We're finished in chapter 1. We're going to pick up in chapter 2. We're going to be reading about the gift of God. I'll start reading here in chapter 2 in verse 1. It says, 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 and 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." Father God, Lord, I thank You, God, for this night to come together, Lord, Hear Your Word, God. I thank You for giving me this opportunity to preach this message, Lord, and pray that You would open our ears, Father, to the Word, that we would hear what You have to say to us tonight, God. I pray You would be with me as I preach and keep me from error, Father, and just pray that You would bless us with something good from Your Word tonight, Father. We thank You for preserving Your Word for us in these last days, and we thank You for Your Son, Jesus, who died to save us, and for Your Holy Spirit that gives us understanding. In Jesus' name, amen. So just to remember what we read in chapter one, Paul was writing to encourage the Christians at Ephesus specifically, but also all faithful Christians in general. He said, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God to the saints which are at Ephesus and to the faithful in Christ Jesus, grace be to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul speaks of all the spiritual blessings that God has bestowed on them. how they were predestinated unto the adoption of children, made accepted in the Beloved. He says, "...in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace." So obviously, Paul is writing to saved Christians. The Ephesians also had an outward testimony of good works. Paul said that he had heard of their faith and of their love unto all the saints. said, Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and love unto all the saints, cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers. So not only are they saved, but their works are evident to those who are watching them. And Paul is thankful for this. Others who see the works of the Ephesians can see that their faith in Christ is what motivates them. John 13 says, A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if you have love one to another." Paul says repeatedly through the first chapter that all these things are to the praise of God's glory. When people see Christians walking in the Spirit and doing good works, the Bible says this glorifies God. 2 Peter 2 says, Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. having your conversation honest among the Gentiles, that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation." So here in chapter 2 in our text, the first verse says, "...and you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins." So as Christians, we were all once dead in trespasses and sins. Paul is writing to the entire church of Ephesus and he says, you, plural. There's nobody that Paul can point to and say, you were not dead in sin. Romans 3, he said, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So this applies to everyone. We were dead and God has quickened us. Quickened means made alive. This is obviously not referring to our physical life now. We were not brought back from the dead like Lazarus, not yet. but we were spiritually dead. God quickened us when He redeemed us with the blood of His Son and raised Him from the dead. Verse 2 says, So we were dead, but we were still walking, just like the people that we see every day, making a lot of effort to follow after the things of the world. They are walking. Some of them are running after those things that the spirit that is in them, which is the prince of the power of the air, the devil, Satan, desires. According to the course of this world, they are on a path that leads to death, though they don't know it. And because of this, they are dead. Matthew 7, verse 13 says, Enter ye in at the straight gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat, because straight is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Verse 3 says, 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. that word conversation means the general course of manners, behavior, deportment, especially as it respects morals. He quotes Philippians 1, So this conversation is not what they're talking about, although that is included. It says, in the lusts of our flesh, meaning that we behaved in the manner that our flesh wanted us to behave, without regard for the things of God. Our flesh and our mind were in agreement that these lusts were what we should be following after, and that was our natural state. We were born that way, as sinners, dead spiritually, walking according to our flesh, as the children of wrath, just like those children of disobedience. This doesn't mean that every unsaved person is just totally awful 100% of the time. Every man has a conscience that God has placed in them, and many things that the Bible calls sin are understood by these people naturally, even if they don't want to admit it. They may have a good moral compass in some respects, and probably take pride in those things that they abstain from, or good works that they might do. There are certainly degrees of sinfulness, and we see that God sometimes allows a society to fall so far into depravity that they are not just spiritually dead. He goes ahead and makes them physically dead, like He did to Sodom and Gomorrah. But all sin is the same in one sense, that it is the cause for our eternal soul to be cast into the lake of fire, and every one of us is far more guilty of sin than we could even realize before God allowed us to understand these things through the Spirit And the more we understand how sinful we are, the more grateful we will be to Jesus for what He did on the cross. Verse 4 in Ephesians 2 says, 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. God has given us a new life. He's quickened us together with Christ. because Christ lives in us, and we are in Him. He is the way, the truth, and the life. When He raised up Christ from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, He set us there with Him together. And it's by His grace that He did this for us, because of His mercy. It says He's rich in mercy, and for His great love wherewith He loved us, that while we were dead in sins, He did this for us. not because of any debt that He owed us or for any merit that we had in us. We were dead, corpses, and God gave us life with Jesus. And why would He do this? Verse 7 says, So once again, it's for His glory that He did these things for us. Ephesians 1 verse 12 said, that we should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted in Christ. It says that in the ages to come, He wants to be able to point to us and say, look what I did for these creatures. They were sinful, rebellious, worthless things, dead in their iniquity. And I gave my Son Jesus to redeem them to myself, to forgive their sins and to adopt them, and to give them eternal life with Him. And who is He going to show this to? I don't know. It says the age is to come. I know of an age to come. The next age is the kingdom. That's the thousand years when Christ is going to reign on this earth along with His faithful chosen Christians that win that inheritance with Him. I suppose that they will be reigning over natural nations and God will want them to know what Jesus did to redeem us and to get the victory over death. Those people won't know what it was like to live under the curse like we do. But then Satan gets allowed to try and deceive those nations for a time, and then the kingdom age ends and goes into eternity after that. Eternity is a long time. I really don't have any idea what God has planned for the next age, let alone for the rest of eternity. If there are ages to come, I'm betting that they will be to the praise of His glory as well. And there might be new creatures that God is going to show what He did, the exceeding riches of His grace and His kindness toward us through Christ. Verse 8 says, 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. Paul wants us to understand that God did all of this of Himself, not because of anything that we did. We had nothing to offer God to make atonement for our own sin. The sacrifices that they offered up in the Old Testament were not sufficient to pay for the sins of the people. Hebrews 10 says, For the law, having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? Because that the worshipers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year. for it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins. Every bull and every goat that gave up its life on the altar was a reminder that the sins of man must be atoned for, but they were not the atonement. They were a shadow, a picture of the perfect sacrifice that would cleanse away the sins of the people but was yet to come, that God would provide himself a lamb, perfect and sinless. Jesus Christ is that perfect lamb. and we are saved through faith in Him. It is the gift of God. We do nothing to add to it. It's all by His grace. It says, lest any man should boast, man always wants to be able to point to his own works and say, look how good I did. He wants to hear the praise of his deeds so bad, he'll do it himself. Isn't that right, honey? Say, look how I did the breaks. I did a good job, didn't I? He gets all the praise for this work. Proverbs 27 says, But we have nothing to boast of in regards to our salvation. It's God having grace on us when we were dead in sin. God quickened us by His Son, Jesus Christ, and gave us a new life. The old man couldn't save himself. There was nothing he could do. And because of that, God had to do everything. And man has nothing of which to boast. But God deserves all the glory. When Jesus gave us this new life, He also gave us a new purpose. Instead of walking after the course of this world, we could walk after the Spirit of God in Christ because we've been given a new nature. Verse 10 says, As we noted earlier, the Ephesians are walking in these good works. And Paul gives thanks for them and their testimony But Paul made no mistake when he said that their salvation was a gift and not of works. Christians are meant to have good works. It is foreordained that we should walk in good works, but those works are not a prerequisite for salvation. But the relationship between good works and salvation in the Scripture is confusing to many people. Paul says we should walk in good works. So does that mean that a Christian is only saved if he is producing good works? A lot of Christians would say yes, if a man claims to be a saved believer in Christ, but is not living a life that would glorify God with good works, that man must not really be saved. Or they might say that it is possible for a saved man to backslide and fall into sin, but that man would have to be restored to repentance and good works before he died, or else he was not truly saved to begin with, or he lost his salvation because he failed to maintain good works. We talked about this some before when we discussed predestination and two opposing views of Calvinism and Arminianism, how they disagreed on why God chose some people to be saved and not others, but they both agreed that these chosen people had to produce good works or they weren't chosen. People will point to passages like James 2 where he says, And verse 20 says, We compare that to what Paul wrote here in Ephesians 2 where he said, These passages seem to be completely at odds with one another. How can Paul say that salvation is a gift by faith and not of works when James says that a man is justified by works and not only faith? This seems like a contradiction, and not just a little contradiction, but the whole foundation of the Christian faith kind of depends on what a man must do in order to be saved. If it's works that saves us, then we need to make sure we know what works we have to do and do them. But if it is faith alone, then to what purpose would James say that we are justified by works? Martin Luther, who essentially started the Reformation when he understood that the Bible taught that salvation was by faith alone, did not care much for the book of James. Some have concluded from his writings that he didn't think it should be in the Bible. I don't know if he went that far, but he wrote this about it. He said, In a word, St. John's Gospel and his first epistle, St. Paul's epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and St. Peter's first epistles are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salvatory for you to know, even if you were never to see or hear any other book or doctrine. Therefore, St. James's epistle is really an epistle of straw compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. Most Christians will not come to the conclusion that the Bible is in error, though some certainly will reject outright parts of the Scripture that they don't agree with. We know that God has inspired the entire Bible, and every word of God is pure, and we believe that the Bible is perfectly preserved for us in the King James. The Word of God isn't some mystical thing floating in heaven. that we can only get imperfect representations of on earth. If God is able to preserve us and to resurrect us, then He can certainly preserve and resurrect His Word. So the Christian has to find a way to understand both of these teachings, as both are the Word of God, and God can't be contradicting Himself. And most Christians think that they have a clever way of reconciling these different ideas. That salvation is a free gift, not of works, like Paul says. And that a man has to have works to be justified. And it is not just of faith, as James says. And what is this clever idea? They basically mash faith and works together into one thing. They'll point to James' statement that faith without works is dead. And they say, see, a true living faith has to have works. So faith and works aren't contradictions. In their view, you can't just believe that Jesus died for your sins. But if you don't have outward works to go along with that belief, then your faith is dead and not a true saving faith. Does this really reconcile Paul and James? They seem to think so, but I disagree. Paul makes it clear in other writings that faith and works are not the same thing, and that they can't be mixed together. James talks about Abraham's justification. He says, But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect? and the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness, and he was called the friend of God." This is unambiguous. James says Abraham was justified by works. But Paul also speaks of Abraham's justification in Romans. In Romans 4 he says, What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found? For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory, but not before God. For what saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered." If James and Paul are supposed to be saying the same thing, they are doing a really bad job of it. James says Abraham was justified by works, plain as day. Paul says Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. He says that if you work for it, it's not grace, it's a debt. Paul said that salvation was a free gift in Ephesians, not of grace, not of works. And here he says to him that worketh not, but believeth. His faith is counted for righteousness. You can't have faith without works if faith automatically has to have works. Yet, many Christians will just adopt a sort of cognitive dissonance about faith and works, and believe that these apparently contradictory passages are just saying the same thing in different ways, or that you have to take the sense of each of them and kind of average it together, and you get faith works, where faith and works are just the same thing. But we believe that these two passages are not saying the same thing, but they are not contradictions. How else could you resolve this apparent conflict between James and Paul? The only way that makes sense to me is to understand that James and Paul are talking about two different justifications. Paul is talking about Abraham's justification in Genesis 15. It says, "...after these things, the word of the Lord came unto Abraham in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield and an exceeding great reward. And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed, and lo, one born in my house is mine heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir. And he brought him forth abroad and said, Look now toward heaven and tell the stars if thou be able to number them. And he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness. Abraham didn't do anything, no works of righteousness. He just believed God, and God counted that faith, just simple faith for righteousness. This is exactly justification by faith alone. When Paul says in Ephesians that salvation is a gift by grace through faith and not of works, this is what he's talking about. God said it. Abraham believes it. There's nothing more to do. Abraham is going to receive this promise that his seed is going to be multiplied like the stars of heaven. But James is referring to a different event in Genesis. God had given Abraham a son, Isaac, just as He said He would. And that son would become the great people that God had said He would make out of Abraham. But then God did something strange. He told Abraham that he was to take his son Isaac and offer him as a burnt sacrifice. Abraham surely couldn't understand why God would do this. But he did what God told him to do and trusted that God would somehow still fulfill the promise through Isaac as he said, even if that meant God would have to resurrect Isaac. In Genesis 22 it says, And they came to the place which God had told them of. And Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. Abraham was willing to obey God no matter what it cost him. And praise God he didn't have Abraham go through with the sacrifice. It says, And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham! And he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him. For now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-Jireh, as it is said to this day, in the mount of the Lord it shall be seen. And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time, and said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore. And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed my voice. God told Abraham that because he had done this thing, that God was going to bless him in blessing and multiply him in multiplying, like he was going to get a double portion of the promise that he had already given him when Abraham simply believed God. And James says, this is Abraham being justified by works being added to his faith. Abraham already had been justified by faith when God tested him and said that because he feared God, not just believed Him, but feared Him and did not withhold his son from Him, that God was going to give him an even greater blessing because Abraham obeyed Him. This is how we reconcile Paul and James, not by trying to take two different things and make them the same. Faith is not works, and works is not faith. Faith should cause us to fear God like Abraham and produce the works that God desires us to do, but they aren't the same thing. Rather than trying to mash them together and make a mess out of both of them, we need to understand that there is more than one type of justification. There's more than one type of salvation. One is by faith alone, apart from works, and is a free gift. One is by works added to our faith and is a reward. These things cannot be mixed together without confusing faith and works. Understanding the difference between these two salvations will clear up a lot of questions that people have about faith and works and what their relationship is. These salvations have a different purpose. One is for unbelievers to be reconciled to God, to save them from eternal damnation in the lake of fire, and to make them fit for the second salvation. This is by faith alone. A man that is dead in his sin cannot do anything to give himself life. God had to do the work through Jesus Christ. And we receive the righteousness of Christ through merely believing that it is done. Jesus said on the cross, it is finished. When you believe that Jesus, His work on the cross paid for your sins, There was nothing else to do. And God made you a new creature. And you get all the benefits of that free salvation. And one of those benefits is that you get an opportunity now to serve God and to be able to please Him because you aren't doing works in your own righteousness now to try to prove that you are worthy of salvation. You are doing works in Christ's righteousness. It is Christ working through you, and these works are acceptable to God, and God wants to reward you for doing those works. And that is the second salvation, at the judgment seat of Christ, when believers who are saved by faith alone will stand before the Lord and give an account of what they did after that free gift was given to them. God expects you to use what He has given you to glorify Him. And if you don't, He's not going to be pleased. But that doesn't negate the free gift of salvation that He already paid for and gave to everyone who will believe. There's nothing in the Bible that implies that a saved Christian will automatically have good works. If a believer doesn't have good works, he will still be resurrected on the last day, just as Jesus promised. In John 6, verse 40, it says, And this is the will of Him that sent Me, that every one which seeth the Son and believeth on Him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day. If we don't believe on Jesus, we won't be saved on the last day. John 12 says, He that rejecteth Me and receiveth not My words hath one that judgeth him. The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day. And I believe that once you accept that free gift by faith, there's nothing you could do that would cause you to lose it. We usually refer to this as once saved, only saved. You get saved one time, and then you're saved forever. And when you believe that this salvation is not dependent on works, some people call it easy-believism. Many people reject this idea. even though Paul affirms that we are justified without works, because they don't know what to do about all the other verses that say we need to have works, like James said. They say that believing in Jesus for salvation alone and ignoring the need for works provides people with a license to sin. If God would not require you to have good works to be saved, then what would stop Christians from sinning all the time? But the answer to this isn't to add works to faith to prove you are really saved, because this makes Paul a liar. The answer is to understand that Christians are going to be accountable for their sins at the judgment seat of Christ, and that being found faithful on that day is also called a salvation in the Bible. And a once-saved, only-saved Christian needs to be saved again on that day if he doesn't want to reap the rewards of a carnal Christian. 1 Corinthians 3 says, Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so is by fire. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. He says that you are the temple of God. How can you be the temple of God if you aren't saved? And he says that our works will be tried as believers. The temple of God, the works that we do will be examined by fire. And those works that burn up are going to be what defiles the temple of God, which we are. So if we defile our temple with bad works, Paul says that there is a destruction coming, but he says that nevertheless we shall be saved, yet so is by fire. Amen. I know Sopec preached on this a while back, but when it comes up in the text, you have to preach it again. Amen. We just need to remember that God's gift of free salvation is not dependent on our works, period. There's nothing we ever did to merit it, nothing we could ever do to merit it. It's only by the grace of God. But once we get saved by the grace of God, he expects us to do some work. Amen. Father God, Lord, we thank you so much, God, for your word, Lord. We thank you, God, for the understanding that you've given us, God, Lord, for those who gave it to us, Lord, that helped us to understand your word, God. We thank you for teachers, Lord, who brought these things to light, God, that helped us to know what it is that you have done for us, God, and what it is that you ask us to do for you, Lord. And God, we just thank you, Father, again, for your word. We pray, God, that you would just help us, Lord, to understand it better, help us to have our eyes of our understanding enlightened, Lord, to know the things by faith that you ask us to receive, Lord, help us to receive them. And God, I thank you for these people, Lord. Thank you for their patience and thank you for give me an opportunity to preach tonight. I pray you'd bless the rest of our fellowship tonight. It's in Jesus' name I pray, amen.