Life Ministries

“Before and After”
Ephesians - 2:1-10

    We live in a world that’s always looking for a change for the better. Hundreds of commercials flood our televisions that advertise products or methods for a healthy body that guarantees life changing results. The familiar still shot of before & after have become popular in showing satisfied results of particular products and exercises. The before picture shows how a person appeared in the sight of others that didn’t bring happiness, but amazingly, the after shot shows results that seem to change their whole outlook on life. People are always looking to change their current situations, financial status, or outward appearances. But people have become so caught up in changing things that only help the outward appearance, that millions remain spiritually dead because the inner man has not received a spiritual conversion…the inner man remains unchanged. I think that we sometimes allow Satan to confuse us, and we forget and fail to know and understand the new creature we have become. Satan wants to keep us bound by confusing us about our identity. He wants saints to think they’re sinners and sinners to think they’re saints!
    There were two brothers, well known around town for their crooked business dealings and underworld connections. They were a mean and cold-blooded as you could imagine. One day one of the brothers died, and the surviving brother wanted to give his dead brother a funeral fit for a king. He called the funeral home and made all the arrangements, then he called the town’s minister and made him an offer, as they say, he couldn’t refuse. He said, "I’ll give you $10,000 to put that new roof on the church if, in eulogizing my brother, you call him a saint."
    The minister agreed. The whole town turned out for the funeral, and the minister began: "The man you see in the coffin was a vile and wick-ed individual. He was a liar, a thief, a deceiver, a manipulator, and a reprobate. He destroyed the fortunes, careers, and lives of countless people in this city, some of whom are here today. This man did every dirty, rotten thing you can think of. But compared to his brother, he was a saint" (Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations & Quotes, 759).

    In Ephesians 2:1-3 Paul is writing to the saints in Ephesus reminding them of their condition before they trusted in Jesus Christ. He gives them - and us - three sobering facts concerning every person without Christ.
First, The person without Christ is alive physically but dead spiritually. Verse 1 - There are three kinds of death:
1. PHYSICAL, the separation of the spirit from the body;
2. SPIRITUAL, the separation of the spirit from God;
3. ETERNAL, the everlasting banishment from the presence of God in hell. Described in Revelation as the “second death”.
Spiritual death is the past condition of believers and the present condition for everyone else who are not yet “born again”.
He goes on to give us three reasons why this may be true;
1.     “when you followed the ways of this world”
2.     “and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air” ( Satan ) Why does he say that? If we are not following God, we are following the ways of Satan, even if we don’t know it or want to admit it.
3.     “gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following it’s desires and thoughts” ( Selfish, self-pleasing, self-indulgent ) "the desires of the body and of the mind" … the passions of the flesh.  
    The word he uses for "desires" is really the word will. It carries with it the thought of an unbreakable resolve, a determination. Perhaps the nearest English equivalent today is the word "drive" or passion.
    That is the subtlety of this. What is wrong with eating? Why, nothing! If you don't eat, then you won't live. But where do we cross the line? At what point do we “over eat”?  What is wrong with having money or wealth? Nothing until we allow it to consume our lives. “And this is the way we “were” and perhaps still are if we allow the desires of the world and the flesh and the temptations of Satan to control us.
    What is the result of all this? “we are objects of wrath”…. What does that mean?  (We are subject to the consequences of our actions, as determined by God.) If we jump off a cliff, we are “objects of wrath” because we have gone against or disobeyed God’s creative and pre-determined law or will. If we “follow the ways of the world” or “the ways or temptations of Satan” or “gratify the cravings of our sinful nature”… Then we are objects of wrath, subject to consequences, of God’s law and God’s Word.
    “BUT” - because of His love for us, God made us alive with Christ.” In, through, and only by His grace.  In order to truly understand and comprehend the greatness and extent of our salvation in Christ, Paul shows us the how and why of our need for salvation…and just how great our need was…If we tend to think that we are by nature pretty good people; that we are not too bad compared to some people we could describe… If that’s how we see ourselves, we don’t see the extent of what God did through Christ on the Cross. We see it as a “nice thing” that God did so we good people could go to heaven…( See Romans 6:1-14 )