mighty cross ♪ ♪ Grace, grace, God's grace ♪ ♪ Grace that will pardon and heal ♪ Grace, grace, God's grace. Grace that is greater than all our sin. Dark is the stain that we cannot hide. What can avail to wash it away? ♪ Look, there is flowing a crimson tide ♪ ♪ Whiter than snow, may you be today ♪ ♪ Grace, grace, God's grace ♪ ♪ Grace that will pardon and cleanse within ♪ ♪ Grace, grace, God's grace ♪ ♪ Grace that is greater than all our sins ♪ ♪ Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace ♪ ♪ Freely bestowed on all who believe ♪ ♪ You that are longing to see his face ♪ ♪ Will you this moment his grace receive? ♪ ♪ Grace, grace, God's grace ♪ ♪ Grace that will pardon and cleanse ♪ Grace that is greater than all our sin. Grace, grace, God's grace. Grace that will pardon and cleanse within. Grace, grace, God's grace. Grace that is greater than all our sin. So the charge is this. The controlling theme of scripture and of world history is the glory of God. Because of the fall, we have been blinded to God's glory and unable to find our way back. God answers this problem in the gospel where he comes and does all the work of redemption. We have seen clearly that our Lord does not come finding people willing to cooperate. Rather, he makes dead people willing by breathing the life of the gospel into them. The announcement that God saves sinners is summed up in the five solas which were emphasized in the evangelical reawakening at the Reformation. These words of life are discovered in Scripture alone and reveal to us that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God's glory alone. and then receive the benediction from 2 Peter 3 verse 18. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. And go in peace.