There are two little words in Ephesians 2 that might be among my favorite words in the entire Bible:
But God.
You really can’t appreciate those two words, though, without reading what comes before them.
Paul begins Ephesians 2 with some pretty terrible news.
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins…”
— Ephesians 2:1
Not struggling.
Not spiritually underperforming.
Not mostly good but in need of a little improvement.
Dead.
That’s Paul’s description of humanity apart from Christ.
And dead people are helpless.
We like to believe that if we work hard enough, learn enough, behave well enough, go to church enough, serve enough, or clean ourselves up enough, we can somehow make ourselves acceptable to God.
But you can’t improve your way out of being dead.
That’s the problem.
The Bad News Matters
Sometimes we’re so eager to get to the good news of the gospel that we rush past the bad news.
But if we don’t understand the problem, we’ll never understand how incredible the solution really is.
Paul says that apart from Christ, we were spiritually dead in sin. We followed the ways of the world. We gratified the desires of our sinful nature. And we were deserving of God’s wrath.
That’s some pretty heavy stuff.
But we can’t understand how desperately we need a Savior until we understand how helpless we are to save ourselves.
On our own, mankind isn’t simply in need of some assistance.
We are helpless.
We are hopeless.
And then come two of the most beautiful words in Scripture.
But God…
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ…”
— Ephesians 2:4–5
But God.
We were dead.
But God.
We couldn’t save ourselves.
But God.
We were deserving of wrath.
But God.
Our hope doesn’t begin with our goodness.
It begins with God’s character.
Because of His great love.
Because He is rich in mercy.
Because of His grace.
God made us alive with Christ.
Notice who is doing the work here.
We don’t make ourselves alive.
God does.
We don’t earn His mercy.
He gives it.
We don’t perform well enough to deserve His grace.
That’s precisely why it’s called grace.
Grace is undeserved favor.
Have Been Saved
Paul continues:
“It is by grace you have been saved…”
— Ephesians 2:5
I love the tense of that sentence.
Have been saved.
Not might be.
Not could be if you perform well enough.
Not will be once you’ve finally gotten your act together.
For those who are in Christ, the work has been accomplished.
Then Paul says it again a few verses later:
“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.”
— Ephesians 2:8–9
Our salvation is completely dependent upon what Christ has done, not what we can do.
Church attendance won’t save you.
Reading your Bible won’t save you.
Serving in ministry won’t save you.
Giving money won’t save you.
Being nicer than your neighbor won’t save you.
Having Christian parents won’t save you.
Knowing all the right theological answers won’t save you.
Those may be good things. Some are things followers of Jesus absolutely should do.
But none of them can make a dead person alive.
Only God can do that.
And that’s exactly what makes grace so astonishing.
There is nothing we can do to earn it.
And there is nothing about us that could ever make God owe it to us.
So Do Works Matter?
This is where we can swing the pendulum too far in the other direction.
If we’re saved completely by grace and not by works, does that mean it doesn’t matter how we live?
Paul answers that in the very next verse.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
— Ephesians 2:10
Works don’t save us.
But true saving faith produces works.
I’ve said for years that faith is belief activated.
Faith isn’t merely agreeing that something is true.
Saving faith elicits a response to the gospel. It changes us. It begins changing the way we live, the way we think, the way we treat people, and what we desire.
Not perfectly.
Not overnight.
And certainly not because we are trying to earn something from God.
We obey because God has already done something in us.
That’s an important distinction.
Our works aren’t the cause of our salvation. They are the result of it.
We don’t do good works so that God will make us alive.
God makes us alive—and living people begin to live differently.
James says much the same thing when he tells us that faith without works is dead.
Real faith moves.
Belief becomes action.
No Room for Boasting
And that’s why there is absolutely no room for boasting in the Christian life.
If salvation depended upon my performance, I could compare my performance to yours.
I could keep score.
I could look at my church attendance, Bible knowledge, giving, serving, morality, or spiritual discipline and decide I’m doing pretty well.
Maybe even better than you.
But grace destroys that entire system.
I brought nothing to my salvation worth boasting about.
I was dead.
But God made me alive.
I was guilty.
But God showed mercy.
I couldn’t earn righteousness.
But Christ gave me His.
The gospel doesn’t leave us standing before God proudly displaying everything we’ve accomplished.
It leaves us standing there with empty hands, completely dependent upon Jesus.
And somehow, those empty hands receive everything.
But God
Maybe you’ve spent years trying to be good enough for God.
Maybe you’ve wondered whether you’ve prayed enough, served enough, learned enough, changed enough, or finally become enough for Him to accept you.
Ephesians 2 points us somewhere else.
Away from ourselves.
Away from our performance.
Away from our ability to fix what is broken.
And toward Christ.
The gospel isn’t the story of humanity finally figuring out how to reach God.
It’s the story of what God did for people who could never reach Him.
We were dead.
But God made us alive.
We were hopeless.
But God loved us.
We could never earn salvation.
But God gave us grace.
And once you’ve really understood everything that comes before those two words, it’s hard not to stop for a moment when you read them.
But God…
The Table 