Ephesians chapter 2, and once
again we're going to read from verse 1, down through verse 10. And you hath he quickened who
were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past ye walked
according to the course of this world, according to the prince
of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the
children of disobedience. among whom also we all had our
conversation in times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling
the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were 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
ye are saved. 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 Christ Jesus. For
by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves,
it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained
that we should walk in them. Amen. May God bless to us this
reading from his word. No matter how often and no matter
how long for how long a believer reads the word of God, the scriptures. We are always just one new insight
away from another extraordinary revelation from God the Holy
Spirit. What is a closed book to many
is to the child of God a lively source of spiritual blessing. So that when we are in need,
when we are in doubt, when we are in fear, when we seek to
worship the Lord, when we are afflicted, when we desire to
praise Him, we find in this book an endless reservoir of glorious
gospel truth that enables our thinking and our desires and
our worship and our petitions to Almighty God. whether it's
by direction, whether it is by God's own request to us, whether
it is by example of his saints that have gone in the past, the
Lord's people find the Word of God to be a glorious resource
and an extraordinary revelation of God's goodness to us. Take,
for example, John chapter 17 and verse 23. There, the Lord
Jesus Christ is praying to his Father on behalf of his people,
principally and primarily his disciples, but he says, not only
the disciples, but all who will hear their message and come through
the preaching of the gospel. And he says, of these people,
these little ones. He says, thou hast loved them,
speaking to his father, thou hast loved them as thou hast
loved me. He says to his father, you have
loved these people in the same way as you love me. The love of the father for the
God-man is the same as the love of the Father for you and for
me." That is a quite astounding and amazing revelation. That is a wonderful and a glorious
thing that the Lord Jesus Christ told us there in that prayer
that he made to his Father on our behalf. And then the Saviour
continues by unpacking and explaining something about that love. And
He says, So the God-man says to his Father, Do you see what
the Lord is saying? He is saying that His people,
for whom He prayed, were loved by the Father as He was loved
by the Father from before the foundation of the world, before
we ever did anything, before we were ever born, before the
world was even created. God the Father, the triune God,
Jehovah, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, loved these people and
upon the basis of that love chose them to be conformed to the image
of the Son. This confirms Jeremiah's experience
and revelation when he stated the words of God to him in Jeremiah
31 verse 3, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. And so it is that when the Lord
God spoke out of heaven on those multiple occasions to and of
His Son, He said, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well
pleased. And so we take the words of the
Saviour literally and say that He loves us as He loved His beloved
Son. and the pleasure of God dwells
upon those whom the Son has redeemed and saved by his blood. In the
covenant of peace, the elect of God were placed in Christ
from eternity, before the world was even created. in that great
covenant purpose. God chose that people, that people
whom he loved, and placed them in Christ. They were loved everlastingly
by the Father, by the Son, by the Holy Spirit. And God's everlasting
love for them ensures their everlasting salvation, their everlasting
life. their eternal, endless glory
in heaven with Christ their husband as his bride. Why am I mentioning
this? Because I want to remind you
that despite false statements to the contrary, God's people,
his chosen ones, his elect, all for whom Christ died, All who
were quickened by the Holy Spirit, ye hath he quickened, who were
dead in trespasses and sin, all those whom God chose, all those
for whom Christ died, all those who are quickened, never were
under the wrath of God. They deserved to be, but they
never were. They were never condemned by
him. though their sin was as grievous
as any other sin. And they were never subject to
God's anger, because the substitute, the Lord Jesus Christ, stood
in their place and took upon himself all the anger of God's
wrath. God's children are everlastingly
loved of God. They are eternally secure in
Christ and they are always viewed as holy in him. Now Paul has
already been teaching us that in Ephesians chapter 1. Let me
read a couple of verses from Ephesians 1 to you. It's verse
3 through verse 6. Here's what Paul has already
stressed to these Ephesians. He says, Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all
spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. according as
he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blame before him in love, having
predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to
himself according to the good pleasure of his will. to the
praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted
in the Beloved. Our acceptance with God, we have
another word for it, we call it our justification, and that
speaks of us being made righteous before God. And that righteousness
is not our righteousness, not the things that we do in this
world, not our faith, not our obedience, but it is God's righteousness,
the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, given to us. That's what the hymn writer,
Mr. Kent, said in that hymn that
we read together. Our justification is not God's
response to our acts of goodness or faith or obedience or anything
that we do, but it is our standing, our just standing in the everlasting
covenant of grace because the Lord Jesus stood as our eternal
surety. As the lamb slain, from the foundation
of the world. Now we trust him in time because
we live in time, we dwell in time, we are constrained by time
and space, we are physical creatures in a physical world. But we believe because we were
chosen to be righteous in Him before the world was made. We believe in time because God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, covenanted together to make us
holy and blameless before Him in love. And so although the
Apostle Paul calls these covenant children of promise, children
of wrath, he is not saying that we were ever under God's wrath. He is saying we were by nature
indistinguishable from others. You couldn't tell us apart. You
could not by looking at the outside of a man, you could not by looking
at the works of a man, you could not by even looking at the profession
of a man distinguish one from another. We were as guilty, we
were as sinful, we were as wayward, we were as rebellious in this
world as any other by nature. We were as fallen as any other,
for we fell in Adam. We were as wicked as any other. We were as angry as any other. We were as full of wrath as any
other. And were it not for sovereign
love, for sovereign grace, as guilty under God's holy law as
every other sinner. But it is these, these ones,
these who are chosen to salvation, those that were yet dead in their
trespasses and sin, who have been divinely quickened and made
spiritually alive, brought and bought by the blood of Christ
into the experience and awareness of sins forgiven and the cleansing
power of Jesus' blood. And it is this experience of
grace, the effect and the result of the quickening grace that
I want us to think about today in these verses before us. This
quickening that we have to consider is specifically a work of God
the Holy Spirit. Now we have seen already the
necessity for quickening and how because of our fallen nature,
this quickening must be a divine act of a sovereign power. And there's a lovely symmetry
in God's revelation of covenant grace to his people. Within the work of the triune
God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God has presented to us a unified covenant work and yet
a work that distinguishes between the various roles taken and fulfilled
within the Godhead. There was a mutually agreed and
voluntarily delegated responsibility within this covenant of grace
and peace. God the Father, in love, chose
a people and committed that people into the care of the Son. God
the Son united himself to his people, represents them, redeemed
them with his blood when he died on the cross in their place.
And the Holy Spirit quickens or makes alive all those that
God chose, that God committed into the care of the Son, and
for whom the Son died. So that we see that there is
a distinctiveness and a specificity amongst those for whom Christ
died. The Father chose them, Christ
died for them, and the Holy Spirit redeems them. and the Holy Spirit
regenerates them and brings them to gospel faith. Titus chapter
3 verse 4 and 5 speaks of this when we're told there, And perhaps
it's worth drawing attention to the forever
nature of this work, God's work in the covenant of grace. Election,
the work of God the Father, is forever. Redemption, the work
of God the Son, is forever. And so too the quickening of
God the Holy Spirit. It is a forever work. It is such
a foolish notion of those who say that one can lose salvation,
when this is a divine act, a forever work of God the Holy Spirit. And after all, is it not everlasting
life that he has given us? The gifts and calling of God
are without repentance, the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans chapter
11 and verse 9. So this quickening work is the
work of God, the Holy Spirit. And this quickening work is the
beginning of spiritual life and growth in grace in those to whom
this work is applied. Those who are quickened, those
who are made alive from their trespasses and sins are made
a new creation and immediately that new creation begins to grow
and develop The divine work by the Holy Spirit is described
in the Bible as being born again, and it is the first spark of
spiritual life in the new creation. And there are parallels between
that and our natural life, because we immediately have a hunger
and a desire to grow, and a process of growth and development begins. When we think of the natural
man, and we spoke about this last week, we're told that the
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. But the opposite is true also.
that the spiritual man does receive the things of the Spirit of God
and that spiritual man, that new man, the new creation feeds
and is nourished by the things of God. The new creation begins
to grow and the grace of God feeds the quickened individual. so that when we trust in the
Lord Jesus Christ and we are converted, that is the beginning
of growth, that is the way in which our growth is being manifested
after the quickening work of the Holy Ghost has been applied. We hear the Gospel and we believe
it and receive it and trust in the one of whom the Gospel speaks. The new creation discerns holiness,
it discovers divine wisdom and it answers to spiritual prompts. The new creation has spiritual
eyes to see spiritual realities, spiritual ears to hear divine
whisperings from on high, a lively soul which feeds upon the gospel
of Jesus Christ. The Lord himself told Nicodemus,
that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and that spirit hungers
and thirsts for spiritual things. That's where its blessedness
is found. 1 Corinthians 2, verse 15 says,
He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is
judged of no man, for who hath known the mind of the Lord that
he may instruct him? but we have the mind of Christ. And so this quickening, this
work of growth and development is because the mind of Christ
has been placed within that new creation. So it is a Holy Spirit
work and it is a work which begins spiritual life and growth in
grace. And the third thing I want to
point out about this quickening work today is that it brings
knowledge and awareness. You remember how in 1 Corinthians
chapter 1 Paul tells us that Christ has made unto us wisdom. Now it's not necessary for us
to try to specify the Lord's work in different individuals
because no two believers' experience will be the same. The new birth, the new creation,
begins and we begin to grow in knowledge and awareness. But
that will be a different growth, just as in the natural realm,
our experiences in childhood and in growing up and in adolescence
and in adulthood are all different, so our experiences of God will
be different. However, some things are common.
The presence of sin, which hitherto we ignored, begins to cause us
discomfort, even fear. The work of Christ on the cross,
which we once scorned, we now see it as the heart of the gospel
and the source of our salvation. The cross that we once despised
we now highly esteem. The gospel takes on a new meaning. We have greater sensitivity to
right and wrong. We see our personal unworthiness
like we never saw it before. And the self-confidence that
we once had disappears and dissipates. We realise how spiritually ignorant
we are. And that gives way to awe and
wonder as we begin to see the Lord Jesus Christ and who he
really is. We begin to glimpse something
of what it means to know the mercy of God and the grace of
God. And when we see ourselves as
recipients of that mercy and grace, it draws forth from us
a sense of wonder and a sense of gratitude. It is the Holy
Spirit's quickening leading us into a knowledge of the truth. Our appetites change. The passions
that we once pursued no longer hold the same attraction to us. The places that we once frequented
are perceived to be dangerous to our spiritual well-being.
The people that we once admired, they no longer enthrall and engage
us. And our ambitions change. We're
no longer infatuated with what I can do for me. Our desire is
to honour the Lord and to serve him and we only wish we could
do it better. Where we once took pride in the
smallest thing that we did in the name of religion, we now
lament at the poverty of our best efforts. With spiritual eyes and with
spiritual ears, we begin to observe how God makes foolish the wisdom
of this world and how that what we once despised, we now cherish
and love. Slowly we come to understand
what Paul says in 1 Corinthians. God hath chosen the foolish things
of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the
weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty,
and base things of the world, and things which are despised
hath God chosen ye, and things which are not to bring to naught
things that are. Why? That no flesh should glory
in his presence. we begin to understand these
things. That's the work of the Holy Spirit.
That's the work of quickening. And fourthly, quickening enables
worship and service and fellowship with God. The great end and purpose
of us being made alive in Christ by God the Holy Spirit is that
we might know God. John chapter 17 verse 3 says,
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent, the knowledge
of God in Christ. so that our worship and our service
and our fellowship with God is sweetened as we grow in grace
and a knowledge of the truth. Now I do not say that these things
will become easier. Sometimes it seems as if the
Lord hides himself and we cannot find him or commune with him
as we might desire. And as we've been reading through
these last few months, the Psalms of David and the psalmists who've
written, we have seen how very often it appears the Lord hides
himself from his people and teaches us by stirring up longings after
him of our own weakness and inadequacies until he will come again and
reveal himself to us. This is the way that the pilgrim
walks. These are the means that God
uses to deepen our understanding and our knowledge of Him. At
such times we must learn patience. We must wait. We wait because
we can't go back. We can't give these things up. We can't forgo what we have learned
of Him. We can only do as the psalmist
did in his overwhelming affliction and plead for the help that we
need for we know that we cannot help ourselves. Then we wait
upon the Lord and we hope in the Lord and in time the Lord
will come to us with those sweet renewals of fellowship and grace
that we desire. Quickening is the beginning of
our spiritual pilgrimage in this world. There will be hard times,
there will be dark times. There will be times of coldness,
times of hunger, times of thirst. But through them, all the children
of God, all the children of promise prove their Saviour and they
own Him to be able and they rejoice in him with joy unspeakable and
full of glory, that they should be found worthy to stand with
him and him for them. Friends, Today, if the Holy Spirit
has quickened you, if the Holy Spirit has made you spiritually
alive, if the Holy Spirit has shown you the Saviour and caused
you to trust in Him, you are blessed indeed. You are a child
of God. You are an heir of salvation. You are bound for glory. And
this is not something that we could ever accomplish in the
flesh or the natural man. It took the Holy Spirit to work
a marvellous spiritual work of grace. So Paul teaches us to
say, thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through
our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.