Also, after the service today, there is going to be an informal meeting to kind of kick off some information about a 2012 summer trip to Israel, and that's going to be led by Tim and Laura. And so after this service, go to the fellowship hall immediately afterwards, and you're going to hear some details about how much that costs, when it's going to be, what you're going to be doing over there. We'd love for you to be involved with that, so head over there. And then finally, our MOPS ministry, which is the mother's or preschool ministry, is starting on Wednesday. So if you are a mom of preschoolers and you want to be plugged into that, or if you have somebody in your family who's a mom of preschoolers, about half the group goes to our church and half the group does not go to our church. So we would love to have you be involved in that ministry, it's really great. So that starts Wednesday, details in your bulletin. Take a moment now to prepare your heart to worship. We were created to be worshipers. That is the core of our identity of who we are in Christ. And so we get a moment to take a moment to pray and to think about that and to reflect on the music as we prepare to go before the throne of God. There is a grief in a far away country. It stands near a sea outside the wall where Jesus are said. You please stand for our call to worship. There is no higher privilege or greater honor than to worship the one and true living God. Bless the Lord and forget not all His benefits who redeems your life from the pit, who satisfies you with good so that your mouth is renewed, your youth is renewed like the eagles. Father, we come before you in the name of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit, we are but sinners saved by grace. We come to offer you praise for who you are and for what you have done. We are thankful. We look forward to this hour of worship. We pray Holy Spirit that you would blow upon the imbers of our heart and turn them to flame. May make this prayer of adoration because you are our great God, the very lover of our souls. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. And so where is temple draw? Show me in love to see. So gently sustain.
We are teaching us a new song. It is beautiful. The words are so honoring to the Lord. We are thankful for the leadership we have in our music and worship ministry. And for their willingness to lead us to sing a new song as we are told to do in God's word. I pray that that new song ministered to you heart as you worship the Lord. In selecting our affirmation of faith this week, I decided to lead us in thinking our way through Ephesians chapter 2 by taking us to verse 5. This week, as we think about the work of the Lord, we are going to be pushed during the sermon in Paul's message regarding our sin. And sin's relationship to each and every human being. It is a message that Paul gave to the people of Ephesus and one that should apply to each and every one of our hearts. Knowing that the theme of the message would be a bit heavy for us. I wanted to lift our spirits to the Lord by continuing on by reading together this affirmation of faith from Ephesians chapter 2. Saying together, even when we were dead in our trespasses, he made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved. And raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. You may be seated. Our confession of sin is written for us not in an effort to keep you from confessing your own personal sin before the Lord, but to help us as God's people to express our need for him. I would encourage you to hold on to our bulletin this week, to review the music, to use the confession of sin. Quite often I use this confession another's like it throughout the week. I would encourage you to use our worship bulletin to lead your own family worship during the week to spend time with the Lord as an individual, but surely to confess our sins to him. Would you join me in this confession of sin saying, righteous father, maker and sustainer of all things, day and night are yours, heaven and earth declare your glory. But even though I was created in your image, I have sinned against you by resisting the guidance of conscience, demands of your law, and the calls of your gospel. Yet I live under the gift of your grace and therefore have hope, deliver me from worldly dispositions for I am born from above and bound for glory. And now if you would take this time and honestly, humbly, silently confess your sins to the Lord. Heavenly Father, these words that we have been praying in the silence only begin to scratch the surface of our sin. We acknowledge that. We acknowledge that we are finite. We acknowledge that we do evil things and wicked things. We acknowledge that we participate in sin sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. Father, who will deliver us from this body of sin and death? Praise be to God that you have sent your son Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to remove our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. That you are a God who says though our sins are as scarlet, you make us white as snow. Father, we do affirm that we are bound for glory. And if any one of us here is weighed down by sin, a sin that enslaves us, a sin that grabs hold of us and seemingly won't let go, we pray that this morning would be the first day of our freedom by the power of the spirit from that sin. Lord, you know us and you know each and every one of our hearts. And we ask that you would release us not only from the presence of sin but also from its power. Lord God, we trust that you are able to do so. We trust that you are willing to do so for you are a faithful Father. We cling to your grace and we cling to your mercy. Father, we confess that our sin goes so far down that we're not even able to pray as we ought. And so we begin this service together by praying the words that you, Lord Jesus, taught us to pray and we pray that these words would become our own, that we would confess our sins in such a way that we are drawn to your mercy and enlivened by your grace and filled with joy in the spirit. So this morning as your people, as a body, we pray these words together, praying our Father, who are in heaven, how do it be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen.
Remain standing in great one another in the name of the Lord. We've come to the time in our worship service where we continue to offer our praise to God by giving back to him in a very tangible way. Some of the gifts that he has given us in doing so, we acknowledge that the Lord is in no way in our debt but we are in his debt and he has given his grace to us so freely and so richly. And everything that we have and everything that we are and everything that we will be comes from him and is shaped by him. And so we do this act as an act of worship. Let's go to God in prayer. Lord our God, you have blessed us so richly in Christ. If spiritual blessings were the only blessings that we were to ever receive from your hand, we would be satisfied and full. And yet you have gone so much above and beyond that, providing us with material blessings that we would never deserve, homes to live in, jobs that we have, transportation. And yet every need that we have, you have met and continued to meet, Father, we pray that we would be generous as well with our fellow man, that we would give of what you have given us so that your gospel may be spread throughout this world. We pray that we would give of our time and efforts and talents so that people who are imprisoned may hear your gospel so that people who are poor and in desperate financial need may receive relief so that kids without moms and dads might receive your grace through our hands as we are instruments in your hands. We pray for our church, that we would be a beacon of light to this city, that we would never be fooled by thinking that we have anything to offer in and of ourselves, but may we acknowledge that we are but simple vessels carrying the greatest treasure that could ever be given to this broken and fallen world. Would I pray that we would be your witnesses, beginning in our families, that as fathers, we would be witnesses to our wives of the grace and forgiveness and mercy that you have shown us in Christ, that we would be good shepherds to our children in a way that points them to you, Lord Jesus, the good shepherd who lays down your life and laid down your life for us, your people. May we lay down our lives for our wives and kids, Lord as women and mothers, may we be good examples to our children of what it means to live in a way that honors husbands and honors our family. May we be people that use every gift that you have given us professionally to honor and glorify your name as children, whether we are young children or children with grown and aging parents, may we honor them and be faithful to them. Lord God, may this church be a place where there is healing and grace and mercy not only for our church family but for the lost and for people who do not yet know you. Lord God, I pray for our city. May we be a city that is marked by generosity toward the poor and the needy. May we be a city that is fair and just. May you take away violence from our community. May you take away the scourge of addiction from our community. And may we, Lord God, be a more and more a city transformed, not by politics or policies but by the changing power of your gospel. When we are in desperate need of your grace, we are in desperate need of your spirit. And so we humbly ask that of you this morning, trusting that you will give all good gifts to your people. For you are loving and you never change. Here are prayer, Lord God. We make it this morning in the name of our faithful Savior Jesus Christ. Would you please stand for the reading of God's Word. We'll be reading in Ephesians chapter 2 and I'll read the first 10 verses of chapter 2. But I want you to note that I'll only be preaching on the first three verses. You may notice in our sign up for our K-groups that we've laid out the scriptures for you through October in hopes that some of you might consider reading ahead. And even using this as an opportunity to study God's Word in preparation, you might think what you would say if you had an opportunity to teach our congregation based on this text. So here God's Word Ephesians chapter 2 beginning in verse 1. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind, book God, being rich and mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places. So that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in the kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, for by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared for us. Which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As we look at our text we find immediately that Paul says we are dead in the trespasses and sins, it doesn't take much for us to see sin at work in our world. We can simply read the newspaper each day. We read accounts of young mothers who after giving birth to her twins apparently killed her two babies, we read accounts of other local news people have lied and cheated. We read accounts on the international level of people who have in grievous ways murdered other people, harmed them in great ways and yet quite often we don't find these people coming to a point of repentance, a point of admitting their guilt. They look to blame others, they look to go into some sort of therapy without acknowledging their own personal responsibility. We have politicians in our own country at a national level who make promises for one thing and then do something else. We live in a world that is stained by bad behavior but do we as the people of God recognize this as sin at work. Are we fooled into thinking that the remedy will come through new politicians or new economic reform? Don't we at one level as Christians have to stop and admit that we are a sin sick world? We are acting according to our sin nature. Often times when people go to trial, even though they are guilty, they plead not guilty. I know that we have a very complex legal system. We have both federal and local officials in our congregation who deal with the intricacies of our judicial system. I am not speaking naively. I am speaking at some level of a person who is guilty must stand before their God and say, yes Father, I am guilty. I have sinned. I am a sinner. Paul is addressing this to us. He is bringing us forward and saying that we must recognize that we are dead in our trespasses and in our sins. Now, oftentimes we hear people in the Bible say such things. We hear them say that they are sinners. I know that as I did research, I went through the Scripture and I found the Apostle Peter in Luke 5 saying, depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. We hear David in Psalm 51 saying, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. We hear Isaiah say in Isaiah 6, woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king. In 1 Timothy chapter 1, Paul says, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost. Oftentimes we hear people in the Bible confess their sin and in some ways we think that well they are different than we are. These are Bible people. Let me give you quotes from some of our heroes in a faith. Samuel Rutherford said, when I look at my sinfulness, my salvation is to me, my Savior's greatest miracle. He has done nothing in heaven or on earth like my salvation. The title page of John Bunions incomparable autobiography runs like this, grace abounding to John Bunion, the chief of sinners, come and hear all ye that fear God. And I will declare what he had done for my soul. My daughters said Santa Teresa on her deathbed. My daughters do not follow my example, for I have been the most sinful woman in all the world. But in the last part of her life she dwelt on a particular verse, the verse says, a broken and contrite heart, oh God, thou will not despise. Do not mistake me, said Jacob Bemen, for my heart is as full as it can hold all malice at you and all ill will. My heart is the very dung hill of the devil, and it is no easy work to wrestle with him on his own chosen ground. But wrestle with him on that ground of his I must, and at the whole of my life to the end, shouted filet nary. Begone, all ye self ignorant and false flatters, I am good for nothing but to do evil. Even our own Martin Luther says, when a man like me comes to know the plague of his own heart, he is not miserable only. He is absolute misery itself. He is not sinful only. He is absolute sin itself. Bishop Andrews sobs and says, I am made of sin. He sobbed until his private prayer book was all but unreadable to his heirs with sweat and tears. He says, it has often appeared to me that if God were to mark my heart iniquity, my bed would be in hell. Lord Brody says, I sat down on the side of a swamp and was disgusted at the toads and snakes and many other unclean creatures I saw sweltering there, but all the time my own heart was far worse to me. Far filthier than the filthy earth I sat upon and then again the Apostle Paul. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the chief. I want us to recognize that as Paul speaks of sin, he wants all people to recognize their sinful condition. He wants us to recognize, as David said, that we were born in sin. Once Adam and Eve sinned, all their posterity, every single person born after Adam and Eve of a natural birth, were born with the sin nature. And so we are under the power of sin. The Apostle quite often refers to us as being under the sin. It sits upon us. So as a non-Christian, someone who has not had their heart regenerated by the work of God, the Apostle calls them a natural man or a natural woman. Natural meaning that they are incapable of understanding the spiritual wisdom of God unless they are manifestly changed by the work of the Holy Spirit. But we as Christians struggle with the sin nature as well. We are constantly at war with the sinful nature that lurks and lives within us. The evil is not simply out there among the world, the natural men and women. Evil lives within the heart of even a believer. In fact, we spend our life warring in the power of the Spirit by the means of grace against this evil power within us. At the end of our series in Ephesians, I'll be doing a mini series, if you will, from Ephesians 6, verse 10 and following, about spiritual warfare. And how the Christian must battle in the power of the Spirit with the means of grace against our own sin nature, not only against the devil and the world. Paul brings this to bear, and he says, you were dead in the trespasses and sins. Listen to this, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, I want you to recognize that when Paul says that we're dead, we have to answer the question, what does that mean? You might say, how can you say you're dead? These people are walking. These people are following. These people are participating in pursuing their passions of their heart. They're active and acting upon the desire that is within their heart. How could the apostles say they're dead? What does it mean to be dead in your sin and trespasses? It means that we're spiritually dead. It means that we are incapable of doing anything to God's glory by the power of the Spirit. Even acts of relative good, which a natural man or woman can do. They do not bring glory to God. They are not unto the glory of Christ. Paul uses the word dead. Historically, theologians have argued over this word. They wanted to reassign an understanding of what it means to be dead, to be spiritually dead. In the 4th century, a monk, Pelagius, argued with another monk, a bit better known, a monk named Augustin, and Pelagius argued that the result of the fall was nil upon man. That the result of the fall did not inhibit man's ability to do acts of righteousness before God. Augustin took issue with this and he wrote against him. There are three views, historically, of the condition of man after the fall. The first view is held by Pelagius and says that man did not incur any spiritual damage to the fall. He and she are still morally capable beings with complete free will to bring honoring glory to God apart from the work of God. That's what every major religion believes other than Christianity. They believe in good works of man to save themselves, whether they're Muslim or Hindu. They believe the truth is within them. They have the ability to work themselves to heaven and present themselves as righteous before their judge. The second view is the idea that we're not well, but we're certainly not dead, we're sick. We have sinned sick souls and we need some help. We can do the best we can do, and through our thinking we come to realize that Jesus is our Savior and we choose to follow Jesus. That is the majority view within Christendom today. I do not hold that view. I believe that view robs glory from the work of Jesus Christ. For at any point a man or a woman is able to say on my own thinking I came to understand that I needed to follow Jesus and I decided to invite him into my heart. I believe they have the sequencing wrong. I hold a minority view that I also believe is the biblical view that man after the fall is spiritually dead. And apart from the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit they cannot come to faith in Jesus Christ. And Paul says, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the Spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among whom we all listen to this universal positive, among whom we all once lived. He speaks of us as being those people who live in the passions of our flesh, who carry out the desires of the body in the mind and we're by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. You might ask yourself why did Paul place this here in Ephesians chapter 2? Why did he decide before he unfolds this glorious manifestation of who Christ is, his amensities and his infinities? Why did he choose to do this? I believe that first and foremost he wanted to lay down the barrier between the Jew and the Gentile. This book is about God's glory in uniting all things to himself through Christ and there was a barrier, a wall between the Jew and the Gentile. And Paul is saying we are all on level ground, whether a Jew who grew up under the promises of God and the covenant of God or a Gentile who grew up wildly self-religious and evil, we're all on the same ground, we all once walked, we were dead in our sins. And so he brings this argument as a peace offering if you will. You might think well that's a whale of a way to bring a peace offering, right? To bring universal condemnation on all men. But sometimes bad news is what gives way to goodness. Most of you know that I'm scheduled for knee surgery on Wednesday. I have a torn meniscus and I have a bunch of calcification under my kneecap. It's unpleasant to walk, sit, stand, or sleep. I'm done with it. I'm ready to get it fixed. And when the doctor said to me after reading the MRI, you have a torn meniscus and you have a lot of calcification, my heart said, yeah! Fix it! It's what Paul is saying. He said, I have some bad news for you and I want you to feel the gravity of the bad news. I wanted to sit on your soul and I want you to stew in it and recognize that you were dead and captive to your passions of your body. You had no spiritual work in you. And then he has this glorious phrase that starts in verse 4, but that's next week. You know, it's one thing to speak of other people's sin, to speak of the world's sin, or to speak of these men and women from whom I quoted. But you know, I want to tell you about my sin. I want to correct some of your erroneous thinking that my only hope is in the Lord touching my life. I believe he called me as a pastor so that I would be surrounded by Christian friends because my heart is a mess. I so desperately need the Lord. You know, I was praying this through this week and I thought, I'm going to stand before our people and confess my sin. And the first thing that came to mind was, we'll confess a little when. So everyone would think, oh yeah, well, oh! You know, I remember one time I came to church, not this church, another church, and I had on some beautiful wing tips, but one was ox blood and one was black. And I stood up there and I looked down and I got ready to preach and I said, you know, how appropriate. I need the Lord so much I can't put matching shoes on my feet, right? But at the sake of being overly vulnerable, I wanted to tell you about a sin pattern I have in my life that I have been struggling with the 54 years that I've been alive. It's the struggle of wanting men's approval. It began to develop in me as a young boy. I've always been a good student and I've always been a good athlete. And so over the years, I began to rely on my performance so that I would get noticed by people and that I would be kind of encouraged by people. And in high school, I even won an award for my sin pattern. That's how the world works, you all. They honor our sin patterns. I received a award for being the best athlete and the best scholar in our school. And that trophy meant so much to me. It really meant more to me than anything that I knew about God. I wasn't a Christian at that point but my sin pattern was being born. It was being fed. And when I came to know Christ, I translated, I transferred my non-Christian sin pattern looking for approval and acceptance into a Christian sin pattern of looking for approval and acceptance from people. And so I found myself being a chameleon, a bit of a liar, if you will. A person who would discern the situation of maybe the crowd or the individual to whom I was speaking, and I would seek to give them an answer that fit the desire of their heart. It's called the gift of discernment but misused, it can feed your own sinful, idolatrous lifestyle. And so I became a man worshiper. I worshipped and saw the approval of men and women and boys and girls. And I received it. In fact, I was promoted quickly in all the jobs I had because Tim would do anything for anyone. At all times with a good attitude, it looked like the fruit of the spirit. It was the fruit of the flesh. It was one of the deepest sin patterns I've ever had in my life and with which I continued to struggle. But the Lord has freed me to some degree from that in that He has led me to worship and to seek God's approval more than the approval of men and women and boys and girls. So it's freed me to tell the truth. Sometimes the truth that other people don't like. It hasn't freed me to be rude, but it has freed me to be honest. To speak to a congregation or a man or a woman who gives a lot of money to the church, honestly and humbly, not fearing them but fearing God for the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. If you do not fear the Lord more than you fear men, then you will succumb to great compromises in your life. You won't do what's right. You will do what accommodates the situation. When Laura and I were in Boston just about a week ago, the doctor called me after he had Laura in the operating room for two hours and he said, Tim, I'm not going to do the surgery. He goes, but I want to talk to you. Will you come up here with me? So I went up to his office and he put the video in of the surgery and we watched it together with the doctor and I looked at it. It was obvious that my dear bride's trache was not ready to be resected. So I looked at him and I honestly said, you know I'm disappointed. He said, I'm disappointed too. Because I had all the Harvard medical students there. I had the cameras rolling. I had other doctors. I'm training to do this procedure. I had reserved an operating suite at Massachusetts General Hospital for the day and I had cleared my day in order to be here and be available to do this surgery. So you know Tim, I'm disappointed too. And then he leaned in a little bit and he said something to me that struck me. He said, you don't make medical decisions on convenience. You do what's best for the patient. And I don't take shortcuts. I like my doctor a lot. I want you to know in your walk with Christ, you must be honest. You must be honest with yourself and you must be honest with others because sin which lives within you seeks to separate you. It seeks to separate you ultimately from God but it also seeks to separate you from your husband or your wife where you keep a secret or you tell a lie because you perceive it to be more convenient for you. And in that process, you isolate yourself from the fellowship you need. What I'm speaking of today is the depravity of man and men and women in their depravity are so depraved, they're blind to their depravity. They can't see their sin and I want you to know something. We need each other desperately. Husbands need their wives to speak truth to them and the husband needs to receive it humbly and husbands need to speak truth to their wife and they need to receive it humbly. Otherwise there's a division and a marriage and separation is the work of sin. Children, you need to hear your mother and father speak to you, you need to hear them because when you separate yourself from them, you place yourself in the way of danger. You play into the hands of sin, you become vulnerable. Students, when there's a division between you and your friends, you open a gap in which sin can operate. You need to humbly speak the truth to one another and stay close together. So as a congregation, I'm calling us to be honest about this sin that rages within us. We need each other. We desperately need each other. If you're trying to figure out whether to go to K group or whether to get involved in a small group or whether to come to the men's study or whether to get involved in the women's ministry, I'm telling you that decision is made. You need fellowship, you need people who can look at you and can touch your life. I wrote a few notes that I wanted to in particular say, let me close our sermon with this. What was Paul trying to say? Paul was saying first, sin is an alien power that has invaded and grips our souls. Secondly, sin has possessed the imagination and engaged a thought process so that our thinking is godless. Thirdly, sin will entangle the soul in the things of the world, making the soul negligent so that it no longer is watchful and sober. Paul wants us to know that we are in a process and we are on a journey of gradual renewal of our human nature. He wants us to know that we didn't start it neutral but we started as dead. We weren't well, we weren't sick, we were spiritually dead. We need the intervening work of the Holy Spirit for conversion as well as for daily living. Lastly, Paul wants us to know that we need each other because when men seek to assert their self-sufficiency apart from God and Christian community, they are easy prey for the enemy.
There is an old saying, the old saying is, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. The wisdom behind that saying is, there are spots on your back that you can't reach but somebody else can. There are spots on my back that I can't reach but you can. There are blindnesses in my heart that I can't see but you can see them. There are blindnesses in your heart that I can see that you can't see. We are dead in our trespasses and sins until the work of the Holy Spirit touches our life and gives us new life. That's next week's sermon but we need each other. The church as an institution is one of the most diverse and unusual institutions in the world because we see each other at our best and at our worst. May God have mercy on us, His people, as we seek to walk with Him and with one another. I would like to close our service by directing your attention to our call to worship. I would like to use our call to worship as a close before our benediction and closing Him. Hopefully after participating in this service the words will have even more meaning to you. Would you please stand as we say together our call to worship, bless the Lord and forget not all His benefits, who redeems your life from the pit, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. And now hear this good word. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord cause His face to shine upon you. May the Lord cause His face to shine upon you. Be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace both now and in the life everlasting. Amen.