From Spiritual Deadness to Life in Christ

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And you were dead before this happened by grace you've been saved. He made us alive together with Christ down in verses five and six before that happened. We were dead in the trespasses and sins which in which once walked according to the age of this world according to the prince of the power of the air. [00:21:02]

So, Father, as we tackle one more time the deadness of dead and what it really implies about our former condition from which we desperately needed to be made alive saved, show us what we were like, what other people who are not yet in Christ are like, and so fill us with gratitude and passion to lead others into this experience that we've enjoyed. [01:05:28]

How are we dead? And we said last time that it isn't just that we are physically unable to walk around. We are. It isn't that we are volitionally unable to make decisions. We do. It isn't that we are intellectually unable to use our minds. We do. Or that we are emotionally incapacitated and can't feel. [02:25:36]

It means as we saw last time that in all of those things, in our bodies, in our minds, in our wills, in our emotions, there is a deadness. And the deadness we saw, for example, in chapter 5, has to do with darkness. Let no one deceive you with empty words or because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. [03:34:00]

So, if you look at this new covenant promise that has to happen for any of us to be saved, Jesus came to buy the new covenant promises for us. I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone hard, dead from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. [05:03:44]

The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to God, God's law. So, there's the does not, and then it becomes cannot. Indeed, it cannot. And those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, Paul could add, like the rest of mankind, but you are in the spirit. [07:11:44]

The mindset of the flesh, which is what everybody is in who has not been made alive and brought into the sphere and control of the spirit, the mindset of the flesh not only does not submit to God's law, it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. In other words, our deadness and our blindness and our hardness is a spiritual inability. [07:38:19]

The natural person does not submit to the things of the spirit of God, does not, for they are folly to him. That's what it means to be dead. You open your good eyes, you open your good mind, you open your good evolution, and what you see is foolishness in the cross. And when you see only foolishness and nothing that is compellingly attractive and beautiful and glorious, you are locked into darkness. [08:31:14]

So, I come back and I say that this dead here does not mean that we're physically unable to do things. It does not mean that we are volitionally unable to decide things. It does not mean that we are emotionally unable to feel things. It means that in all of our physical motion, all of our intellectual thinking, all of our volitional deciding, all of our affectional feeling, there is a deadness. [09:19:20]

And the deadness means you can't see, you can't feel, you can't value, you can't assess properly the beauty of Christ, the glory of the gospel, the great weight of the riches of grace, and therefore they will always look foolish, shall always be a stumbling block, and we will always be locked in to our inability to believe. We must be made alive. [09:49:12]

Nobody you love has any hope of salvation unless God makes them alive, which leads me to think next time we will tackle the question, all right, if that's the way we were and God made us alive, how might we participate in other people becoming alive? Is there any help in Ephesians? There is for what we should do to help other people experience life. [10:26:08]

The transformation from death to life is a work of God, not something we can achieve on our own. It is by God's grace that we are made alive with Christ, and this should fill us with gratitude and a desire to lead others to this life-giving experience. [00:25:52]

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