Versus here this morning and
I just want to Walk down through the precious truths that are
found in the first ten verses Ephesians chapter 2 I'm giving
a title to this lesson as a new creation All right, let's begin reading
with verse 1 And you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses
and sins, wherein in time past you walked according to the course
of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air,
the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience,
disobedient children. among whom also we all had our
conversation, our behavior. This is not just what you say,
it's what you do. Our conversation in times past,
in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and
of the mind, and we're by nature the children of wrath, even as
others. But God who is rich in mercy,
for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were
dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ. By grace you are saved." And
all I can say about that is I reckon. Verse 6, And hath raised us up
together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ
Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches
of his grace in his kindness toward us through Jesus Christ. For by grace are you saved through
faith. And that, that is talking about
the last word, faith. And that faith is not of yourselves.
It is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should
boast. For we are all his workmanship. And here's the word, created
in Christ Jesus and two good works which God has before ordained
that we should walk in them. Let's pray. Father, we would
ask this morning for the only real essential that's required
for this service, and that is we would ask for your creating
presence. We would ask that your spirit
would so join us as your children to the Father that we would have
his mind and that we would have his will. Lord, we pray that
you would grant us to do this morning and to say, grant me
to say exactly, Lord, what you have prepared for me and grant,
Lord, your people to hear exactly what you have prepared for them
to hear. And how we pray that you'd cause us all together to
rejoice, Lord, in heavenly places, in the spiritual realms. May
we be, to that degree that serves your purpose, may we be made
to remember that we're not just flesh, but we are flesh and spirit. May we rejoice in Christ this
morning. For it's in his name we pray,
amen. I'm preaching them this morning
about a new creation. And religion takes many forms
and it's produced many grievous heresies and every one of them
are fatal. All of the spiritual teachings
of religion are fatal. In their religious self-sufficiency,
false religionists have produced a virtually infinite number of
false doctrines. They continue to turn out false
teachings, and they continue to invent false beliefs, which
they love to spend their time arguing about. Those who don't
like to argue generally just tune out all the other voices
and when they do that they get worse. Religion never gets better,
it always gets worse. They reach one of two conclusions,
either that all religions are right That is that all believe
in God and it really doesn't matter what you believe about
God just so you believe something. Or they reach the conclusion
that in some cases that they're the only ones who have gotten
it right. And that nobody else has any knowledge of God but
they're the only ones. In which cases, they usually
either become a cult or they believe that everyone will be
saved in the end. Either one of them are cults. And that regardless
of what God they believe in, or even if they choose not to
believe in a God at all, they believe that it's all gonna be
alright in the end. Now, the point I wanna make about
that is that there is no practice of religion on the planet That
is capable of saving a lost soul and when I say no practice of
religion on the planet. I mean every one of them Every
one of them even when the gospel of God's sovereign grace is preached
in its absolute truth and in its glorious simplicity by God
called preacher who gets every point of doctrine right. Even
then, just this exercise, just these words, these sounds going
into your ears are not enough in and of themselves to save
one soul. I've attended services. I'm sure
you've attended services. Or you had a lost friend or a
lost loved one in the meeting. And the preacher just preached
the gospel just as clear as it could ever be preached. And you
said, surely, surely no one could leave this building without understanding
that, without believing that and seeing the truth in that.
Never heard the preacher more clearly in all my life. And we
only get ourselves disappointed because in spite of the clarity
of the message and the moving of the spirit, they get up and
walk out and thank the preacher for a good message and never
heard a thing. Never heard a thing. If the truth alone could save,
We'd be baptizing folks every Sunday because the truth's been
preached here for a long, long time. If the truth alone could
save, we'd be baptizing a lot of people. But it takes more
than a gospel message to save a lost soul. It does and always
will take a sovereign act of God Almighty to save a sinner.
And there's nothing else but direct divine intervention that
will get that job done. In our text, the Apostle Paul
was inspired to reveal the essence of this saving operation of God
with a very interesting word. He called it an act of creation. created in Christ Jesus how many
people you hear talk about that as you're out talking to religious
no one talks about creation being saved by a creative act of God
no they just they're saved by various things they believe they
chose they were baptized something else but Paul says it's an act
of creation created in or in union with Christ Jesus. Oh,
what a far cry from the descriptions of salvation given by false religions. He accepted Christ. She gave
her heart to Jesus. Or they talk about some old guy
that's been coming to church for years. Oh, he finally prayed
through as though he finally got it right. Oh, the truth conveyed
in this inspired word created totally eliminates us and anything
of us, anything that we might do in order to be saved. God
saves by his grace alone and no one stands with him on the
podium. He does it all. A dead sinner can't give his
heart to Christ or pray through or accept Christ any more than
a corpse could read his own eulogy. We're dead. Spiritually speaking,
a dead sinner, such as we all are as we're born into this world,
can do absolutely nothing to save himself. Well, somebody
says, but I can pray, can't I? I can pray. When was the last
time you saw a corpse in the funeral home praying? No. No sinner was ever saved because
he prayed. None. No, if he truly prayed, he prayed
because God saved him. Prayer, the very first words
out of the mouth of every newly regenerated saint is this prayer,
Lord save me. He already did. He already did
or you wouldn't have asked. You wouldn't have asked. Someone
says, I can repent, can I? Well, some people take repent
to mean that they change their mind about how God saves sinners,
and others think repent means to be sorry for your sins. Either
way, dead folks cannot repent. Dead sinners can't do anything. I can repent, not if you're dead
in sins. Now, here's the teaching of the Bible about every sinner
on the face of the planet. As sinful, fallen, depraved sons
and daughters of Adam, we were all, all six billion or some
odd so of us, born into this world spiritually dead, every
last one of us. So dead that apart from the life-giving
grace of Christ, we'll leave this world dead and we'll spend
eternity having never known the grace of life in Christ. That
thing which we so desperately need, we can do nothing to provide
for ourselves any more than Adam and Eve could have backed up
on their failures and their sins and recreated themselves. No,
they couldn't do anything about it either. From the first man
to the last man on the planet, we have no power to do what we
actually need. What they lost was life. Spiritual
life obviously their bodies kept working their hearts kept beating
their minds kept being active, but they lost spiritual life
Eternal life the only real life that there ever is and only and
no and only God can give that We cannot study it out in the
scriptures. We cannot work it out in our
works and we cannot in any way develop it on our own Just like
Adam and Eve by the very nature of things We are at the mercy
of God and we have no say in this matter of life. I want to
say that again We have no say in the matter of spiritual life
The world is full of spiritually dead preachers Telling spiritually
dead sinners to secure for themselves a place in heaven by doing Some
religious act or another which they do not have the ability
to perform And I'm telling you that as dead sinners There's
a dead sinner in the house this morning listen hard do listen
hard But a dead sinner can't even hear a word of the truth.
I'm saying this morning Dead sinners can't do anything. They're
dead. They're dead. You may do some
very good deeds for others, and I hope you do, but that's not
the righteousness of God. There's only one way by which
we must be saved. The scriptures make it clear
from the very first to the very end. God must first make of us
a new creation. Now what part can a spiritually
dead sinner play in becoming a new creation? The very idea
is absurd. The thing created cannot play
a role in its creation. I can't repent and change my
mind about how God saves sinners if I'm dead. I can't change my
old wicked heart if I'm dead. I can't transform my sinful nature
into a good one if I'm dead. Only an act of God Almighty will
transform this file center into something that he will approve
of. I need to be recreated all over again from scratch. I need
to be made in the image of God. And only then, when God has done
his gracious work, remade me in his image, will I be as I
ought to be. I can't do a thing about that.
Salvation then cannot be by decision. That's the most popular option
people go for these days. Salvation can't be by decision
because spiritually dead sinners have no mind to decide with.
Only a mind completely dead in trespasses and sins. Neither
can salvation be obtained by an act of repentance because
dead sinners have no sorrow for sin. They only get sorry when
they're caught or found out. They only have regret for being
proven to be what they are in other people's eyes. And salvation
can certainly not, contrary to all popular preaching, cannot
be initiated by an act of the will. For a dead sinner has no
will by which he or she can desire anything that's holy and just
and true. In spite of what religion teaches
us, I'm as dependent on the sovereign grace of God to recreate me as
I was when he created me the first time as a natural man. How much did you have to say?
How much say did they give you in your birth? They didn't ask
you where you wanted to be born. They didn't ask you if you wanted
to be born. And maybe they didn't plan on you being born when you
were born. You had nothing to do with that.
Not one thing. I'm as dependent on the sovereign
grace of God to recreate me as I was when he created me the
first time. Let's talk just a few minutes
about the necessity of a new creation. The first three verses
of our text speak of this necessity. They summarize the necessity
of becoming a new creation. While false religion has told
us over and over that we can get ourselves saved and then
we can keep working on that and get progressively and progressively
better, they call it sanctification but it has nothing to do with
the term. The first three verses of our text that we read a while
ago revealed that fallen sinners, even religious fallen sinners,
can only get progressively more sinful. I don't know about your
experience, but I know mine very well. God in his grace has let
me have some knowledge of who I am. And in every day and in
every way, I am not getting better and better. In every day and
in every way, I find myself getting worse and worse. I find myself
to be more despicable, less faithful, less believing, and less loving.
And I find that to be an ever-growing thing that I cannot control.
And I'm glad it's that way, because when the Lord brought me to Himself,
I saw very clearly that I had nothing I could do. He just brought
me. And you know if He keeps me, I'll have no hand in that.
Not any hand in that. I'll be kept, as the writer says,
by the power of God. And that's the only way we will
be. Herein lies the faulty foundation of all religion, based on the
depraved will of sinful sons and daughters of Adam. The vast
majority of religionists that we meet share the delusion that
they are gradually becoming less and less sinful and more and
more righteous. They define salvation as a decision that they must
make before God can save them. They believe that as fallen sinners
they still retain the ability to choose good over evil and
that they can choose to be saved somehow and somehow in making
that choice they actually do believe that God will save them. They feel no need being recreated. They only need to improve the
creation they were born as. They call it sanctification.
They only need to dedicate themselves to the task and they can make
it happen. But the Bible nowhere allows
that sinful men have those abilities. The first two words of verse
four in our text are at once the cause, as well as the means,
as well as the substance, and this is the heart and core of
the truth about salvation. It begins with, but God. I was going to do a lot of things,
but God determined otherwise. I thought I was saved. But God
showed me that I wasn't. I thought that I was going to
be a great preacher or missionary, but God decided otherwise. Our
only hope is, but God, that he would change and have his way
instead of our own. I don't know about you, but the
religion I was raised in left me with a very strong impression
that God would rather send me to hell than save me. I was raised
in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and about all anybody ever preached
on was going to hell. And I was just convinced I was
going to be in that bunch. And there was nothing I could
do about that. They spoke of God's love, but never without
the reminder that sin Any sin, even the most unintended sin,
like a sinful thought or a misspoken word was enough to turn God into
a raging fire who would rather send me to hell than he would
to save me. That's the God I was raised to believe in. Needless
to say, the free willism as we had it then, it's the only way
that you could survive in free will was pay as you go. If you
could just make sure and keep up with all your sins and say,
Lord, I'm sorry for everyone. I remember going as a young man,
I went around whispering, Lord, forgive me, Lord, forgive me,
Lord, forgive me. And I was doing all I knew to do. There was no
such grace in our religion. No, the only thing you could
do was keep yourself prayed up. Did I get that one? Did I get
that? And we were trying to keep ourselves
saved. Oh my, what a glorious relief. when the God who had
so terrified me for all those years of growing up revealed
himself to be not the God who would delight to send me to hell,
but the God of all grace. I never knew him. I never knew
him. Paul wrote, but God being rich
in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us,
I would have lived and died in the bondage of religion, but
God set his love on this sinner. Not only is God the cause of
my salvation, he's also the means of it. For what the law could
not do, and that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending
his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned
sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law be fulfilled in us.
I don't think any of us will ever have a clear understanding
in this world of what Christ did for us, but I do know this. that somehow every sin I have
ever sinned to this moment, and every sin that I will sin or
will have sinned by the time I die, my Savior has already
met them all. I've not even committed them
yet. I've not ever even thought them up yet. And He's very familiar
with every last one of them, and He's already put them away.
That's my hope. That's the only hope a sinner
can have. I can't begin to fathom the depths of what that actually
means. We say it, we have a very wonderful
and a very clear way of saying that, union with Christ. I think as long as I'm in this
body, I will always have a very fuzzy definition in my heart
of union with Christ. All I know is that I'm in him
and he's in me in such a way that we cannot be separated.
And everything that I am, he became. And everything he is,
he's gonna make me. And I'll be just like him. He is the means, as well as the
cause, then, of our salvation. For what the law could not do,
and that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own
Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned
sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law be fulfilled in us. And all of this secured for us
before the foundation of the world. But by his redeeming grace,
I do know at least this much. I, who am still nothing but sin,
was made perfectly righteous because he who knew no sin joined
himself to a multitude of lost sinners just like me, assumed
the guilt of our sins as his own, and God the Father poured
out the wrath that should have been ours on the person of his
son. It's legal, it's binding, and it's done. And it cannot
be undone. The Lord Jesus is likewise the
very substance of our salvation. So many people in religion that
I grew up with, they had a Jesus who was elsewhere. They called
him by his first name and very irreverently talked about a Jesus
all the time, but they had no close relationship with him.
No, the Lord Jesus, the Christ of the scriptures is the very
reality. I hate to use words like this,
but I'm limited in my language. He's the very stuff. He's the
very substance. He's the matter of our salvation. I know that spiritual realities
cannot be touched. They cannot be felt. But at the
same time, they can be seen. They were seen in the New Testament
writings. They were things that could not
be explained in terms of of atoms and molecules and things like
that. But I do know this. The very substance of my salvation
is that Christ liveth in me. No, you can't see him. And sadly,
you can't even hear him all the time from my lips. But my relationship
with Christ, or rather I should say his relationship with me,
is one of union in which that he is in me and I am in him. And I don't even begin to know
how to explain that. But He is the very substance.
He is the very reality of my salvation. My faith is not my
salvation. My faithfulness is not my salvation. My works are not my salvation. Christ is my salvation. I want nothing else. I need nothing
else. I have everything. Infinite grace,
infinite glory, infinite holiness, infinite truth. I have everything
I need. I fear not. And when I look at
Mark and all the things that Mark is capable of, and when
I look at all the ignorance that's in his heart, and all the sinfulness
that still is in his sinful nature, I fear for Mark. He's an unreliable
man. He cannot be trusted. He can,
from one minute to another, can have opposite thoughts on both
ends of the spectrum. He's not a good man. But Mark
is united. with a perfect man, a holy man,
an absolutely just man who has no sin and no penchant for sin
and will never sin and will never do anything that does not please
his Father. And as long as Mark is tied up
with that man, I don't worry about Mark as much as I ought
to because when I look at myself and when I look at Christ, I
don't worry about Mark. Christ said, I have finished the work
which you gave me to do. How could that possibly be reversed?
Just as he was made sin through union with his people, we were
made the very righteousness of God. through union with him. In him, then, his righteousness
is my righteousness. His holiness is my holiness.
His love is my love. His faithfulness is my faithfulness. His perfection is my perfection. And his peace is my peace. When he said, it is finished,
done, complete, When he uttered that on the cross, it was finished
for him. It was finished for me. It was
finished for every elect sinner found in him at that moment.
Done. Finished and over and cannot
be changed. And let me speak briefly about,
then, the life of a new creation in Christ Jesus. The life of
anyone who has been recreated in union with Christ is the life,
then, of a two-natured person. Union with our Savior is such
that we are still everything we were born as, and all of its
sinfulness and self-righteousness, and at the same time, believers
are everything that we were born again to be through union with
Christ. Being one with Christ means that
our spiritual life and every blessing that comes with it actually
predated us because he predated us. Let me read that to you from
Colossians. I want to finish with that Colossians
chapter 2, begin with verse 12. Colossians 2 verse 12 We were buried with him Baptism
the symbol that represents the spiritual reality wherein also
You were raised with him Through the faith of the operation of
God that is the faith which was the faith that God operated Even
my faith is something that God had to cause me to do faith of
the operation of God who's raised him from the dead and look at
verse 13 and you Being dead in your sins. I did not help him.
I did not help him with any of those things. I could not help
You being dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision the unfitness
the unreceivableness Of your nature the uncircumcision of
your flesh You have he quickened Now, He didn't just give me life.
You know, we say that sometimes. We say that sometimes. The Lord
gave me life. There's a sense in which that
could represent the truth, but it's not really clear. He didn't
give me life. He is my life. He gave me Himself. And you have been quickened together
with Him. There's my life. He has made
me alive in union with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses. blotting out the handwriting
of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us,
all of the right that God had to send us straight to hell.
And he took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. Salvation is not a matter of
my decision. It's not a matter of my walk.
It's not a matter of my works. It's not a matter of my study.
Salvation is being made a new creation by the only one who
can create, by our creator, the Lord Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we look to you this
morning in these week with weak minds, with their weak emotions. We look to you, Lord, in this
weak flesh, and we realize, Lord, that we're as capable this very
moment of all sins as we are, Lord, as we ever were. Our flesh
is still the same. And yet we look to you, Lord,
and we confess, and we trust that you will give us faith to
always confess that all of our hope It is not in our decision. It's not in our faithfulness.
It's not in our works. All of our hope is that you have
latched on to us, taken all that was ours and made it your own,
and have given us all that is you and made it ours. We rest
this morning for Christ's sake, amen. Okay.