We're All Dead Not Mostly Dead
Tom Shrader continues his study of Ephesians 2:1-10, focusing on Paul's declaration that all people are spiritually dead in trespasses and sins—not merely weakened or inclined toward evil, but wholly unable to comprehend or respond to the gospel on their own. Drawing on 1 Corinthians 2:14, John 6:44, Romans 3, and the Westminster Confession of Faith, Shrader argues that original sin has left natural humanity without the ability or desire to seek God, making regeneration entirely a work of the Holy Spirit. The teaching concludes by emphasizing that salvation is therefore entirely of grace, leaving no room for human boasting and giving God all the glory.
“You don't have free will in the sense that nothing affects you — you have free choice, but your will as a natural man is in bondage to your nature.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Ephesians
Recorded: 2010 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 47 min
Themes: grace, salvation, sin, spiritual death, regeneration, boasting, God's glory, human nature, new believer, questioning salvation, struggling with pride, feeling unworthy, seeker, doubting God's grace, young adult, skeptic exploring faith
Scripture: Ephesians 2:1-10, Romans 3:23, Romans 5:12, Romans 6:23, 1 Corinthians 1:18, 1 Corinthians 2:14, John 3:3, John 3:16, John 6:44, Genesis 2:16-17, Genesis 3:1-24, Psalm 119, James 2:6, Acts 16:19, 2 Chronicles 6:36, Ecclesiastes 7:20
Theological Themes: total depravity, original sin, monergism, sola gratia, grace alone, effectual calling, regeneration, Ephesians 2
Full Transcript
Introduction to Ephesians 2:1–10
Open your Bibles, if you would, to the book of Ephesians. If you don't have a Bible, raise your hand and the guys will bring you one of ours to use. Go about two-thirds of the way back — that will get you to the New Testament. When you get there, go to about page 150, and that will get you into the book of Ephesians.
We are looking, over this time together, at verses 1–10 of chapter 2. I have a real fondness for this passage. The doctrines that Paul lays out here and the teaching he presents have been so important in my life, in the life of so many people at East Valley Bible Church, and in the life of the church throughout history. We want to take — perhaps even an extra amount of time — to make sure we get what Paul is writing about in this very important section on our relationship with God.
Let's read verses 1–10 and then get back into it. Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1: "You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air and the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, 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 ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is a 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 so that we would walk in them."
The Past, Present, and Future Structure of the Passage
We covered the introduction to this section last week. We noted that there is a past, present, and future component to what Paul is saying. In verses 1, 2, and 3, Paul talks about the past: you were dead, you formerly walked, you were by nature children of wrath. He is writing to a group of Christians — sending this letter to Ephesus with the idea that it would be distributed to the cities and towns in the area. Because God preserved it in Scripture, it comes down to us today.
So Paul is saying to those of us who are Christians now — those of you who just celebrated communion and declared your faith and trust in Christ — here is what you were. You were dead. You were walking according to your instincts, lusts, and desires. You were a child of disobedience. You too, just like all the others, were by nature children of wrath. What he is saying is that because we lived this way, we were under the wrath and punishment of God. That sin we were in had to be punished.
The present is found in verses 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9: "But God, being rich in mercy because of His love, He saved you." Verses 8 and 9 tell us you are saved by grace through faith. It is a gift. It is not a result of your works, or you would boast. The future is verse 7 — "so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" — and verse 10: "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them." That word "walk" is not talking about transportation. Paul is talking about lifestyle — the way we would live.
The guys changed the cover of the bulletin today, and it now reads *sola gratia* — by grace alone. What we are saying is that we are saved by grace alone. There is no place for works in producing salvation. The works that come into our lives are the result of what God has done.
The Most Difficult Truth in All of Scripture
What we are doing here is camping in this passage for a while to make sure we truly understand that we were dead, grasp the implications of what that means, and embrace the reality that we are now alive. Even a casual observation ought to force the question: how is it that someone who is dead can be alive? When we begin to process this, there is an instinctual pushback.
Ray Stedman writes of these verses: "As we read these three verses, I would like you to remember that this is probably the most difficult truth in all of Scripture for human beings to believe." It would be interesting to stop right there and ask whether you had a problem with it as you read it. My experience has been that most Christians don't really have a problem as they read it — somehow it seems to make sense in their minds. It is only when we start to define it and examine it closely that the reaction comes: wait a minute, is that right?
Here, at the outset of this section, is the revelation of a truth so difficult to understand, grasp, and believe that most of us — and this has been my experience in dealing with Christians — tend to tone it down immediately or simply water it down. We don't accept it and we don't believe it. And Stedman says there is a cost to pay for that. As a consequence, we have no realistic outlook on where we stand — either on the tremendous hopelessness of our condition if we are without Christ, or on the glory and wonder of our position if we are in Christ. We don't fully understand how lost we are and how desperate that condition is.
What Paul does here is take us behind the scenes. It was thirty years ago yesterday that God saved me. Four, five, or six days before that, I walked into a Bible study — not invited, but knowing it was going on, and knowing that…
God's Work Behind the Scenes
Some guys from our office went to this study, so I just joined them. I asked one guy if it was okay for me to come, and he said it was available to anybody. So with that rigid standard, I was able to eke my way into the study.
I show up and walk in — it was at Phoenix Country Club. There were about 35 of us in the room. Larry Wright was teaching, and he began to teach that day. Honestly, the guy I had asked said yes, but he didn't know I was going. No one knew I was going.
As Larry was teaching, I'm asking myself, how did Susan know to call this guy and tell him to talk about all these things, because you can really get him here — he's really vulnerable here. That's what it felt like. It felt like Larry was speaking right to me.
I went back to my office, pulled out the phone book, went to the W's for Wright, ran my finger down a whole bunch of them, made a phone call, and said, "Is there any chance you're the Larry Wright that taught a Bible study this morning?" And he said, "I am." That began what is a beautiful picture of how this was completely a work of God.
Now if you ask me what happened, it would go like this. On that day, I went into that room, Larry spoke, I heard something, I then had a follow-up breakfast with him, he shared what we would now call the gospel, I then took a day or so and weighed the options, and at roughly 8:20 in the morning on March 6, 1980, I asked Jesus into my life. I asked Jesus to be my Lord and Savior. I moved to Him in repentance and faith. And indeed, indisputably, that is my experience.
What Was Happening Behind the Scenes
What Paul explains is here's what was going on behind the scenes — in other words, here's why you responded. Remember I shared last week, I had been presented the gospel prior to this on several occasions. The one we talked about last week was people who invited Susan and me over to their house for dinner. Why is it that when those people laid out the gospel — even with the enticement of the brownie — they could not generate in me a response, but Larry in his presentation, and then me by myself, would all of a sudden produce a response?
Is it that Larry presented it better? Is it that I got smarter? What happened in there? That is a really important question. What Paul tells us here is what took place behind the scenes — not what Tom was doing, but what God was doing.
For me personally, and this is probably why I'm so passionate about this, if you don't get this right, your view of God will always be stunted, and your view of man will always be exalted. This is a huge issue.
The Effect of Sin on Human Nature
I want to put a couple of quotes on the screen. Steele and Thomas write: "The view one takes concerning salvation will be determined to a large extent by the view one takes concerning sin and its effect on nature." What they are saying is that when we talk about salvation — how I moved from sinner to saint, how my destination was changed from hell to heaven, how God redeemed and saved me — a very important component of that discussion is the effect of sin on my life and my nature.
Stifler says this: "It cannot be said too often that a false theology finds its source in an inadequate view of depravity." What he is saying is that when we encounter something that strikes us as biblically off-ground, when we go back and find its origins, we discover they did not have a clear view of sin — what I'll call original sin — and its effect on us.
Think of it like a math equation. You have this massive equation, you got the wrong answer, and you start working back. The problem didn't appear at steps 7, 8, 9, and 10 — it got messed up at step 2, and because that was wrong, everything else that followed was wrong. If you get the thing we're talking about now wrong, your view of salvation will always remain at that purely experiential level.
When you come to passages like the one we encounter today, Stedman says, in your own humanness you will push against this and fight against this. I think I know the reason why: because it makes God bigger and it takes you out of the equation.
Dead, Not Mostly Dead
We said last week — look at it — you were dead. Not sick, not dying. Dead. Now probably a dozen of you last Sunday and this week got hold of me and said there must be a film clip that would illustrate this. So let's take a look at this.
*"Are you the Miracle Max who worked for the King all those years?"*
*"The King's stinking son fired me, and thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you're at it, why don't you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it. We're closed. Beat it or I'll call the brute squad."*
*"I'm on the brute squad."*
*"You are the brute squad."*
*"We need a miracle. It's very important."*
*"Look, I'm retired. Besides, why would you want someone the King's stinking son fired? I might kill whoever you want me to miracle."*
*"He's already dead."*
*"He is, huh? I'll take a look. Bring him in."*
*"I've seen worse."*
*"Sir?"*
*"Huh?"*
*"We're in a terrible rush."*
*"Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles."*
Mostly Dead vs. All Dead
Now, it's really important to grasp what Miracle Max is saying in that scene. He said your friend here is only mostly dead, and there is a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
When it comes to the spiritual condition that all of us come into the world with — what I'm calling natural man — there are essentially two views. One says that man is dead, which flows from the verse in front of you. The other says that man is really mostly dead, that man is sick, with various levels of this sickness, and that if you come to him and present him with some sort of serum that will allow him to live, he will respond, sometimes, under the right conditions. The view I believe Scripture teaches is that man is totally unable to respond, even to the gospel itself.
As a result of Adam's sin, all mankind is spiritually dead. And because we are dead, we are unable to comprehend or believe spiritual truths. We are blind and deaf to the message.
Original Sin
The term we use here is original sin. Augustine introduces it — not talking about a specific act on our part, but about the effect that Adam's sin had on all of us, and God's punishment upon that sin. It explains the condition we are in today and the behavior you see around us.
I want to be fair and acknowledge that some Christians — guys I know, love, and respect — would disagree on the depth of the effect of man's sin on our lives. Let me give you something subtle, but something that may really grab your attention when you see it.
Here is the Westminster Confession of Faith, written around 1646. A group of 121 Puritans came together and said: this is what Scripture teaches. Because it is roughly 400 years old, the language is a little wordy, but you get it. Here is what they say:
*"Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation. So as a natural man, being altogether averse, altogether opposed from good, and dead in sin, he is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto."*
He is not even able to prepare himself so that when the message comes along, he is ready to receive it.
You Were All Dead
So when Paul says you were dead, here is what he is saying. You were not mostly dead — you were all dead. You were unable to respond, unable to change your situation, unable to believe the truth. Not only that, you have no desire and no ability to do anything but what you have been doing. You are repulsed by the idea of true good.
If you use the illustration of a man who is sick, perhaps almost paralyzed, and along comes the serum that would cure him — here is what this view says. Even if you could open his mouth to get it in, he would spit it out. He has no ability and no desire.
Mostly Dead: The Baltimore Catechism View
When I was raised in Catholic grade school, high school, and college, we studied from the Baltimore Catechism. The Baltimore Catechism's view of original sin has a slight difference that ends up in two totally different places. Our inherited condition from the sin of Adam and Eve is that we are born into the world without grace, and — here is the key phrase — inclined to love ourselves more than God.
That is mostly dead right there. And why this is so central to our understanding of Scripture — and to what the whole body of Scripture teaches as it relates to our salvation — is this: if I do not get this point right, I will end up off course on this enormous issue of salvation.
We have used this illustration before. Arguably the most important event in American history is the Civil War. The most important battle was Gettysburg. The most important incident at Gettysburg was Pickett's Charge. This is the Pickett's Charge of salvation — you have to get this right. These truths are almost like dominoes. And I am not trying to win an argument — that is not my point at all. Once you get this, everything starts to fall into place, and there can really only be one answer after it.
Dead, Not Just Disobedient
Here is what the Bible teaches. You were dead. You were sons of disobedience. You were a zombie spiritually — walking around, having a body, having physical life, going through the motions, but not possessing life.
We looked at this last week in Romans chapter 3. "No one does good, no, not one. No one understands. No one seeks God. All have turned aside. There is none who does good."
Now, that rubs against our experience, because we think: wait a minute, I was away last summer and my friend came over and mowed my grass without even being invited — that is a good work. But we are not saying you compare yourself to each other. We are saying, first of all, we compare ourselves to God, and God is the one who measures.
The Heart Behind the Action
God is not looking at the action — He is looking at the heart of the actor. A classic illustration of this is Thanksgiving morning, when television crews interview volunteers who come out to feed the hungry and homeless at rescue shelters. The reporters ask what compels them to give up their holiday morning, and almost always the answer is the same: it makes them feel good. Feeding the hungry is certainly a good thing, but the motive is misplaced. They are not doing it because the people are hungry — they are doing it because they feel good when they feed them.
This is exactly what Scripture does when it lays us bare. It cuts through all the facade and white noise of our actions and gets right at the condition of our heart.
How We Got Here: Adam's Sin
We arrived at this condition through Adam's sin. Keeping your place in Ephesians, turn to the very front of the Bible — the book of Genesis. In Genesis 1 and 2, God creates. In Genesis chapter 2, verse 16, God commands: "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." Genesis 2 ends with the man and his wife naked in the garden and unashamed.
In chapter 3, the serpent comes and begins to question Eve. Did God really say this? He tells her God is simply jealous — He knows that if she eats from the tree, she will become like Him. Then, between verses 5 and 6 of chapter 3, there is a gap we know nothing about. It could have been a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a year. Somewhere in that time, Eve is looking at the tree, and the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life all rise up together. She sees that the tree is good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise. She took it, she ate, she was deceived, and she gave it to Adam, and Adam sinned.
What follows in verses 5, 6, and 7 covers an enormous amount of ground — from temptation to sin to the first recorded instance of abnormal human behavior. Both the man and the woman have their eyes opened, they realize they are naked, and they hide from God. God walks through the garden and calls out, "Adam, where are you?" God is not seeking information — He knows exactly where Adam is. He wants Adam to understand the absurdity of what has happened: one moment he was walking in the cool of the garden communing with God, and now he is hiding in a bush covered with leaves. That is what sin does. The result, recorded in chapter 3, verse 24, is that they are driven out of the garden entirely.
Dead in Adam, Dead in Sin
What does that mean for us? Back in Ephesians 2, it means you are dead. It means you are among the sons of disobedience. Adam was your perfect representative, and when he sinned, the consequences passed to all of humanity. Romans chapter 5, verse 12 says: "Just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, thus death spread to all men, because all sinned." Romans 3:23 confirms: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Romans 6:23 declares: "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus." There are no exceptions.
Second Chronicles 6:36 states: "There is no man who does not sin." Ecclesiastes 7:20 adds: "There is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin." These passages are absolutely essential. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The wages of sin is death. You were dead in your sins and trespasses.
From Death to Life
And yet, when Paul gets to verse 5 of Ephesians 2, he says you were made alive. So how does a person go from death to life? This question becomes especially urgent if what has been argued here is true — that you are not mostly dead, but fully dead.
Following the logic of Scripture, Jesus says in John 3:3: "You must be born again." Nicodemus pushes back, uncertain about what this means. Jesus responds: "Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again" — and He explains that this is a work of the Spirit of God in a person's life. It is not something God is asking you to do. You have no desire to do it and no ability to do it on your own.
Your Real Problem
Some of you may be in exactly the same position as Tom was the day he walked into that Phoenix Country Club thirty years ago. You came today because a friend invited you, or you were driving by and saw the sign, or for some other reason entirely. When you stop and think about it, you might say, "I don't think I believe what these people believe." If asked to identify your problem, you might say your problem is alcohol, or drugs, or that you cheat, or lie, or steal — that you are lazy, or you worry, or any number of things.
But that is not your problem. When Tom walked into that Phoenix Country Club and heard Larry teaching, he thought he had a series of problems, and his list included many of those very things. What he heard that day was that those are all symptoms of the problem — they are not the problem itself. Consider: if the issue is drugs or alcohol, you can get sober. If it is sexual sin, you can become celibate. If it is a temper, you can learn to control it. But then you will simply be a sober, celibate, controlled person on your way to hell. That did not work. You would be the most miserable person there — the worst of both worlds, a difficult time here and a dreadful time there.
Those things are not your problem. The problem is a condition of your heart — and you are dead. As was established previously, the one thing a dead man needs is life. So the question becomes: how can a dead man be born again? He cannot do it on his own.
Natural Man Cannot Understand Spiritual Things
Remember what we said: if he is dead, he is unable to comprehend and believe these spiritual truths. I want to take you to a couple of passages of scripture. Write them down, write them in the front of your Bible, write them on your hand — do whatever you need to do.
First Corinthians, page 131 in the Bible we gave you to use. First Corinthians chapter 2, verse 14. How is it that a fallen, natural man can be born again? Is there any chance that he can achieve this on his own? "Natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him. Nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned." Paul says earlier in that same book, chapter 1 verse 18, "The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God."
Here is what that means. The natural man can be taught, read to, argued with, debated, shared with, and proclaimed truth — and it will not matter. He is dead, and the Spirit of God does not dwell in him. Spiritual things cannot be understood by natural man. He does not have the spiritual — if you will allow the term — decoder.
So the psalmist writes in Psalm 119, pleading, "God, open my eyes that I might behold the things from Thy word, from the law." Martin Luther said the Bible cannot be understood simply by study or talent — you must count on the influence of the Holy Spirit. John Calvin wrote that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason, for these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.
So natural man is dead. The result of that death means that a natural man, in and of himself, without any external force, does not have the ability or the desire to understand spiritual things.
Ability Versus Permission
Let us work through this carefully, because we need to make sure we have it. Can a natural man understand spiritual things? Is the gospel a spiritual thing? Is it possible, then, for a natural man — unaffected by some external force — to understand the gospel on his own? No. You can see that flowing directly from scripture. That is what Paul means when he says you are dead in your trespasses and sins. That is what he means in First Corinthians when he writes that a natural man cannot understand spiritual things.
But then how is it that Paul says you were all of those things and now you are alive? What happened? We are going to go to page 76, the Gospel of John, chapter 6. Jesus is speaking, and I understand completely that you can always pull a verse out of context and make it say almost anything. But if you work your way through this passage, you will see that it fits right within the context. Here is what Jesus says, as recorded in John chapter 6, verse 44: "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day."
There was a lady who came up after the first service today and said her daughter and she had been going back and forth on this for years, and that when we got to the distinction between ability and permission, she had one of those aha moments. That is what this passage is. Jesus is speaking here not about permission, but about ability. No one has the ability to come to Me.
Now, that word "unless" implies some sort of pre-existing condition — something that has to happen before I can come to Christ. Whatever comes after "unless" has to happen first. There is a big distinction between ability and permission. Back in third grade, Mrs. Gideon's class — class sizes were about 33 kids to one teacher back then, and it seemed to work fine — I put up my hand one day, and when she called on me I said, "Can I sharpen my pencil?" She said, "I have not got the foggiest idea. I do not know if you have the dexterity to take that small stick, put it in that hole, and crank it. I do not know if you can or not. You may give it a try." That is the distinction: "can" is ability, "may" is permission.
So when people stop and say, "Wait — what about John 3:16?" here is what John 3:16 says: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." That is a big verse. A great verse. But it has nothing to do with what we are talking about here, because it is about permission. All it says is that whoever believes will be saved. That is a significant thing, but we are talking about ability. And the explicit always trumps the implicit. The explicit statement is that nobody can — nobody has the ability. You have permission to sharpen the pencil, but whether you have the ability is another matter entirely.
The Father Draws
So look at what Jesus says again: "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him." That word "draws" simply means to compel. We see it two other times in the New Testament — in James chapter 2 and Acts chapter 16, verse 19. In James chapter 2, verse 6—
Free Will and the Condition of the Natural Man
James writes, "But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not you the rich who opposed the poor and dragged them into court?" That word — dragged — is the same word used in Acts 16:19, which speaks of Paul and Silas being seized and dragged into the marketplace. I want to be fair to the other side of this discussion. The other side would say man is not dead, or he is mostly alive, or — and some even acknowledge he is dead — that the Holy Spirit woos and coaxes everyone along. But "woos" is not the term used in Scripture.
When we were in another church years ago, my girls were young, and they were doing a big Salty the Singing Songbook program. Great music, lousy theology. One of the songs was "The Holy Spirit is a Gentleman — He'll always knock before He comes in." That is the "mostly dead" position. Because here is what we are saying: you can knock and knock and knock and knock, and it is not going to make any difference. The person on the other side of the door is dead. It does not matter how long you knock. It does not matter if you woo.
Something has to happen. He has to be drawn, compelled. Some external force has to come into your life that draws you. It is not that He knocks on the door of your heart — it is that He kicks it open. He comes in, finds you dead, rips out your dead heart, and on His own puts a new heart in you. You may then come to Him and say, "I've been resuscitated!" No — you have been born again. You have not been resuscitated. You are a new creature.
The Question of Free Will
For thinking people, this produces a whole bunch of other questions — who does that, how does it happen — and we will get to those next week. But there is one big question we need to deal with now. At this point in the discussion, everyone feels that their free will has been violated. So there is a large elephant in the room. Let us go ahead and address it.
Free will, in its simplest form as most people use it, is the ability to make a decision without any prior prejudice or inclination. People define it two different ways. One group defines it exactly that way. The other group says it simply means doing whatever you want to do. I am fine with that second definition. But if by free will you mean making a choice without anything affecting you, you have never actually had one of those moments. You came here today at 10:30 because we said we meet at 10:30. You sat where you sat because someone else was already sitting somewhere else and that option was gone.
So when we say free will, here is what I believe the Bible teaches: there is no such thing. No one has the ability to make a choice without some pre-existing impact on their life. Martin Luther, in his classic work *Bondage of the Will* — a large book with a 32-page introduction by J.I. Packer, and that introduction alone is great — says, "Free will without God's grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bond slave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good." Jonathan Edwards, the greatest mind America ever produced, puts it simply: we will always do what we want to do.
The Vulture Illustration
Your will, my will, the natural man's will is enslaved to his nature. Here is an illustration. Suppose I have a vulture over at the sound booth, a head of lettuce here, and a steak here. I release the vulture. Where is he going to go? The meat. Now what if I brought a vulture from New Mexico? Where is he going to go? The meat. I do all 50 states — every single one of those vultures goes to the meat.
Here is what I want you to see. This could be an aha moment. That vulture had free choice. He had permission to go to the lettuce, but his nature holds his will in bondage, and he is always going to go to the meat. The only way to get that vulture to go to the lettuce is to put the heart of a rabbit in him. That is huge. You have free choice, but your will as a natural man is in bondage to your nature. You are a sinner not because you sin — you are a sinner by nature.
Why This Truth Matters
I love this truth for one reason: it helps me accomplish what John the Baptist challenges me to do. "He must increase, and I must decrease." God gets bigger and bigger in this. This is not a source of pride, nor is it something you run out of here and use as a tool to argue with your friends, neighbors, or fellow Christians. The whole point is not to give you a debating tool or cause confusion or argument. I am simply telling you — that is what it says.
Knowing what Scripture says, and understanding it, is not the end. It is the means to get us to a point where we glorify God all the more. This is not about you — it is about Him. Even when we talk about our sinfulness, we love that we are at least talking about ourselves. "I was a wretch. Oh, what a wretch. Let me tell you how bad I was." It does not matter. The Bible does not teach that we are as sinful — meaning as behaviorally bad — as we can possibly be. Hitler did not kill his mother. It simply teaches that we are as badly off as we can possibly be — that our hearts are not set toward God, but are self-serving and set toward our own sin.
So here is where this lands personally. I am at dinner — we talked about this last week — and these people are sharing the gospel again and again, and I am saying, even with the incentive of a brownie on the table, "I don't think so." Two, three, four years later, on my own, by myself, with no external human —
Saved by Grace, Not by Decision
When I all of a sudden responded to the gospel, the difference in that moment was not me, not my intelligence, not that I got wiser. The difference was that at that moment in time, the Creator God of the universe, through the Holy Spirit, opened my eyes, took out my heart, put in the heart of a spiritual rabbit, and made me hungry for lettuce — the gospel. So I am saved by grace. I am not saved by that proclamation.
So when you came to that moment where you checked a box or walked an aisle, whatever it was — that moment is not what saved you. That is a result of God's grace that had saved you, and it is the first outward expression of it. Isn't that remarkable? You just get smaller and smaller and smaller, and He gets bigger and bigger and bigger. You didn't figure this out. You didn't decipher it.
But God — verse 4 — but God invades your heart. But God comes in and tears out the heart of a vulture and puts in the heart of a rabbit, and all of a sudden there is nothing you want more than the gospel at that moment. And now, as followers of Christ, we have a true choice and will. We now have the ability to sin and to not sin.
Dead Means Dead — Not Mostly Dead
There is a whole lot more in there, but I want to step back and consider what we have established over these last two weeks: dead means dead, not mostly dead. I was dead, and now I am alive. I was dead, and now I am born again.
I want to tip my hand here — God plays a key role, and God is going to be big in this. So we are going to look at that next week. How does God do that? What is it called? What is that process?
There is also a set of questions that goes along with this. Can He undo this, or will He undo this? The most frequent question I get — other than who is the Antichrist and when is the end times — is this: if I am a Christian, can I lose my salvation? We will talk about all of those things over the next two or three weeks.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for this amazing, wonderful, life-changing truth. God, I pray that You would start with my heart, and in my heart You would get bigger and bigger and bigger, and my sense of myself would get smaller and smaller — that we were dead and now we are alive, not as a result of anything that we have done, not because You looked at us and saw something in us, some potential or some good. You saved us in spite of us.
Father, remind us this is not a source of pride. This is not something to brag about. This is not something to argue over. We can boast about Your strength and our weakness. God, I pray that we would take this wonderful, beautiful, life-changing truth and use it for Your honor and Your glory. God, watch us and guide us, guide our conversations and our actions, protect us, until next week when we gather again. We pray this to You in Jesus' name, amen.