The Power of Grace
Notes
Transcript
Handout
The Problem
The Problem
Human beings are caught in a cycle of sin, ANXIETY and DEATH. v. 1-3
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,
How are we already dead?
We think Paul is talking about a spiritual reality, but that’s not it. He’s talking about the fact that mortality works back into our lives to kill us in the here and now.
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.
This sounds like we are enslaved by our passions—our sinful nature—but that’s quite what’s going on. It’s still about the power of death.
Flesh = sarx, which Paul always uses to refer to our mortal nature. For Paul, it is our mortal nature that enslaves us to our cravings.
After all, what is our most powerful craving?
3 weeks without food
3 days without water
6 minutes without air
Which craving is the most powerful?
Our cravings are exaggerated by our anxieties about not getting enough. Mortality makes us hoard.
For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death.
This is where that cycle comes from.
The powers of this world exploit our ANXIETY to enslave us to SIN. v.2, 12-13
in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
This is not one person, but two.
spirit = air. Which spirit is associated withe the air?
Jupiter, the patron saint of the Roman Empire.
The spirit works in them to incite them to idol worship and disobedience.
This is why Paul describes them the way he does later:
remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
God didn’t exclude the Gentiles. They chose another power. This is the story of Genesis 4-11.
When we try to fight the powers ourselves, we only sink DEEPER into SIN. v. 3, 11, 14, 16
This is what happened to the Jews. Remember what Paul says:
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.
The Jews ended up just as enslaved to their mortal natures. They reacted to the powers with fear and anxiety, and they tried to hoard their status as God’s people. Notice what Paul says in v. 11:
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands)—
Why does it matter that the circumcision is “done by human hands”? Because that’s how the Jews described idolatry. They cared more about their national, religious, ethnic identity. They wanted to keep everyone else out.
In verse 14 Paul calls the law a “dividing wall of hostility.”
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,
But it’s God’s law. Did he make it hostile? No:
by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
The Jews turned the law into something they could use to keep the Gentiles out—and in so doing, they served death. This is why BOTH needed to be reconciled.
So, in summary:
We are caught in a whirlpool of sin, anxiety and death.
And there’s a monster in the middle, pulling us under.
Oh, and the whirlpool is also quicksand: the more you struggle, the more you sink.
The Solution
The Solution
God breaks the cycle by giving us LIFE while we are still in SIN. v. 4-5, 13, 17-18
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.
Remember the problem: sin leads to death leads to sin.
You can’t get free from sin without getting free from death. You can’t get free from death without getting free from sin.
It’s like, you need experience to get the job, but you can’t get the job without experience. So what’s the solution?
God gives us life before we gave him any reason to offer it.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.
This willingness to give us life when we hadn’t earned it is generosity, or grace. Grace is HUGE for three reasons. First, it breaks the cycle of sin and death. Second:
Because God gives life for free, we cannot HOARD or CONTROL it. v. 8-9, 14-15
This is what the Jews tried to do—they thought they could control God’s life by patrolling the wall that separated the living from the dead to keep the Gentiles out.
So God destroyed the wall. How?
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.”
Jesus went outside the wall to die under a curse with the lawbreakers.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace,
When God raised him from the dead, he brought Jesus back through the wall to the living, and broke it down.
Now we know that life is available to all of us, not because we were on the right side, but because God is generous.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.
God unites us under a new power founded on LOVE and GRACE, not sin and death. v. 19-22
Back to Love
Back to Love
Our job is to be the TAPESTRY that proves God’s GRACE to the world. v. 6-10
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
To understand what this means, we have to rewind.
And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
Why did God raise us up? To demonstrate his grace to the coming ages. To prove that your anxiety is not the truth.
We testify through the fact that we are a motley crew, united by God’s generosity.
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
We is plural, but handiwork (piece of art?) is singular. There is one handiwork, created in Christ Jesus, and we become a part of it when we enter Christ.