Lord, you have filled this world with beauty. And I do want to thank you for artists who can see that beauty clearly, and with a train skill can paint, shape, sing, or play that truth to us in ways that opens our imagination to the glory of you and the glory of your world. Keep them attentive, ready to applaud the wonder of your works, enable them to find in creation in our stories, in our life, in what is. Signs of your love that direct us to you. And now as we open your word, we pray that the scriptures would lead us to worship, to understand and to lives that reflect that love and glory and beauty as it is found in Jesus Christ. We pray in His holy name. Amen. I need to probably remind you that Christians for the millennia generally together say, amen or amen at the end of their prayers as an indication both of consciousness and agreement. So we say, it's just so much more worshipable, don't you find? This morning we're going to be reflecting on Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 through 7. And we are looking through this letter, verse by verse, or just looking at portions of the scriptures together throughout the fall. This morning I'm taking my inspiration to reflect on this from a great band called The Eagles. And one of their best songs is called Life in the Fast Lane. Which hopefully you're a student enough of the Eagles that you'll be humming that song the rest of your afternoon. But you remember Life in the Night? See, this is something about May. I still have to read it because I know the tune, but I can't remember the words. I remember Life in the Fast Lane blowing in burn and blinded by thirst. They didn't see the stop sign. Took a turn for the words. I want you to see this morning how Paul says, that's basically a picture of our world, not just an unfortunate couple driving too fast. Ephesians 2. Paul says, ask for you. You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live. When you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who was now at work and those who were disobedient, all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our single nature, a simple nature, and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. 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. 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. This is the word of the Lord. Since this is sort of the culmination of our art festival, I thought it would be appropriate to begin this sermon with a high-brow art illustration. There's a film that came out two years ago that tells a story of a journey. A journey as significant as that of Odysseus returning to his home. I refer, of course, to the Forwellie Brothers film, Dumb and Dumber. And if you know this film, you know that the basic idea is that these two guys who are not bright have a briefcase full of cash that they're trying to return to Colorado. So they leave, on US-80, if you've ever driven it, it goes from, it basically goes from Pennsylvania all the way to California. They're on their way on US-80 to go to Denver, Colorado. And they get about halfway there and they make a pit stop in the middle of the night and they switch drivers. And Dumber takes the wheel. And he's very sleepy. And when he gets back on the interstate, he takes the exit that goes east. So for five hours at 90 miles an hour in a truck that looks like a dog. He drives as fast as he can. And then his buddy wakes up. He wakes up and he looks around and they've just passed Boise, Idaho. He wakes up and he looks out at the flatlands of the Midwest. And he says, I thought the Rockies would be rockier somehow. To which Dumber says, yeah, you know that John Denver. So what he was so worked up about, you know? Well, they, of course, realized that they are racing in the wrong direction. The Bible says, the Apostle Paul says, that is exactly what is happening in all of human history. That is what is happening in all of human culture. It is what is basically the story of the world. This is a world that is racing foolishly in the wrong direction. Now what he wants to say here is the way Christians celebrate the goodness of God is by saying, on the one hand, we have to, we have to say this. We really do believe the world is moving in the wrong direction. But he says here, and it's beautifully put in that last verse we read, verse seven. He says that in the coming ages, God wants to show the incomparable riches of His grace to us and His kindness and Christ Jesus. He is saying, a Christian is someone who actually has not only changed directions, but for all eternity in the coming ages, you will never be able to exhaust the glory of just how much God has changed our direction, just how much God has changed your life. And what I want you to see this morning, what Paul does is he says, a Christian is someone who not only experiences a rescue from God that changes your direction, but you begin now, you begin now to glory in what he's doing in your life. And he actually says, and you're never going to stop doing it in the coming ages, the kindness he showed you, the change of direction he gave you, will always blow your mind. It's a powerful picture. The more clear it gets, the more you get to heaven, you don't just move on, you'll always be amazed at the direction the change you brought into your life. Now, Paul is writing to Christians. Now, whether you're a Christian or not, I hope you can enter into this because whether it's something you need to consider that God offers you or whether you're a Christian and you need to look at this as a way to go deeper in your faith. Paul is writing to Christians and he's saying, listen, let's talk about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Now, the first thing he says is this, we, you, were dead. We were dead. To describe what it means to be in the fast way, moving with the world, he says, you're dead. Now, dead is a powerful metaphor. There's nothing like a corpse. You know, if you want to talk about powerlessness, if you want to talk about inability to change your situation, if you want to talk about what does it really mean to be moving in a stream? I love the translation of this verse from J. B. Phillips and his translation into this to me. He says, we drifted along the stream of this world's ideas. And here we read it this way, verse two. You used to live. And by the way, the word live here translated in the idea is actually a Greek verb for walk, which is actually a much, I think, a better metaphor. They're trying to help people who can't understand metaphor sometimes when they translate these to the Bible. I think walk is a pretty easy one. I don't know why it got translated into live, but it is describing the idea of being in this world and living as walking. That is, you're moving. You're moving with the world. You're in it string. What do you call it? Swimming or walking? Hopefully you get the imagery that your decisions unconsciously, your decisions consciously are linked to a great direction that is moving in the wrong direction. He said, you used to walk in the ways of the world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air. You were dead in your sins and trespasses. And what Paul is telling us is that it doesn't matter who you are, unless you are in a vital relationship with Jesus Christ, you are walking in a direction you are swimming in a stream of living death. You're moving in a direction that is going to have a horrible end unless you move to the only source of joy in life. Now, I want to give you an illustration that is uncharacteristic for me. I actually, one time read an essay trying to understand what chaos math was. I didn't really understand what it meant by the end. Maybe some of you do, but I came up with a great concept from chaos theory. And it's this. Chaos math talks about something they call mathematicians. They call phase lock. Let me read this description. I got out of this essay. It is the principle that atoms, molecules, and people function in link cycles. As an independent organism where feedback takes place immediately, iteration takes place immediately and effectively. A phase locked group begins to take on the look of a fractal equation where each tiny part reflects the nature and shape of the larger ones. Now, let me draw this out of chaos math theory. When I say, what Paul was saying here, if you were to put it in chaos, math translation is, your phase locked to the world. No matter how much you try to be an individual, you know, I used to live in Greenwich Village. And I would meet all these people in the East Village who would say, I'm here because I'm an individual. And I wouldn't say it, but I would think so. That's why you're dying your hair. The same shade of purple is all the other individuals here. And piercing yourself in all the weird places, just like all the other, in other words, you can talk about your individuality, all you want. The fact is, your phase locked into a group that's part of the world. You know, people say, you know, I'm an independent thinker. And that's why I'm a conservative. I'm going against the liberal stream, but you're just floating in the conservative stream, or you say, you know, I'm not a conservative. I'm a free thinker. I'm a liberal. And so you're floating in the liberal. You know, you're just in another stream, phase locked to another group. Or you say, you know what, those labels don't work anymore. We're post-ideological. So now you're phase locked to all the other people who are post-ideological. The fact is, it doesn't really matter in this world. You're going to find yourself powerfully drawn into a stream unless you're not. You're going to be in a stream, some kind of stream. It may be different than all the other streams. It may not be many people in the stream with you, but there are many, many streams in this world. And they are moving in their own direction. There's only one other direction. And that's what the gospel's all about. Jesus Christ came into the world. Now, it's not just that the way culture goes. Paul says, there's actually a satanic. There's a satanic. There's a spiritual dimension to why we flow the way we flow. You have an enemy. He calls him the devil, the Satan. He doesn't even use, by the way, a masculine or feminine modifier to describe the noun. It's a neuter. It's almost a depersonalized person. A malicious intelligence. And that makes it a little crazy to some of you. The idea that people still believe in the devil or the Paul believe in the devil. But you just need to understand that what you're saying is, listen, evil, holocaust, they don't just like whoops happen. You know, whoops, holocaust, no. There's a malicious intelligence that orchestrates evil. Not only on the grand global scale, but some of the ways your choices lead the disaster in your life. I don't think that's so crazy. All right. There's an evil intelligence at work in what's going on. And he actually calls him the prince of the power of the air. That's the old King James, which is how I remember everything. But, you know, the ruler of the power of the air. And that's a great, that's a great picture. I'm glad they left that metaphor in there because what it really says is that influence that face locks you into so many ways of the world's thinking. All right. That influence is as immediate to your life as the air you're breathing. It's kind of a simple picture, isn't it? You are being affected by these things that move you in the wrong direction with the culture, with the groups. They're drawing you and it's a satanic and it's as immediate as the air. You breathe. And the result, Paul says, moving on in to the third verse, is you gratify the cravings of your simple nature. And you follow its desires and thought. You gratify the cravings of your simple nature. Now it's not saying that everyone is as bad as you can possibly be. It's not saying that you've become the most horrible person in the universe. That's not what he's saying. He's simply saying that you're powerless to not reflect the brokenness of the world moving in the wrong direction. No matter how great your intentions are and you may have great intentions. I remember reading this article on the newspaper four or five years ago and I saved it because it was just one of the most extraordinary things that I've ever read. It was an interview and one of the Sunday magazine supplements you know. They had a picture of all these 20 something kids. They're about 10 of them. And what they all had in common is that they were the kids of beat poets from the 50s and 60s. They, some reporter went and chased them all down. You know, the ones that had kids, they chased them down. And what they all had in common is that they were all in therapy, all of them. And they all hated their parents. And he went through and it was almost painful to read because he went through their stories and he basically would go through the poet's ideals. You know, I want to live a life that's rid of the hypocrisy of the bourgeois. Where everything is about love and peace. But then they found the people that lived with them. And they said, you know what? They only cared about themselves. They were selfish. You want to talk about hypocrisy? Let me tell you a hypocrisy story. Why am I telling this story? To beat up on the beats, no. Just to say this, the P.J.L. work puts it this way. Everybody wants to clean up the environment. Nobody wants to do the dishes. Nobody, no matter how high your intentions, okay? You can't even live up to your own standards. We will always fall short of our own standards. And the Bible says how much more we were created for God's standards that we fall short of that standard. It's a very, it's a harsh thing to face. Have you faced the reality that the world is not getting better? Do you still think politics are going to improve your life? Do you still think that education is going to lift us out of all of our problems? Please. Look at, look at square in the eye. And face it, you know some artists are actually honest about it. I still remember from college reading Chemo's The Plague. You may read The Plague. Do you remember that one? Remember everybody? It's a little parable about where the world is going. And Chemo says, look, we're all trapped in the city and there's a plague. And he says, there are two kinds of people in the city. Do you remember? There are two kinds of people in the city. You've got the activists. This is like the journalist. The journalist who's committed to changing the situation and he's going to get out of the city. But he can't. He can't get away. And Chemo says, and then you've got the pacifist. This is the people who just kind of sit, wine, have cheese and say, what the heck? And he says, it doesn't really matter whether you're an activist or a pacifist. At the end of the day, all there is is the broken city and death. The Bible is just as stark in terms of where we're headed and where we go. The difference is if we go in on our own. And that's where this story is all together different than Chemo's story. And it's wonderfully described in verse 4, you're dead. You're moving in the wrong direction. This is the story of the world. You can't sit. But he says, and again, I really do hate the quibble with the text. But there's a wonderful little phrase that is in the King James that translates the Greek literally, that gets modified in here. And I think it takes the punch out of it where he says in verse 4, but because of his great love for us, God who is in mercy. God of his mercy made us alive in Christ. Eventually in the original text it says, but God. I love that phrase. That's one of my favorite verses of the whole Bible. It says, listen, this is where we're going. This is the story. But the original says in verse 4, but God. But God who is rich in mercy raised us up into a new life. And Jesus Christ, Paul is reminding you that Christianity is a rescue religion. I don't know anything about the gospel. It is that you must admit on the one hand that the only hope for your life and frankly, the only hope for this world is a God from outside who comes in and rescues. And then you need to be able to accept for yourself regardless of what your hurts or hang-ups or habits are. You've got to be able to believe that good news for yourself and believe that God wants to rescue you because of what he's done in Jesus Christ. Some people have been able to do this when they've after they've gone into other paths. One of my favorite stories is of the great poet, W.H. Auden, trying to find literary references for our art festival. And I've been saving this for five years. I've been wanting to tell you this story because it's one of my favorites. But W.H. Auden, one of our most famous poets. And a lot of time he's celebrated because of his homosexuality. And that's really not the story of his life. Because while Auden pursued that sexuality for many years, he turned away from it for the end of his life. And it was part and parcel of a lot of other paths he tried. He had many years as a Marxist. And then when he saw, at the end of the sea, what was really going on in Marxist countries, he realized that was a dead end. So then he, like a lot of people in New York City at that time, he became a Freudian. And he went into therapy. And after many, many years of that, he realized that he wasn't getting any better. What I actually shook him up was going to the movies. He went to the movies one day. He lived in this neighborhood of Manhattan that was near where I used to live called Yorkville. And in Yorkville, there used to be 40 years ago. There used to be lots and lots of German immigrants who lived there. This is in the 1930s, actually, when this happened. There were a lot of German immigrants who lived there. So he goes to the movies. And when they showed the newsreels before the movie, they were in German. And they showed a little newsreel when the invasion of Poland happened, when the Nazis invaded Poland. The little newsreel was called Zeke in Poland, the war in Poland, the battle in Poland. Now he said to get the movies. It's a nice little 30s comedy. But he's watching the newsreel. And he's there with his neighbors. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You know, the lady across the hall, the people who are just the normal people he loves. And his nice little cozy neighborhood. And when they begin to show the images, people start shattering out in German things like, kill the Poles, kill the Poles, kill the Jews. And Auden, he finally hit bottom right there. He realized the utter hopelessness of us ever fixing this ourselves. And he tells his own story. He says, I walk out of that theater. I went back to my apartment. I fell on my knees and I gave my life to Christ. Because I knew there was absolutely no hope but God. There's no way we'll ever do this for ourselves. Have you come to that point in your life where you finally give it up on all the self-help magazines and said, but God, this is what I need. One last point into this. This story not only tells us, all right, we're dead. We're moving, listen, the world's moving in a direction. And the only hope there is is if God himself enters in and offers a new course, but God. And that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. God became one of us. He took up the same kind of flesh you have. He lived in it. He lived holy and beautiful life. He died for your sin and was raised up into a new life. And the third point I want you to see is not only is the stream running the wrong way, the wrong direction, and the only hope to be turned around. But Paul actually says that turning around can begin now. It's not just something way off in the future, but it's something that happens right now. Look at what he says in verse 6. Verse 6. God raised us up in Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. And notice that's the past tense. He's not talking about the future when someday believers believe we will all be raised. And someday we will sit with him at a great bankling table, resurrected and glorious. We believe that. He uses the past tense to talk about what can be true for you right now. He's actually using the same verbs that are used in verse 20 of the previous chapter, which tell the story of Jesus. And in that verse it talks about Jesus being raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of the father in the heavenly realms. That means in the great dimension of God, the spiritual dimension, the dimension that the reveals. All the dark powers that work in the universe, Christ is lowered. He's seated at the father's right hand as a victor. And what he says here is that you simply accept Jesus, admit your need, receive him into your life. What actually begins to happen is your raise, just as he was raised from the dead, new life raises you. And not only that, just as Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of the father in this new union with him, this new relationship with him. You are seated with him. What does that mean? It means you share in his power and victory over everything at work and an overpowering stream. Is there an overpowering stream? Yes. Are the lures there? Yes. Are there riptides? Yes. But the fact is, if you believe in Jesus, he says you're raised and you're seated with him now. And for all eternity, you're never going to get overseeing just how true that is and how kind and wonderful it is. Tell you one last story. A lot of you know I was on a short trip to Australia, I don't know, a week or two, lost track of time. But I was on a Australia for a couple weeks with my wife. And while I was there, I got to experience rugby. I watched some rugby games and it's because the rugby world cup was taking place in Sydney while I was there. It was very exciting business. You know, I don't understand what they were doing but it was very exciting. I came back with a hat and a rugby ball cup and I even got some rugby paint, you know, to face paint for the games. All this kind of stuff, still don't know the rules, but it's very exciting. Now, while that was happening, the one of the first teams in the world cup was the New Zealand Warriors. And their mascot are the Warriors from New Zealand. You know who do the Hawke. Remember that from the Olympics, the people who paint themselves up and kind of go, and do a big warrior dance. And the owner of this team bought 10,000 tickets to the game and said that any Kiwi, any New Zealander who would fly to Sydney, he'd give them a free ticket to the World Cup. So they came by the thousands. You know, getting off the planes with their warrior paint on, you know, going to the camera, you know, they're all excited. And I'm watching the news the morning of the game and all these people are there with their passports. They're camped out at this big stadium in Sydney. And they come up to this one New Zealand New Zealand lady and she was pushing about 350, you know, size-wise. And she stood up to the camera and she said, we're going to murder them. We're going to be victorious. And I'm sitting there thinking, I don't think you could walk down the field. How is it that you're going to get in there and murder them? But, you know what, she was doing the same thing that you Auburn fans do and tech fans do. And Georgia fans, somehow, you're able to see a champion. And in that champion, something is hardwired in you to say, I want to share, and what that champion has done for me. It's not just that, wow, what a great catch, what a great victory, what a great run. You yourself are running with them. You yourself share in it. Now listen folks, that's just psychology. The Bible says that in the greatest battle of all, the great redemption of the world, that is actually how you win the battle. It's by understanding that another has run the field for you. Another has won the victory and you actually begin to share in the victory now. That is, your thinking changes, your desires change, your life will change no matter what's going on. No matter what's going on in your life, simply by doing what? A lot of people say, tell me what to do. I'll tell you what to do. Look at him. Look at your champion. Believe in what he's done for you. And allow him to give you his strength and his life. Allow him to show you that you're really raised with him. That you're really seated with him now. Let's pray. Now great Father, we pray that we would be able to do in this time of communion what Paul tells us we're going to be actually doing forever. And that is fixing our eyes on our champion and believing, believing deeply in our heart, that he has given himself for us and won a great victory. And that we share in that victory, not only ultimately someday we'll see you face to face, but that we can share it right now and what's going on in our lives. Take us to this place we pray by faith and Jesus now. Amen.