Follow with me as I read. Therefore,
remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called
the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which
is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you at that time
separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel
and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and
without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you
who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. I pray that God would put this
in your mind in such a way that you would see it, that you would
hear it, that you would embrace it, and as Drew has prayed, that
it would have an effect that's full effect in your life this
week. What is the effect of this text? What is the effect of what
we're going to talk about today? Well, the effect should be primarily
worship. What is worship? Well, that's
the age-old question. It's, in a nutshell, ascribing
the worth that is due to something with your heart and your mind
and your soul and your strength. Worship is everything that you
are, exemplifying and exalting everything that God is. And if
God is not the object of worship, then something else is. And the
Scripture teaches that if something else has our eye, has our heart,
has our mind, has our time, That that is our God. That is what
we ascribe worth to. And the Scriptures say that that
is idolatry. And of course, we know that it's
reprehensible. For God commands all men to repent
of their sin, to walk holy before Him. He commands all people to
believe in Him and believe on the Son, Jesus Christ. And God
commands all to worship Him and to love Him. To love the Lord
your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And
Jesus does tell us that the greatest commandment is that one. But
one of equal importance is to love your neighbor as yourself.
We've gone through a lot. It's very difficult to not want
to go back and rewind. And so I've got probably Twenty-five
little therefores that we're going to go through in the beginning
here. Because you see the therefore. And as you were dead, Paul says
in the beginning of this chapter, and he goes down, and which God
for, verse 10, we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good
works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh,
called the circumcision, the uncircumcision, by what is called
the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Then he
says in verse 12, remember. And so therefore, there's this
clause, this little moving forward. There's something that we need
to think of. Because of this, therefore, I want you to remember.
That's what Paul is teaching here. And that's what we need
to see when we see this type of language. We need to understand,
what is he saying? Because of something else, he
wants us to remember. Because of this truth, therefore,
remember this. Remember this, and then remember
that. And there are five things that he wants us to remember,
that he wants these Gentile Christians, these Ephesians, to know and
to remember. What is that therefore pointing
to? It points all the way back to the very beginning of chapter
1. It points to all the spiritual blessings. Therefore, because
you have all spiritual blessings in Christ, remember, remember
what I'm about to tell you. Remember that you were not of
the covenant. Remember that you were not of
the commonwealth of Israel. Remember that you were alienated
and hostile, as he tells the Colossians. Remember. Remember, because you have all
spiritual blessings in Christ, therefore, remember. Because
you have been chosen for holiness, therefore, remember. You've been
chosen for all this. You have been predestined for
adoption. So therefore, remember, remember, you have been blessed. You have been redeemed. So remember,
you have been forgiven. So please remember, Paul is not
saying to these Christians, you have forgotten these things.
He's saying, I've just reminded you of who you are in Christ.
And I've also reminded you of who you were without Christ.
And now I'm going to help you understand that it's important
that you remember again who you were before Christ saved you,
who you were before you were part of Israel, before you were
grafted in by the grace of God. You were nothing. We see this. That there is a
therefore there in all of our lives. We need to understand
that we have been given grace, therefore, we ought to remember
the power of that grace. We ought to remember what the
level and the richness and the depth of this grace really is
by remembering who we truly were without Christ. Remember, you
have been given wisdom. You have been given insight.
He says you have been given the spiritual knowledge of God's
mystery. You have been shown the revelation of God Himself
through the face of Jesus Christ. Remember, you are united with
Christ in death and in resurrection and in eternity. You are one. Therefore, remember. Remember
what we talked about just in the last few weeks in the beginning
verses of chapter 2. That you've become an inheritance
of God as Israel, as His children. He has you, and you have been
received by God, and you will be received by God as an inheritance.
You have become part of God's purpose, a part of His divine
will. He has brought you into His divine
plan, for that's why He created you. To the praise of His glory,
to the display of His glory. You have been given hope in Christ.
Therefore, remember. Remember. You have been given
the Word, the Gospel. And if you follow through there
in chapter 2, you'll see all of these things. You've been
given the Word, the Gospel. You've been given salvation.
You've been given belief. You've been given faith. You've
been sealed with the Spirit of God. You've been given a promise.
You've been given a heart to the praise of His glory. All
these things are there. Each one a separate exhortation
to us as Christians. Each one a separate promise that
Paul is saying that God has established in them by His purpose and pleasure.
Therefore, because of all these things, therefore, remember."
And what is it that Paul wants us to see? And actually, everything
that I just said was in chapter 1, not chapter 2. That's all
in chapter 1. That's all the very introduction
to this letter. Remember all these things that
God has done for you, has given to you, has expressed with you,
has shown you, has enlightened you, has renewed you, has regenerated
you, has adopted you, has redeemed you, has atoned you. He has done
all of these things, so remember. Remember, therefore remember,
remember what we see in the first ten verses of this chapter two.
And you were dead in your trespasses in which you once walked. You
see the past tense here. You were dead. and their 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." Paul putting himself there. 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, remember, But God being
rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved
us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, has made us alive
together with Christ. By grace you have been saved
and raised us up with Him and 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 of your own doing. It is the
gift of God. Not as a result of works, 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. Because you were once dead in
your sin, because you once walked in the world, because you served
the flesh and served the enemy and served the mind and carried
out the desires of the body, because of all of these things
and you were children of wrath, remember God is rich in mercy. Remember, God has given you life
when you were dead. God has made us alive in Christ,
Paul says. He has shown us love. He has
expressed His love. He has effected His love in our
life. He has shown His grace toward us in Christ Jesus. He
has saved us by grace. He has gifted us in faith. He
has prepared us for good works. And He has created us as new
creatures. You see this? It's to point you to all what
I just said, therefore. Because of what I've said, because
of all of this, therefore, remember. So all of these blessings, all
of these actions, all of this great grace and faith and all
the stuff that God has done and all the things that he has purposed
in you, therefore, remember church, remember Ephesians, remember
former pagans, remember former Ah, enemies of God. Remember. Remember. What Paul is doing
is he's trying to help us understand that we need to remember that
they need to remember and thus we need to remember. They need
to remember why they have received these things. See what all you
have gotten. See what kind of if you take
John 1 John 3 1 and you put you put all that in that sandwich.
Oh, see what kind of love the Father has given to us that we
should be called the children of God. And so we are. Just take
chapters 1 and 2 of Ephesians up to verse 10 and just stuff
it right in there. You want to see John 3.16? You
want to see the meat behind that? Stuff all that in there. You
want to see what it means for God to display His righteousness
and forgiving wickedness? Stuff all that in there. And
take a bite of it. You'll never be able to devour
it. It's too big. It's too real. It's too full. Remember. Remember, why did you
receive these things? They must remember what they
were and who they were before they received all these spiritual
blessings in Christ, before they received the grace of God. They
were children of wrath. And friends, we were children
of wrath. Do you know what that means? The hardest reality of
that is to think about a time where either you or someone you
know, or maybe something you experienced or heard or watched
on television, where the dad would come home in a drunken
rage and beat his children and beat his wife and beat and destroy
and tear the walls out and everything in just a drunken rage. And the whole family held under
the wrath of the father of that home. But see, the difference
in that kind of Father and the Father, God the Father, is that
God the Father doesn't do it in a drunken rage. He does it
in a justice and a righteousness. He doesn't come home and inflict
undue wrath on His children. He never puts His wrath on His
children, but He puts His wrath under the children of wrath,
on the children of wrath. Those who are unbelievers, those
who are rejecting the gospel of Jesus Christ, God puts wrath. And let me tell you, there's
not every man in the world Moving his wrath on our heads and our
flesh will never even touch the sight of God's just wrath. The
problem we have today in the church, friends, or one of the
main problems is that we've stopped preaching justification by grace
through faith. We want to have people feel good
about coming to church, and so we don't want to do anything
that's going to make them think about the wickedness of their
own heart or the problems of their own life. But if we do,
we want to give them an out so fast that they're so comfortable
with God that they're almost high-fiving Him or bumping Him.
They want to take God, and they don't want to put us down to
where we should be. Because see, every human being
is actually, in their own minds, is above where they actually
are. You realize that? You and I all, if we sat down
and we thought about who we are. Now, most of us are humble people,
right? Of course, we are. Just ask us.
Of course, I'm humble. And if I were going to write
a little biography about how wicked I was, it would be pretty
bad. But if I were to show it to God, he would laugh and scoff
at the mere arrogance that I would think that I was that good, even
talking of my wickedness. Well, that's not popular. Of
course, it's not popular. Why? Because man by nature is
self-centered, narcissistic. They think the whole world revolves
around them. Even when they hurt someone else,
the reason they want to reconcile is because of how bad it hurts
them. It's egotistical and sinful. And the most wicked view of our
own lives is really righteous compared to the view that we
really should see in comparison. And so now we see that this group
of people, these Christians, they did nothing to warrant this
grace. They did nothing to receive and
to deserve to receive this grace. They did nothing to deserve to
receive adoption as sons. As a matter of fact, they not
only were wicked and separated in the desires and the passion
of their flesh that we call depravity, radical corruption. We're not
just talking about the sin nature. Now he's going to go to the ethnicity
that they by race were a people of disgust. to God. For God,
they were not chosen of God. They were not the people of God.
They were not Jews. They were children of wrath.
They received these riches because God's purpose and his will, they
did nothing to warrant to merit his affection. As a matter of
fact, God's love gave them these things apart from what they deserved. They were called. The uncircumcision. Look at that text. Therefore, remember that at one
time, you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by
what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by
hands. You are the uncircumcised. You are the uncircumcision. You
are the outcast. The circumcision made by hands
refers to the covenant of God with Israel. That when God said,
I want you to bear My sign, My seal, the seal, the outward expression
of someone being under the covenant of God is that they were as men
circumcised. That's why, Paul, of course,
we see in Galatians, we see in Colossians, he says circumcision
is useless. It has no merit before God. Circumcision can bring us
nothing before God. We can't take anything that we've
done and lay it before God and expect Him to be impressed or
amazed or amused. It's rejected. The righteousness
of men is always rejected before God, for we are wicked. Even
our righteousness is wicked. Filthy rags, the prophet teaches. And so this circumcision, though
it is for nothing, it does nothing. But yet we do see Paul telling
Timothy he needs to be circumcised. We looked at that a little bit
when we learned about leaning in to cultures, leaning in to
people. He knew that if Timothy, half
Jew, went into a Jewish people, that the Jewish people would
not respect his position on Scripture if he was not circumcised. So
for the sake that he might win some, he was circumcised. I saw
a friend who goes to Kabul, Afghanistan, twice a year. He grows a big
beard. He's from South Carolina. He
grows a big beard and he uses a broken English, very similar
to the dialect of the people there. Not insulting, but very
similar. And it's so habitual, he uses
it constantly now when he speaks. He sits out in the sun and gets
tan, and when he goes there, he only wears the regalia of
the street. The long robes, the headdress
and the beard. And if he were to get off of
a bus, you would swear he was a Muslim. Now, why would he do
that? Why not wear a suit and tie and
this big Jesus cross?" Because he'd cut off his head the minute
he got off the plane. And then they'd burn him alive.
God's called him to reach them. But none of that is going to
win favor with God. It may win favor with man. It's
not required of him for the gospel's sake. It's required of him to
reach those whom God has called him to reach. So here the circumcision
These Ephesians were never part of even the physical covenant.
They did not even have the, they weren't even part of the earthly
inclusion of this covenant. They were outcasts and severely
separated from the beginning. However, they were just like
the rest of humanity, children of wrath, as Paul puts himself
in that same thing. We, like the rest of humanity,
you, we all were children of wrath. But this division now
of races, per se, is seen throughout the history of the Old Testament.
God has said that this is a people that I will create from the peoples
of the world. Now get this. We lose sight of
the fact that the first Jew was a pagan. God pulled him out of Ur as a
pagan moon god worshiper and told him he was now God's chosen
Race. This was not a nationality that
sprung up through the eons that God looked down and said, I like
this guy, and I want him to be the father of my people. No,
God chose a man dead in his sins and his trespasses against God, separated and alienated from
God and the world with no hope, and he says, I'm going to give
This man, my promise and my covenant, that through him the world might
be blessed. But he secluded Israel. Sometimes through, well, we know
all the seclusion of Israel just in their faith and their practices
and their precepts and the edicts and the law, circumcision for
crying out loud. And Paul is saying, look, you
weren't even part of the shadow of the covenant. You didn't even
bear the resemblance. But he's not just dealing with
spiritual. He's not. He's dealing with cultural inequality. He's
showing that even in the even in the in the finite crevices
of our mind, that we can understand this relationship. We can understand
it great here in the South. Matter of fact, I talked about
this very briefly during my four weeks in February dealing with
race in the gospel. Because Paul is very clearly
showing there was a huge difference in the eyes of the Jews and with
God's people. God, and I'll say this and we
can go from here, but God in some sense had judged and condemned
all the world except Israel. He didn't send Israel to go and
proclaim the gospel. He didn't send Israel to go in
and preach. God sealed the fate of the world. But yet we do know
that there are people who were not Jews or even in the lineage
of Jesus Christ, Rahab, others like her. So it wasn't their
ethnicity, it was God's purpose and will, but God selected these
people. They had the covenant. We were not just depraved, Paul
says, but you were not even equal with the Jews and their culture.
You were a lower class of people, if you will. That's what it would
sound like if we read this from a worldview that is not biblical. That's what they would have seen.
They would have said, wow, Paul's telling us we're nothing. Well,
he's trying to help them understand where they've come from, that
even in the culture of the world, I'm not saying this is what Paul
says is how it should be, but this is how it was. You were
separated from God because you were not Jews. The Jews were privileged. They
were privileged people. They were given the law, the
oracles of God. They were given the covenants of God. And they
had the outward sign of redemption, specifically in circumcision. But it all pointed to something.
It points to Christ. It points to the rebirth. It
points to God's grace. But the sad thing, as we know,
is that the Jews had the outward sign of circumcision, had the
outward expression of the covenant. They rejected the very one to
whom it pointed. Why? Because Jesus says it was
prophesied that they would. And if the elite Jew who was
circumcised. Was also part of all mankind
and were children of wrath. What hope did a pagan Gentile
have? See, that's when you go to Romans, you see, that's that's
really the argument. One of the arguments that we
see in Romans is that Paul is trying to help establish in the
Romans mind that they are Israel. Not by race, but by grace. Remembering. from which we come
and our inability to come to Christ, our sinfulness and our
wretchedness and our understanding God's holiness and justice towards
sin and evil, then seeing how he forgives and lavishes upon
us the riches of his grace fully on all who believe. This creates
something in us. This creates a deep and generous
and grateful, worshipful heart. This creates for when the world
goes to. Hell. And death surrounds us,
we worship. to the praise of His glory. So
let's look at the details of this condition. You are the uncircumcised. Friends, that is not very expressive
to us. But there's nothing that's ever
happened in America other than the race relations of maybe the
1960s. That would even come close. By way, people would hate and
hang people just because of the color of their skin. That's the
uncircumcised. Every uncircumcised people in
the world were hated to that degree by the Jews. Remember. Remember. This uncircumcision, this is
what it teaches us, that you were at that time separated from
Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the
covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the
world. I'm going to break this down
phrase by phrase. The first thing we see there is separated. Now,
we could take separated and we could look at it and go, OK,
well, separated could mean holy, because the word holy in its
definition means to be set apart, to be separated. But he doesn't
say separated and leave it there. He's separated from whom? Christ. That we without Christ, that
you Ephesians, before you came to faith in Jesus, you were at
that time separated from Christ. There's just a lot to think about
here. I mean, I didn't... It bogged me down. I almost preached
just on that. But I want to get through it quickly. I want you
and your personal study, if God pricks your heart in this, to
go back and pray and study through it. Though we are separate from
Christ before our awareness of Him and before our salvation,
we cannot say that those who had come to faith in Ephesus
who once were pagans were hated by Christ before they came to
faith. Because only God's love toward the dead brings them to
life. See that? I stayed on that for
a long time. And then we just moved on. So
even when I was God's enemy, the Scripture says that God loved
me. Why? Because I am His. I was His before
I was born. And He found me. And He saved
me. And that is the way one is saved,
is that God loves them and finds them and saves them. And John
6, He gives them to the Son. And all whom the Father gives
to the Son come to the Son. And all who come to the Son,
the Son never casts out. And the sheep, those who are
the children of God, know the voice of the Son. And they obey
it. And this is good stuff. It's
not part of this. Separated from Christ, but even
while we were enemies, Christ died for us, Paul says. These
Gentiles were loved by God and had a certain salvation that
at one time, one time like all mankind, had not been affected
in their lives. Before we come to faith, we are Christless. We're separated. We're Christless.
We're without Him. And if we're not without Him,
we're enemies of Him, right? There's no gray area. If it's
almost right, it's wrong. It's either With Christ or not
with Christ. And we serve, as we see in the
prior few weeks, following the course of this world, following
the prince of the power of the air. Giving ourselves up to the
desires of our flesh and of our mind and by nature, we're children
of wrath. On the same point, those who
are unbelievers, those who are perishing without Christ are
Christless. So we who have come to faith at one time were Christless
and those who are continually not in faith are Christless.
The difference is going to be, are the ones who are unbelievers
today truly going to be saved? We don't know that. We don't
know who will and who will not be saved. Our responsibility
is not to save people. God saves people. Our responsibility
as evangelicals, as Christians, is to proclaim the gospel through
the right teaching of the Word of God, to empower the church
to go out and to make disciples of all peoples. At all times. In all places. In the way that
we're equipped. In the season that God has called
and equipped us. Not everybody's going to be like me, and not
everybody's going to be like you. Personalities are different,
our attitudes are different, our character, ideals, philosophies,
worldviews, our temperaments. But what unites us is the gospel,
the fluid, solid, flowing gospel of Jesus Christ. And we all have
the same vine, the same water, the same well, the same bread.
We all dip from the same source. even though we might express
it differently. It's the same message. It never changes. It's
never changed. You don't have to change the
message when you do anathemas, Paul, in Galatians chapter 1.
I pray that I be accursed, damned, cut off. See, the difference is God's
love toward us. For those who are perishing, the difference
is God's love toward us. God's affection comes or His
judgment comes, but both don't come. Either we receive judgment
or we receive mercy. We receive justice or we receive grace. There is no mix of the
two. The Scripture teaches that God
never punishes His children, but He disciplines us. He brings
us to a place and He molds us like an athlete preparing for
a feat of strength or a game or a contest. In Romans 8, The
rhetorical question is, who shall separate us from the love of
Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or
famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? And if you know over
there, by the end of verse 38 it says, nothing shall separate
us from the love of God. Nothing! Not angels, nor demons,
nor powers, nor principalities, nor darkness, nor height, nor
depth. And what Paul says, there is not any other created thing
shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is
in Jesus Christ our Lord. So even before we were in Christ,
though we were separated from him, his love pursued us here,
that church. Otherwise, we got smart and we
started looking for him. And that's a boast, we who are
in Christ will never be separate from him. But those who are not
in Christ. that do not live by faith, they
walk in darkness, they establish their lives apart from His grace
and His glory, and in all essence are Christless. Such were the
Gentiles of Ephesians. Such were us. Alienation. The second thing he says there
is you were separated from Christ. You were alienated from the commonwealth
of Israel. See, when you get to some of
this type of teaching, a lot of people go, yeah, yeah, yeah,
get on with it. And they want to go someplace else. Let me
tell you what that does when you're not worshiping correctly.
When you think to yourself, yada, yada, yada, he's already said
that, he has already said a lot of this. But you're not worshiping. If the apostle says, remember
what he just said, then it's important for us to remember
what he just said. And it's important for us to
go through it again. I've heard preachers skip total chapters
of letters because it's a recapitulation of what was taught the chapter
before. And so they just skip it. You know what I've learned
in my own studies is that going through the book of Ephesians
ten times probably, extensively, preaching it several times, teaching
it several times, studying it several times, whatever, however
you want to do, read it, listen to it, you still don't get it. You can't. You can grasp some concepts.
You can actually outline it. I probably outlined it in my
sleep. Does that mean that I understand it? No. And it doesn't have an
effect on my life. We want it to affect our lives.
What's the application of such teaching that you worship God
and you are reminded constantly of His grace? And that that affects
everything you do, from what you put in your ears, your mouth,
your eyes, where you go with your feet, what you do with your
hands, what you think about, what you hold dear. It affects you.
There's no such thing as a Christian business that, you know, we're
going to sell to everybody in the world telephone service. So we want to be Christian telephones.
There's no such thing as a Christian telephone. There's no such thing
as a Christian toy. There's no such thing as a Christian
movie. There's no such thing as a Christian service. Christians
are people. And if you're selling rocks or
hamburgers, then you ought to be Christian in the way you sell
and approach that. You ought to understand that it's not for
you to get excited about owning a business or being rich from
a business, but it's for the glory of God alone. That's what
this teaching does to us. It helps us realize that we're
not wasting our lives when we work in the world as Christians. But then God does
remove some of us completely, and He cuts us off to the point
where we can't do anything. and causes to preach, to be the lowest
of the low, to be the shepherds which were a hated people. Alienation
from the commonwealth. Alienation is to be cut off,
to be removed, to have no place. Most urgently, they were cut
off from the presence of God because they were cut off from
the people of God. They were enemies of God because they were
not the people of God. Now, hear this. You ever think
of yourself that way? I used to be cut off. God's promises
were to Israel alone, no others. You know, we might be part of
another culture or group. The Ephesians were Greek. They weren't Jewish. And though
they might have lived their lives, their life was utterly wasted. When we are not the people of
God, everything we do is a wasted breath. It's a wasted thought.
It's a wasted dollar. It's a wasted effort. It's a
wasted strength. It's a waste. If we are not in
Christ, our entire life is a waste. Worthless. I don't care what
you create, do, call, stop, cure, whatever. It's a waste. Now,
friends, this is not what people want their children hearing.
You tell my son that his life was a waste. He wanted to create
such and such. He wanted to be the next Bill
Gates or the next Apple producer or the next whatever. He wanted
to do great things. Well, go ahead. But it's all
for nothing if it's not for the glory of God. If he's not in
Christ, he's a waste of life. He's a wasted life. That's just
cruel. No, it's true. That's what Paul's
teaching here. You were cut off. You were alienated
from the commonwealth of Israel. You were nobody. Just in the
culture, not because the Jews were special, but because God
was saving Himself of people. God promised to save His people,
not all people. Listen to that. In the Old Testament,
the Jews were promised salvation. The Babylonians weren't. But
what we see and we know on this side and what we get to in verse
13 is that Though we were all cut off, of course, Christ then
brought us near. See, the fullness of what Israel represented was
Jesus coming to save all nations. Not everyone in the nation. But
the people of God are from all nations, all tribes, all tongues,
all ethnicities, all races, and they're one people. So just see
the racial tension that's created here in this text. You see this
stuff, and friends, today in Jerusalem, today in Israel, Amongst
the Orthodox Jews, this tension is still there. Look at the world
around us. Look at who are the most hated individuals in the
world holistically. The Jews. Why? Because just by their covenant,
just by the law of God, people hate them. And they hate God. They think they love Him, but
they've rejected the Son who He has sent. And there's a lot
to that. Jews and everyone else were at clash.
But as we know, the whole focus of this text is though they were
aliens, though they were cut off, Christ made them sons. The
true blood of Israel forever is the blood of Jesus Christ
and all who are in it. In Colossians, if you take Ephesians
and you can parallel it almost perfectly with Colossians in
many ways. In Colossians 1.21, Paul says, and you. who were once alienated and hostile
in mind doing evil deeds. See, he sort of truncates. He
doesn't go into some of the details here. And in some sense, he details
more Colossians than he does in Ephesians. But here, you who
were once alienated and hostile in mind. So if they were alienated
and the Ephesians were alienated, then I could also say, well,
then the Ephesians are probably hostile in mind doing evil deeds.
We already see that. An enemy of God. What does that
mean? That you're an enemy of God. So before salvation came
through grace, we were not just lost walking in the darkness,
but we were enemies with God. We were hostile in our thinking,
we were hostile in our minds, and they were darkened. And we
did evil before God. This is the trespass that Paul
talks about. You were dead in your trespass
and your sin. Your trespass. Our wickedness.
You know what this means? That means without grace, our
minds would be opposed to the gospel. Our minds will be opposed
to the glory of Christ. Our minds will be opposed to
holy things. Our hearts will be opposed to the word of God,
opposed to God in our attitudes. We'd be opposed to God in our
affections. We'd be opposed to God in our actions. And we would
be hateful toward him. And what that ultimately means
is that we were enemies. And that our very existence was
a trespass against God's holiness. You ever felt like that? That
your very existence was a trespass against somebody's joy? We didn't
take God's joy away, but we definitely encroached on His holiness. We
didn't remove it. We didn't degrade it. We were a pock in comparison
to. He will justify. Or He will judge. So not only that, we were strangers,
they were, and we were strangers to the covenants of promise.
The promise is Christ. Being apart from Christ meant
to be apart from salvation. Don't ever, ever forget this. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. From the lineage of David, the
King of Israel, Jesus came as a Hebrew and a Jew. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. If it weren't for God saving
a people, Christ wouldn't have come. They, the Jews, knew Christ was
coming. And John says, He came to His
own, but His own did not receive Him. But all who did receive
Him and gave the right to become the children of God, not of the
will of their mind or the decision of the flesh or the blood, but
of God. In Romans 9, We see clearly. We see Paul teaching says they
are Israelites and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the
covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises
to hear that this is in Romans chapter nine is a pretty really
thick in an amazing text. Paul says that the Israelites
to them alone belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the
giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. So, he's just
reminding them that they weren't Jews. They were not Israelites. Salvation, in other words, was
not available to those who were not historically Jews. And so,
as far as the covenant was concerned, non-Jews were not aware or included
in these promises. They had no idea. We did not
see God changing His plan in history. We did not see God going,
I'm going to save these people. Oh, they rejected me and now
I'm going to save these people. We didn't see God doing a flipsie
or whatever. We saw one plan. And it was His
plan eternally to save peoples from all nations, tongues, and
tribes. It was His plan to point to Christ,
and this reality came through the Jews. The Jews pointed to
Christ. But only in history did the Israelites
receive those promises. Nobody else. And so that brings us to what
He says next. Why is that true? They were strangers to the covenants,
and they had no hope. Look at what Paul says there.
No hope. And without God in the world,
they had no hope. You know what that means? Well,
this is a final stab of alienation. What this means is that the world
at large, apart from the Jews, had no hope. It's very simple.
Nothing to hold on to. They had no reality or revelation
of God's promises. They had no longing. They had
nothing to look forward to. They had no affection for the
day of redemption. They had no understanding of
the rest of the Lord. They had no understanding of salvation.
They had no understanding of what it meant to have Emmanuel,
God with us, walk among us. tabernacle with us to become
like us, to save us. They didn't even know this existed.
And so what they did is they turned their affections to the
world and to paganism and to all the other things that would
occupy their hearts and give them affection. And Paul deals
with this in 1 Corinthians 8, where he says, For although there
may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there
are many gods and many lords, he knows that these are no gods
at all. We know this. Gods are everywhere. Idolatry
was the norm throughout the entire world, but yet this small sect
of people had the oracles of God. And yet, even with the oracles
of God, when God Himself spoke from Mount Sinai, they boiled
down gold and created a cow to worship. So we don't esteem the Jews.
We just recognize what God had promised through them. And we
were so lost, we weren't even a part of those people. What a condition. You see, this
is the point. Paul is trying to give us a picture of the condition
before Christ. What a condition, what a state.
I'll look at it this way. What a mess. No hope. This goes
beyond hearing and preaching. This sits at the core of the
gospel. This is the real of the shadow that Israel or Israelite
Jews provided for centuries. This is God's eternal plan. And
look at verse 13 here in chapter two. But now in Christ, you who once were far off." Now
see, what if Paul had only said, you were once far off? What if
he came in there and, you know, he could have written this whole
letter in about one page. He's going to say, yo, y'all
have been blessed. You were once far off and Jesus
has brought you close. Quit acting stupid and walk in
grace. Love your wives. You know, that's
where it ends. And God's got your back. That's,
you know, But he didn't do that. He wanted
to teach us the extreme, extremely important reality of where we
have come from. But again, we've been bought.
brought near by the blood of Christ. So how is it that someone
is not only are we wicked in our essence and we trespass against
God just because of our existence as sinners, but now we're not
even part of the historical covenant of promise. What's our hope? You see, the question comes.
It's hopeless for me. And that's where the atonement
is so perfectly illustrated here in these next few verses. And
next week we will dive into that. Friends, the gospel only makes
sense when we remember from where we come. If we do not know who we were
before God saved us, if we forget our wickedness, if we forget
our sin, then our worship will be almost Self-worship. It'll be to the
place. Here's the way I look at it.
Our worship of God. It's almost like he was obligated
to save us. And God is not obligated to anyone.
God doesn't have to do a thing he doesn't want to do. There's
no law. Or truth. Or person that God
must answer to. He is the root of all truth.
He is the giver of the law. He doesn't break it because it's
a reflection of who he is. By grace, through faith, through
the blood of Jesus Christ, the purpose of God before the world
began, that which was far off, listen, dead, without hope, didn't
even know about it, None of the covenant has been brought near,
and Paul says in other places in Scripture, that we are being
prepared for the presence of God by Jesus Christ. Sanctification. And so Jesus provides something
for us. You know what we give Him? Sin.
You know what He gives us? Righteousness, atonement, propitiation,
justification, redemption, sanctification, glorification. All these things
are made possible by Christ, through Christ, through His blood.
Listen to Colossians for just a second. Chapter 1, verse 21.
You don't have to turn there, just listen. I've already referred
to it. And you who were once alienated
and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled
in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you wholly
and blameless and above reproach before him. If indeed you continue
in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of
the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation
under heaven and of which I, Paul, became a minister. See,
Jesus brought us together with God, brought all who were apart
to Himself. This is the Gospel. It starts
with God fully, and man's wickedness, and then is revealed God's mercy,
and then God's righteousness, and God's grace toward us who
believe. God is the Gospel. I guess the only question is,
is life full in Christ? Is your life full in Christ? Are you satisfied with God's
plan to redeem you? Are you understanding and fully
worshiping God because you see the reality of who you were before
you were saved? Do you understand what God is
saying when Paul says you had no hope? You had no life? You had nothing but death and
sin, and the totality of our existence, friends, is a trespass
against God when we are not in Christ. But see, Christ saves
his own. I came to seek and save the lost. Christ will perfectly accomplish
all that he purposed to do. He is a perfect Savior, not a
hopeful Savior, not a wishful Savior, a perfect Savior. And
what Christ has done in obedience in this life as a man who was
fully God and fully man, and the obedience and the willingness,
and we'll talk about the atonement next week in more detail as we
get into these next two verses. Christ's willingness to die on
the cross is what made Him the Lamb of God. Are you a child of God? Are you
a child? Do you desire to be free? And
do you see Christ and believe today? Let's pray. Father, we're just grateful that
You are a God who saves. Lord, we thank You so much that
You've given us this time to worship together. Lord, it's
warm in here. It makes us tired. It makes us
sleepy. But Lord, I pray that Your Spirit
would quicken us to help us remember all that You've taught us. Father, we are just so glad that
you saved us. We are so glad that we are no
longer in that position or that place. But Father, we are truly
your children. Lord, I pray that you would bring
to faith those who are not aware today of their sin. Help them
to see it. Help them to believe. Bring them
to repentance. Bring them to life. And Lord,
help us to bottle this into our souls, that it may overflow in
our lives. And we pray these things in Jesus
name. Amen.