RESPONSIVE, USEFUL, GRATEFUL

Ephesians 2:1-10

Do you remember when someone dear to you -- sweetheart, child, best friend -- was desperately ill and getting no better? The surgery needed was itself high-risk. The illness of the patient plus the riskiness of the procedure seemed to render recovery almost impossible. You sat in the hospital waiting room, watching the hands of the clock move more slowly than a caterpillar trying to cross a four-lane highway. Then the surgeon emerged and told you the good news: the person unspeakably dear to you was out of danger. "Phew!" You exhaled noisily, so profound was your relief. The change in your dear one from danger to deliverance couldn't fail to produce an audible exclamation.

On one of my many trips to the Maritimes I spoke with a farmer on P.E.I. who had been a sailor on convoy duty during World War II. His corvette was torpedoed. He and a handful of crew-members were huddled on a life-raft. Soon they realized that while they had dodged death in the initial explosion they were not going to avoid death from the icy North Atlantic. "All of a sudden", the farmer told me with brightened eyes and animated voice, forty-five years after the event, "all of a sudden we saw a Canadian destroyer racing toward us; we knew were going to be saved." As the older man spoke with me I could hear the relief in his voice, the exultation, the lifted spirits as he recalled the turn from danger to deliverance.

Every time I read the second chapter of Paul's letter to the Christians in Ephesus I hear once more the relief in his voice, the exultation, the lifted spirits as he recalls the turn from danger to deliverance. Again and again I hear him say, "Phew! Just in time! Just when our situation seemed hopeless! What a relief!" This is what I hear every time I read, "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us...". The key word is "but"; "but God". The "but" is crucial. Up to this point the apostle had been speaking of the universal human condition before God. He hadn't exaggerated a thing; he had merely told the truth. Yet the truth about the human condition before God had been a frightful diagnosis.

As we read of humankind's predicament before God we must not think that the apostle is referring to "bad" people in the sense of people who are manifestly "worse-behaved" than we. He's not talking about cannibals in the malarial jungles; nor about the nasty people who are wantonly violent and cruel in our urban jungles; nor about lurid sensationalists whose kinky appetites are written up on pages one and two of the daily newspaper. He is speaking, rather, of the condition of every man, every woman before God.

I: -- Never one to beat about the bush, Paul uses one pithy word to speak of humankind outside Christ: dead. "Dead in trespasses and sins", he says in the first verse of Ephesians 2. When he says "dead", he is speaking literally, not metaphorically. To be sure, we use the word "dead" metaphorically every day. "Anglophone politicians are dead in Quebec." "A pitcher without a curve-ball is dead in the major leagues." We mean that Anglophone politicians can't get elected in Quebec; pitchers without a curve-ball can't strike out batters in the major leagues. We are only speaking metaphorically. But when the apostle insists that outside the One who is Resurrection and Life we are dead before God he is speaking literally.

Now the characteristic of anything dead is that it is unresponsive. A corpse is invariably unresponsive. However much we talk to it, wave at it, prod it, it remains unresponsive. To say that we are dead before God is simply to say that we are unresponsive to the Holy One himself.

"Dead in trespasses and sins", says the apostle. "Trespass" is deviation from the right path, transgression of a known boundary. "Sin", according to the most frequent New Testament usage of the word, is falling short, falling short of what God has created us to be, displaying a warped, even grotesque, version of that image of God we were meant to display. The first word tells us we are rebels; the second, that we are deformed. Our spiritual rebellion and deformity are no small matter, however; they are lethal. Before God we are dead. We are spiritually inert, insensitive, unresponsive to the One who has made us and longs for us.

We must understand something crucial here. Paul is favouring us with our spiritual diagnosis; he is not commenting at all on our psychological condition. He hasn't said a word about psychology. We who are unresponsive to God may be "well-integrated", in today's psychological jargon, or we may be more fragmented than "together". All he has said so far is that we are spiritually inert: we have no acquaintance with God, no throb at the mention of Jesus Christ, no joyful recall of moments when the Spirit of God nudged us, no cemented-in conviction of Christian verities, no glad assurance that what Jesus Christ did for us centuries ago he has also done in us now. None of this.

It's important that we not confuse our psychological condition with our spiritual condition. It's important in that so many contemporary preachers make this confusion regularly. Many contemporary preachers like to draw attention to people's psychological needs or deficiencies, magnify these, and then plug in the gospel. "Are you lonely? Get to know Jesus." Surely the sceptic will reply, "Why not get to know anyone, someone, a friend?" "Are you depressed? Find Jesus." Why not find the underlying cause of the depression and treat it?

Two things must be said here. In the first place, no magnification of someone's psychological condition acquaints that person with his spiritual condition. No magnification of how I feel can of itself give me the truth of where I am or what I am with respect to God. In the second place, to confuse the two matters is to suggest that the gospel is nothing more than a psychological fix-me-up which happens to employ a religious vocabulary. The sceptic will reply once more, "Forget the religious vocabulary; just give me the psychological fix-me-up." When Paul speaks, he speaks of our spiritual condition, our situation before God.

The apostle isn't finished speaking. There's more to the diagnosis. We who are spiritually inert "follow the course of this world". He means that the value-system we have bought into unthinkingly and internalized uncritically; this value-system which we think is the soul of truth and reality and commonsense is in fact nothing more than another aspect of the world's deadliness. We "follow the course of this world" insofar as we have been seduced by it; we have been seduced by it insofar as it never occurred to us to examine it; it never occurred to us to examine it insofar as we had no reason to think there might be another, a better. We had no reason to think insofar as a corpse doesn't think at all. We "follow the course of this world".

The apostle still isn't finished. He insists that we "live in the passions of our flesh". I know you'll be disappointed to learn what this means, since it has nothing to do with pornography. When Paul speaks of "the flesh" he means human life, including decent, moral human life, lived without reference to God; human life without any vertical dimension whatsoever; human existence turned in on itself, preoccupied with itself. By "passion" the apostle means that we are driven by all of this. The driving force of our existence is our self-furthering selfism. We are taken up with ourselves; and being taken up with ourselves we are "taken in" by ourselves. Selfism is the driving force of our self. We live in the passions of the flesh.

The result of all of this will surprise no one. The result, says the apostle, is that we are children of wrath; children of God's wrath. We are the recipients of God's anger.

God's wrath or anger is not ill-temper; not peevishness; not touchiness. God's wrath is God's personal, righteous opposition to sin in any form. God's wrath is his righteous resolve never to wink at sin, and finally not to tolerate it.

To sum it all up. Dead in trespasses and sins, we are unresponsive to God. Unresponsive to God, we are highly responsive to "the course of this world", the value-system we absorb uncritically. With this now deep inside us our selfism is fuelled constantly; in fact we are driven by it. The bottom line of it all is this: God reacts by opposing us in our insensitivity to him.

II: -- And then the wonderful exclamation of relief! "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us...". What alone alters the human condition is the God who is rich in mercy, the God whose love is oceanic.

Have you ever asked yourself why God bothers with us at all? Why does he bother with us when we are those who defy him, deny him, frustrate him? Insofar as any "reason" can be brought forward Paul piles up four words which are closely related: love, mercy, grace, kindness. Actually, mercy, grace and kindness are aspects of that "great love with which he loved us". Mercy is love poured out upon those who do not deserve such love. Mercy is love forever remembering people who deserve to be forgotten. Grace is love remaining love, love remaining faithful to itself despite innumerable frustrations. Kindness is love supplying specific need. Little wonder that Paul enthuses about the "great love with which God loved us."

Then what about God's wrath? God's wrath isn't the opposite of his love; God's wrath is his love, his love burning hot, his love shaking the sleeper awake, his love exposing rationalization for the silly self-deception that it is. God's wrath is his love frightening complacent people just because their terror is their only hope. Since God is love, his wrath has to be an aspect of his love. Then if you and I are possessed of any depth and discernment at all we should thank God for every time that God has been angry with us, for his anger is simply a sharpened touch of his love upon us.

What's more, were God devoid of wrath he would suffer from a character-deficiency so dreadful that we could never adore him. But he who is possessed of great love is deficient in nothing; his wrath, a necessary dimension of his character,is his love jolting us out of our complacency. Then we must thank him that he can get as angry with us as we need him to be.

The God whose love is oceans deep; what does God in his love do? Paul tells us that believing people are those whom God's love has "made alive with Christ". Just as Jesus was raised from the dead by nothing less than a mighty intervention of God, the selfsame mighty intervention of God has raised me, quickened this corpse, made me alive. And just as the distinguishing characteristic of a corpse is unresponsiveness, so the distinguishing characteristic of believers, now alive, is responsiveness to God.

Responsiveness to God entails more than we have time to spell out, but it must entail at least our answering love for God and his people, conviction of the truth of the gospel, assurance of our inclusion in the provision God has made in the cross for sinners, a desire to pray, confidence in the Spirit of God as the secret efficacy we can trust to render scripture vivid and testimony life-giving.

In addition, responsiveness to God must entail some experience of victory over the sin which dogs us. Early-day Methodists were fond of saying that they had first-hand experience of something which the church seems largely to have forgotten: God can do something about sin beyond merely pardoning it. You must have noticed that the "deliverance movements" (like Alcoholics Anonymous) which thrive on the perimeter of the church always hold out release to the bound. The person who is enslaved to anything, whether in her body or in her mind, doesn't want merely to be told that she is pardoned, doesn't want her hand held, doesn't want counselling; she wants release. I am convinced that the deliverance movements on the perimeter of the church are God's reminder that the gospel continues to be that power of God which lends believing people victory.

"But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, made us alive together with Christ." The corpse has been quickened, the insensitive rendered responsive.

But of course to be rendered responsive to God is also to be rendered useful in the world. For this reason Paul insists that believing people are newly created in Christ for good works in which we are to walk. "Walk" is Hebrew shorthand for "characteristic behaviour". Earlier we had "walked in trespasses and sins", characteristic behaviour of the godless. Now we are to walk in those good works which God has foreordained for us: characteristic behaviour of those who want to be followers of that Son whose obedience to his Father is unbroken.

One last matter. The apostle maintains that we whom God's rich mercy and great love have resurrected from the dead; we whom God's kindness has rendered responsive to him and useful to the world -- we are God's demonstration project. Like any craftsman God persuades onlookers to become "buyers" by displaying his craftsmanship. Paul insists that God intends to "show, (ie, show forth) the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." Anyone whom God has raised from the dead and rendered alive; that is, any Christian at all is someone whom God can show, display, as evidence of the effectiveness of grace.

Then with the apostle you and I must surely find ourselves today inhaling sharply and exhaling noisily -- "phew!"-- when we recall that we were dead, that we are now alive, and are commissioned to advertise the very truth and grace which rendered us responsive to God, useful in the world, and grateful for evermore.

Victor A. Shepherd                                                                                   September 1993