Ephesians 2:1-10

In Ephesians chapter 2, the main message is that believers in Christ are not only reconciled to God, but also to each other. The focus is on maintaining unity within the church while resisting temptation. The key verses, Ephesians 2:8-9, emphasize that salvation is by grace through faith, not by works. The book of Ephesians highlights the importance of grace, which is a concept that goes beyond human understanding. Grace is God's provision for our needs and His active and dynamic movement in our lives. It is through grace that we are saved and brought into a relationship with God. The first three chapters of Ephesians focus on theology, while the last three chapters are practical, emphasizing that our beliefs should impact how we live. Salvation is a transformative experience that results in a changed life. We're in Ephesians chapter 2. Someone told me that Robert Jeffress was in chapter 3 this morning. If I could have gotten started earlier, I could listen to him and have a little more fodder for you. But anyway, chapter 2. And the book of Ephesians is an incredible book. The most common word in Ephesians is grace. We meet it in the second verse, and it's there 12 times. In six chapters. And the main message of Ephesians, I'll just remind you, is that believers in Christ are not only reconciled to God, but they're reconciled to each other. So, sort of backdoor approach, we're still talking about the unity of the church. Now, if you didn't hear Brother John's sermon this morning, you need to go online and listen to it. A great message on the church. None of us are meant to do it by ourselves. And the church is a family or tribe, as he called it this morning. And it's a great place. And the whole New Testament from Jesus' prayer in John 17 focuses on what the reality in every church ought to be the unity of the church. Distinction and chaos in the church is of the devil, not of the Lord. And we belong to each other. And it ought to be a happy experience. Not every family is a happy family. But every church ought to be. And we do that in Christ. So, the focus here in Ephesians is to maintain the unity of purpose within the families and the church at the same time, while resisting the temptation to fall into sin like the world that's around the church. The key verses we look at today, Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, 8 to 10, are probably the key verses in the entire book. I tell you what, let's just read these first 10 verses. We're going to look at 10 verses this morning. Next Sunday, there will be 11 verses. And we'll finish up the second chapter next week. And then Brother Jack will do chapter 3. And I think we're trying to do maybe two times for each chapter. But I'm in trouble because if I'm going to end up doing chapter 4, I've got four messages on chapter 4. And I've got to pare it down a little bit if that happens to fall on me. But grace, as I said, appears 12 times in these verses in this book. Grace is a common word in our society. People name their daughters Grace. Churches name themselves Grace. Ministries will call themselves Grace. Singing groups call themselves Grace. It's a very common word. But it's a very uncommon reality. I mean, there's nothing like Grace. It's an incredible concept. None of us wants justice. We all want mercy. Because we'll never deserve anything good that happens to us. Everything God does for us is by grace. If you pause, if you get to our age, and you look back on your life and you can see key things that happened during your life, you look at it really closely, you realize it was all grace. It's kind of fun getting older, isn't it? You look back on a lot of things. And look back with thanksgiving, maybe regret. People ask me, what would you change about your life? I wouldn't change anything. Except I'd just do it better. I don't want to change anything. I'm happy for everything God brought into my life, but I'd sure like to do some things better. I'd like to have a do-over sometimes, but we don't get do-overs, do we? It's all by grace that God gives to us. Let me read these verses. He's talking to the church now and He's reminding them of what they used to be. You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously lived according to the ways of the world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the Spirit now working in disobedience. We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts. And we were by nature under wrath as the others were also. But God... Isn't that a great phrase? That terrible thing He just described? But God, who is rich in mercy because of His great love that He had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You're saved by grace. He just had to throw that in there. He didn't explain it. A couple of verses later, He amplifies it a little bit. There in verse 5, He says, You were saved by grace because of His great love that He had for us made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You're saved by grace. He also raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavens in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages, He might display the measurable riches of His grace through His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For you are saved by grace through faith. It's not of yourselves. It is God's gift, not from works, so that no one can boast. For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared ahead of time for us to do. Chapter 2 may well be the heart of the book of Ephesians. It certainly is a good summary of what God is saying. Grace, He introduces quickly. The entire book is about grace. It's a word of immense mystery. Who of us could ever really understand the depths of grace? There's no way for us to do that. At its heart is God's provision for our needs. The idea is God's blessing is basic to understanding the meaning of grace. It's just all about God, grace. And grace is synonymous with the Gospel. There is no Gospel without grace because grace brings us a free and unmerited gift from God Himself. In the Old Testament, the idea of grace refers to God's pleasure or favor upon individuals. But in the New Testament, Charis, by the way, little girls get named Charis too, grace in the Greek has the meaning of favor and kindness and graciousness, joy and gratitude. All those things are wrapped up in grace, but it's infinitely more. Grace is not God's goodness and kindness. It is God's providing the payment for our sins and full through the death of Jesus Christ. That is grace. And it is God moving. By the way, it's not passive. It is active. God's grace is something that is active and dynamic and dramatic because it brings us into a relationship with God. You know, God wants to know us. That's an amazing thing. One of my favorite verses, passages in Jeremiah 9, verses 23 and 24 where he says, if you're going to boast, don't let the rich man boast in his wealth and don't let the wise man boast in his wisdom. But if you're going to boast, by the way, he doesn't say don't boast. He says, if you're going to boast, you need to boast in this, that you know me and that I know you. That is absolutely a miracle. It couldn't happen without grace. We could not do it without grace. My grandfather's generation, he preached for 54 years in Arkansas, mostly in Arkansas. He pastored actually in Coolidge, which is over near Mahea when he was in seminary where my mother was born in Coolidge, Texas. If you can find it, you better look quick because there's nothing there but just a few houses and it's still just a hole in the road. But he pastored for 54 years. But his generation used to speak of salvation as an experience of grace. An experience of grace. Now grace is an active experience with God that changes our lives. It's not passive. It's not something we just happen to have. It's something that gets in and transforms us and changes us and brings us into the redemptive purposes of Christ for our lives. And it's all experience of grace. Amazing grace. Oh, by the way, I did say, you know, we have a song named Grace, don't we? Amazing Grace. We also had a movie some of you may have seen about John Newton called Amazing Grace. But grace involves God's initiative in saving us and sustaining us. It's not a one-time experience. It's one that we live by. We never stop living by grace. We receive grace. We grow in grace. We stand in grace. We serve by grace. Not one of us who preach the gospel are doing it because we're worthy. The Apostle Paul who wrote half the New Testament said that he was the chief of sinners. Now, I'm not sure what he was referring to, but he certainly referred to a truth that said none of us are good, basically good. I've told you before, we're all capable of any possible sin. It's only grace of God that keeps us from it. We can't explain it. We can't fully understand it. We don't know why God does it. We know he loves us, but why does he love us? Most of us are not very lovable. Down deep and when you get really close, we've all got flaws. It's grace that God gives to us. And Peter described it this way. He said, because of his great mercy, God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. You're being guarded by God's power through faith for salvation ready to be revealed at the last time. That's 1 Peter 1, 3-5. Paul made his purpose very clear in this. He expected that the community of faith would walk in accordance with their heavenly call. Now, the book of Ephesians divides in two parts. Brother Jack has already pointed this out to us, but the first three chapters are really theological or doctrinal. Last three chapters are practical. And the point is that what you believe ought to make a difference in how you live. In other words, you can't be a Christian and just do your own thing. If you belong to Christ, you're going to live differently. You're going to be differently. Paul put it like this to the Corinthians. He said, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. All things have become new. Now that means that when you get saved, you are changed. Your life is transformed. And if your life has not been transformed, you better check back and see when you thought you were saved. Because salvation is not just believing certain things. The devils believe and even tremble according to the New Testament. But they're not saved. It's a spiritual experience. It's not salvation. Salvation is a very studied, careful decision that is made to invest your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. It's not our faith that saves us. It's the Lord that saves us. Faith is no value unless it's invested in the right thing. So when someone says, I have faith, you ought to say, well, in what? We can't trust the government. You really can't trust each other. What's your faith in? Your faith has to be in God. Somebody is going to mess up in some way. Everybody is going to do something that will disappoint you. And the truth is, when we disappoint others, we disappoint ourselves. But when we're saved, things are different. Now here's the difference. Before you get saved, you can sin and not care. It doesn't bother you. It's just a thing. Everybody is doing it. After you get saved, you still sin, but you can't get away with it. When you sin, you realize you've made a mistake. You've done something that's wrong. And as a believer, God's not going to let you get away with that. And so that's why grace is so important. By the way, grace is one of the main reasons why we have security as believers. If we're saved by grace, it's something God did, but we can't undo what God did. My dad used to say, if you could be saved and not know it, you could lose it and never miss it. Grace is what brings us to God. That's what Paul is emphasizing here. And so these first three verses, I just call it the condition that requires grace. In there he says, even though we were dead. Continuous, ongoing experience of death. It's a picture of a life that is destitute without meaning. God is not welcomed or even acknowledged in it. We're dead to God. That means that our moral and ethical lives, our wills and emotions are controlled by death or sin. Not controlled by God. Without Christ, lives are controlled by sin and that's something you can't wash off. It's deadly and spiritually we're dead. That's the condition that demands grace. Sin kills innocence. You're never the same again. It kills ideals. What once alarmed us, no longer bothers us. We were all children under wrath, verse 3 says. All these tenses or verb tenses in the original language that are continuous, it speaks of something that's always going on in our lives. We have a tendency. He talks about fleshly desires and inclinations and cravings of the flesh in verse 3. Fleshly means that our bodies have a disposition to sin. Desires is a word which speaks of a passionate craving for evil. Carrying out means we accomplish or we do, we perform. They're all present tense. And present tense, I'll just remind you that in the Greek language it's not the same as in the English language. Present tense means now. In the Greek language it does not mean just now. It means ongoing. It's not just now. It's always. It is continuous. It's going to keep ongoing. It's present tense. That's what sin is like without God. That is our struggle. It always is ongoing in our lives. And it's smarter than we are. I got word this week of a close friend who's been in ministry for years who had another affair. He said, I did it again. How would you do that? That's the way sin is. We get away from the Lord and we're going to do what we... Remember Paul in Romans 7? We talked about that. He said, the good I want to do, I don't do. And the bad I don't want to do, I do. Who can deliver me from the body of this death? I'm never away from it. Only God's grace can do that. And I'll emphasize again, we need to realize that just as we could do nothing to be saved, we can do nothing to live right either. It's by God's grace that we honor Him with our lives and that we live the life He has planned for us. It's God's grace that allows us to do that. The emphasis in these first verses speaks of all of us. The word you in verses 1-3 are all plural. Not any of them singular. He's talking about us. Us all. All of us have lived this way. Not just a few. We're all children under wrath. All these verbs indicate from our birth, our lives, and have continually been lived by that principle. That's why we need grace. We're trapped in these first verses. And fleshly desires. Our bodies have a disposition to carrying it out, doing what we should not be doing. Thoughts and flesh. Now, flesh refers to the body and thoughts to the mind. And by the way, thoughts are plural too. You ever been praying and then something fleeted across your mind and had nothing to do with your prayer? It took you off of what you were praying about and you just thought, how in the world did that get in here? Your thoughts. Now, who can control our thoughts? Well, I do have an illustration for that. If you had to watch television and you couldn't turn it off, what would be your only option? Change channels. So your thoughts. You can't turn your thoughts off. So you need to focus on how you can change channels. Focus on the Lord and what the Lord has said. Go to Scripture. Pray Scripture. It's going to be a battle. Satan can't keep us from getting saved. He wants to mess us up and not let us live the life God wants us to live. Our body and our mind. The mind is the center of understanding, the root of desires and emotions, where we make decisions. And evil thoughts, I said that's plural. All that's controlled by our sinful flesh. So we need to be sure we're feeding our mind with things that are going to deliver us from the way our minds want to think. Focus on the Lord. Stay in His Word. Grace still functions. And God is still going to provide what you need. And we'll still make mistakes. In fact, in Galatians 6, when Paul was talking about someone who had stumbled into sin, you restore that person. That happens to all of us. And it starts through our mind. So guard and protect your mind. Colossians 3, 5, to 10 says, Therefore put to death what is in you that is worldly, sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, God's wrath comes on the disobedient. And you once walked in these things when you were living in them, but now you must also put away all the following anger, wrath, malice, slander, filthy language from your mouth. Don't lie to one another since you've put off the old man with his practices and have put on the new man who is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of his Creator. The only answer to the sin nature that we have received by our first birth is the spiritual nature that we receive by the new birth. And the Lord Jesus Christ plants Himself in us. Remember now, we have one God and three Persons. We have a tendency to separate them and treat them differently. But you can't do that. If the Holy Spirit does something, God and Jesus do it, too. You never have a split decision. You never have them going in two different directions. They can't make a mistake. They can't stop being unified. And so when we're saved, God plants the Holy Spirit in us. And it's not rocket science. He lives in us. Spend time with Him every day. Pay attention. Be obedient. It's pretty simple. It's profound, and yet it's simply profound. And it's profoundly simple. Just pay attention. God lives in you. Stay close to Him. Read His Word. When you are praying and those thoughts come that distract you, well, rebuke them. I'll tell you a funny story for us. When I was in Dallas, I preached every Sunday night for several years. And Sunday mornings when Dr. Crystal wasn't there, we always met in what we call now the green room. We had a place for the staff and everybody would meet. And we'd pray together and get ready to go into the services. And so one night, I was scheduled to preach and we met in the green room. And so we had prayer. While I was praying, did you ever say something and think, well, where did that come from? Well, I was just praying away and I said, Lord, rebuke the devil and send him to Texas Stadium. The Cowboys weren't playing, so I knew he'd be empty. And of course, we kind of chuckled a little bit. But I did. I thought, send him to Texas Stadium. Get him out of this place. We had one of the greatest services that night that I could ever imagine. Mel Carter, who was a dear friend, been on staff at First Baptist of Dallas I guess 30 or 40 years. We used to, after church on Sunday night, we'd come out to Grapevine to the snow cone place. They have a snow cone place down there next to the bank at the north end of Main Street. And don't laugh at these snow cone places. That guy put all five of his kids through college at that snow cone place. But we could get a snow cone. We'd get out there and Mel, he was just laughing. He said, you know, you sent the devil to Texas Stadium. And look what God did. Well, you know, we need to draw on the strength we have. God is in you. And when you are distracted or when things come into your mind that you will change channels, focus again on the Lord. Back up. Start over. And the good news is that God understands our hearts and He knows our prayers even when we don't really know how to pray. And His Spirit is in us. And so this is the heart of the God. It's the story of the grace of God. God did something. He invaded the tragic scene of humanity and He extended His grace. Max Lucado said, holiness demands that sin be punished. Mercy compels that the sinner be loved. That's grace. Verse 4 talks about He is abundant in mercy. He is unlimited in mercy. We have an unrelenting deadness in sin. He has an unrelenting mercy that we desperately need. How do we get God's provision? How do we get God's mercy? Grace. Grace brings it to us. Mercy means that we don't get what we deserve. Grace means that what we don't deserve, we get what we don't deserve. We don't get what we deserve. Grace means we get what we don't deserve. That's what I'm trying to say. His mercy is everlasting. Never runs out. God never runs out of patience. Well, now let me back up. For the lost, His patience does wear out because He's always warning. You need to be saved before it's too late. God won't always draw you to Himself. But for the believers, we're talking about Paul's writing to the church. He's writing to us. God's going to always have unrelenting mercy for us. It never runs out. God's faithful to forgive our sins in spite of our sins. I tell my pastor friends often, God doesn't use any of us because of us. It's always in spite of us. God can hit a straight lick with a crooked stick. That's just God. And His grace is what allows us to do what we do. And it's because of His great love, verse 4 says. The word because of there means that it's a preposition. And it means in order to satisfy His great love. God's love is so great that it can't be satisfied with anything less than mercy. Just think about that. God's love is so great that it can't be satisfied with anything less than mercy. That's how desperately He loves us. Amazing. And the word love there, as you would expect, is agape. And there are two aspects of agape love. There are several words in the Greek language. There's agape, which is a godlike love. You have phileo, which is a kind of kinship. My brother, my family, and we love our family. And you have eros, which is an erotic love, which is an inappropriate love. But love, agape, first of all, it's love extended because of the preciousness of the object loved. God loves us because we're precious to Him. Don't you remember the verse that says, precious in the sight of the Lord or the death of His saints? His love and His mercy comes to us because of how precious we are. He loves us because we're precious to Him. He also, this love that He has for us is not passive. It calls for sacrifice for the benefit of the one loved. God loves us so much because we're precious to Him, and He loves us enough to sacrifice His Son for our sins. Amazing. What great, great love. Colossians 2.14 says that God erased the certificate of death with its obligations that was against us and opposed to us and has taken it out of the way by nailing it to His cross. You probably are aware that when a criminal was crucified, the charges against him that caused him to be crucified were written down and nailed to the cross. And what Paul says was, for us, our sins were nailed to the cross. Which means God's love has washed away our sins. He's made it possible for us to have fellowship with Him. Verse 5 says, He has made us alive. By the way, this phrase, made us alive, is used only here and in Colossians 2.13 in the New Testament two times. He reminds them that their deliverance is real. They were dead in sin. Now they're alive unto God. Dead in sin, now alive with Christ. Romans 6.11-14 says, So you too consider yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires, and do not offer any parts of it to sin as weapons of unrighteousness. But as those who are alive from the dead, offer yourselves to God and all the parts of yourself to God as weapons of righteousness, for sin will not rule over you because you are not under law, but under grace. And then he burst into a very quick shout, By grace you're saved. Second person, plural, perfect, passive, participle. Second person, you, plural, passive, meaning it's not active, it acts upon someone. When we're saved, it's not us doing it, it's God doing it. We receive it, but it's God being active and we passively receive it. And it's a participle and it is an incredible description of how we get saved by the grace of God. Next thing is the crowning result of grace. What's the result of grace in our lives? And it's interesting to notice how many times he speaks of being with him. In verse 5, with him. In verse 6, with the Messiah. Raised up with him and seated with him. This speaks of our union with Christ. When we get saved by God's grace, we're with him. We're with him. And it speaks of our relationship with Christ. And we need to continually remind ourselves that our faith, our relationship with God is something that is with him. We're in a relationship with him. It's not just like coming to church and checking it off when we did that. I'm so glad we can come to church, but the great thing is we're with him. He is with us. We're never without him. And the crowning result of grace is that we are united with Christ and we're seated with him. Right now, we're seated with him in heavenly places. Again, that's another reason for believing in eternal security because it says he sat down. Now, Jewish priests never sat down. Their job was never finished. When Christ died on the cross and when he was raised, his task was finished. So he sat down because the job was finished. And Jesus sacrificed for us. He presented that sacrifice to the Holy of Holies in heaven. He paid the penalty for our sins in full. And then the Scripture says he sat down at the right hand of God. The human priest never sat down. Our heavenly priest sat down. It's finished. It's done. We're with him. The Lord sat down, having completed his sacrifice for sin. That's amazing grace. Amazing grace. This is a foretaste of what it's going to be like in glory. Why did he raise us up and seat us with him? Now, this is really a fascinating thing. He says in verse 7, "...so that in the coming ages he might show and display the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus." Now, let me bring it down to our jargon, our day. We are his show and tell for all of creation to see his great grace through us. Let me come from a little different angle here just for a minute. When we get saved, we get him. But when we get saved, he gets us. In fact, Paul says we are his inheritance. Now, you think about that. Think about what God did for you. And then think about what you did for him. Seems like he made a bad deal. His grace is incredible. None of us are incredible. Not in our own strength. What he requires, though, he provides. What we could never do, he does through us. And so he wants to show us off. The church, this is why it's so important. I think this is why the New Testament especially speaks of the unity that the church ought to demonstrate. The world ought to look at the church and say, boy, if that's what God's like, then I want some of that. We are his display for the whole world, for angels, for angels to see. Angels never have been saved. They don't know what it's like. They celebrate it. They observe what happens to us and they understand that God's grace is working through us. So his grace is displayed. The whole universe sees it. And truthfully, we don't always give a good witness, do we? I grew up, not anybody here older than I am, never saw television until I was a senior in high school. I would write letters to a missionary in Argentina and it would take three weeks to get a letter to Argentina. Now then, if I were on the internet right now, anyone in the world, any place could hear me in seconds. So we're more exposed now than we used to be. You let the church stumble or a Christian stumble and it'll be public knowledge and nationwide and global in no time. God intended for us to live out his grace in such a way that when people saw us, they would be reminded of the greatness and the goodness and the grace of God. That's why what we do is important. That's why, you know, it's really interesting. I probably have preached in 1,000 churches over the last 70 years. That probably is an exaggeration. But it's been a bunch anyway. I've preached over 12,000 sermons over all those years. And I've been in a lot of churches that were struggling, chaotic, dysfunctional, arguing. And you know it's rare to find a church that's arguing over anything significant. It's what I like and what you don't like. We're not split a whole lot on doctrine and things. There's some of that. But most things in the church that occupy our time are really piddling stuff. Little stuff. The Old Testament called it the little foxes that destroy the vines, I believe is the way one of the prophets called it. That ought not to be in the church. Now I've told you before, one of the things that really impressed me about this church was that it was not a gossipy church. It was not a church arguing over little things. As John mentioned this morning, four of the six pastors of the pastors in the last 60 years were now members of the church here. Or three of the four. There have been four pastors in the last 60 years and three of the four are members and in church every Sunday. This church has always been a strong church because it never got bogged down in little stuff. When I came, the church was a great church. But they had an interesting policy that was how they did things. For instance, even if it was in the budget, you had to have full church vote approval to spend over $25. Now just think about that. You got a budget. Back then our budget was probably $300,000 or $400,000. Imagine spending $300,000 or $400,000 with church approval on everything over $25. No, you adopt a budget. And then your finance committee makes sure that you don't spend what's not approved in the budget. More than that, all the salaries were printed for everybody to see every month in the business meeting. Now, let me just put it bluntly. Not everybody would be happy with anybody's salary. I mean, if one secretary is making more money than the other, they want to whine and chig at that. I mean, it's an open-end opportunity for dissension and chaos. So one of the first decisions I made was that we will not list salaries in the monthly business meeting. Now, anybody who wants to know what they are can come see. But we're not going to hold it out there to create dissension every month. Our financial secretary resigned over that. Oh, and the first month I was here, the church voted to buy a printing press, a little printing press, several thousand dollars. Question went up, what color is it going to be? So we decided several things. We stopped listing salaries, not because we wanted to keep them secrets, but because it's just an opportunity for people to argue who makes the most and why this one doesn't make more. Anybody wanted to know it, it's true today. If you want to know what the salaries are, they'll let you see it, just ask Chris and he'll show you. But it's not something you want to create chaos over. And so we did away with the $25 things pretty fast. We just didn't know if it's in the budget and it's approved by the finance committee, whatever the process is, we're not going to go back to the church for every $25. And then we quit showing the salaries. And then we stopped having monthly business meetings. We went to quarterly business meetings. And our business meetings would last maybe 10 minutes. There would be a full disclosure of finances, everything that was there. We didn't have to vote on everything because we corrected that. So there were some things that needed to be done, but the church, even back then, the church was a church that had a great harmony. Imagine when we removed some things that you could argue about, it was even better. This is a strong fellowship because do you know that there are two churches in Ulis that were split off of this church, and both of them were received back and came back into the fellowship of the church, and then were cut loose again because of the generosity of this church? It's amazing, gracious, loving people, because we're bound together in God's grace. And when bad things do happen as they did, it was not known generally in the church that it was dealt with appropriately, but it was never gossiped about in the church. I could say more, but I won't. Being together in grace is something special. That's why I loved John's message this morning. I mean, you need to go hear it. He talked about the church, what the church is, what it does. Do you know the church does things that the government never does? If you think your taxes are high now, just close down all the churches. Churches spend billions of dollars every year doing things the government might like to do, but it's what the church does. I don't need to get off on that. I'm already, what time is it? It's time to quit already. So OK, I'm not through, but I'm going to stop here in a minute. Grace bestowed on us causes us to relate to each other properly, because grace is not only God to us, but it is God through us to each other. Why would God so vividly describe our past in the first three verses and then spend the rest of the time talking about what God has done? Because God is saying it's not going to be like that anymore. You live dominated by fleshly desires, but you're never going to be that again. You're never going to be conquered by the evil of this world. You're never going to be living to satisfy the loves, lusts, and desires of your mind. Never again. God has stepped in and made a difference. That's the crowning result of grace. We cannot be the same when we receive God's grace because we're not the same. We're not the same. Oh, and here's the heart of grace. And I'm going to stop here just short of verses 8 to 10. We'll comment briefly about it. Grace is not because of God's covenant with us. It's because of God's government with his Son. The Trinity, the Godhead, made a covenant together. God the Father promised God the Son that he would do certain things. That covenant is our covenant of grace. That means we had nothing to do with it. If it hadn't been for the Godhead deciding to do something for us, it never would have got done. Grace. It's a promise not given to us, but to his Son. It's the activity of God in our lives when we receive by grace, by faith, the grace that is given to us by the covenant that God has with Jesus. Our salvation is secured by that covenant. Now, every morning when I get up, Carol Ann wants me to stay healthy, so we drink a little protein drink. And we drink it with a straw. She's got a thing about straws. So we drink it with a straw. Now, when I get through drinking that, I don't praise the straw. I thank God for the drink. But I get that by a straw. When we're saved, we're saved by grace, but the straw is faith. We get it because of faith. And again, faith is only strong if you have it invested in the right person. And our faith is strong because it's invested in God Himself. And so 8 to 10 is this declaration he started in verse 5. The verb to be is present tense combined with a participle in perfect tense, and it literally means by grace you have been completely saved with the present result that you are saved and will always be saved. That's what it means. We're saved now in the future. There's security in God's grace. Well, I really am going to quit. I wasn't through. But let me just say quickly in verses 8 to 10, it's no grace that would abandon us, that would save us and then destroy us. That's not grace. God's grace is not like that. He reaches down in our dead lives and makes us come alive with Jesus Christ. And that new life is on beyond now into the infinite future that lies ahead. Something happened in the past that has meaning in the present and on into the future. And it's passive. It's something that happens to us. So our salvation is totally from God. That's why we can't earn it. That's why we can't get rid of it. Because we had nothing to do with it. It's all God's. And that's grace. Well, thank you for the passage. Thank you for the truth of your Word. And thank you for the ears that we hear, the mind that we reason, and the decisions we make because of what you've said. We're grateful in Jesus' name, Amen.