Sorry for the delay on the "God's Morality" post... it's still coming! I've been very busy recently. One of the things I've been doing is a youth talk for a weekend away, which I did recently. Here it is (my apologies to anyone called Herbert, I really do think it's a good name actually):

Let me introduce you to a guy called Herbert. Now, as you may have guessed by his name, Herbert is one of the unluckiest people you will ever meet. Herbert’s also afraid of heights, which is unfortunate for him as he’s currently standing on a balcony, on the top floor of a 10 story sky-scraper, on the edge of a cliff, next to the sea. He’d get down if he could… but his best friend, who’s brother he’s just killed, is standing behind him with a gun telling him to jump. Which isn’t great for Herbert, as, even if he could survive the fall, he can’t swim. Oh, and there’s sharks in the water. He’s pretty stuck. In fact, he’s in a hopeless situation, with absolutely nothing he can do to fix it. And it’s all his fault that he’s there. Surely he’s going to die?

But it turns out that we've pretty much been in that very situation ourselves.

The passage we've read starts by explaining that we are all naturally in a similarly hopeless and deserved situation, that we can do nothing about, when it comes to God.

It starts off in the first 3 verses saying, “As 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 of the ruler of the kingdom of the air (which means, Satan), the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.”

We get an image of someone who is totally addicted to sin, take a look with me at verse 3, as it says we were, “gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.” You know when you know something's wrong, but you do it anyway? Or at least you would if you could? And how we spend so much of our time thinking about ourselves, obsessed with how to make ourselves happy and cool and content, instead of thinking about how we can serve and praise God? That's addiction to sin. And it's no small matter. Have you ever seen a picture of a smoker's lungs? Or an alcoholic's liver? They're ugly and creepy, aren't they? Definitely not anything like what they were meant to be. We might not see the effects of being addicted to sin in the same way as that, but that's a bit like what we end up looking like to God.

We don’t deserve anything from God, and there’s nothing we can do to fix things.

And we know that sin is rebellion against God, so this isn't just a picture of a helpless addict who life's just gone horribly wrong for, but rather of someone who loves and does the sinful ways of the world, even of Satan, who is an addict and slave to sin in much the same way. We get a picture of a disgusting corpse of a person, festering in their sins, have a look back in verse one, “as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins”. And the worse bit about it all, is that it's about us.

Do you see how we just don’t deserve anything from God? And like this there’s nothing that we can do to fix things.

Have you ever pictured yourself as being, or having once being, just like that?

The passage says that that's what all people are like by default. It's what we naturally choose. And it's awful. The end of verse 3 says that being that way makes you in your very nature, “deserving of wrath”. Like what we are, if we're that way, just needs to be punished. And God's wrath, we know, leads to Hell. It's a scary and desperate picture that these first verses paint, way worse even than the situation Herbert was in.

We really don’t deserve anything from God except his anger, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to fix things or rescue ourselves.

I know this has been heavy, and if the passage were to finish there then we would be left in a pretty desperate and hopeless situation. But the passage doesn't end here! It's about to get a whole load better. We’re about to see how amazingly beautiful God and being with Him is, but we can't realise just how amazingly beautiful being with God is, unless we can see how totally ugly and desperate it is to be without Him.

So I'm going to say it once more, as clear as I can. If you're here today, and you've not been saved by God, then you are in danger of God's wrath. And if, like me, you're here today and you have been saved by God, then remember that we once were in danger of that very same wrath, for all the same reasons.

But now for the good news. Take a look at verse 4, “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.”

God loves us and He’s saved us, despite our being hopeless addicts to sin, despite our following the ways of Satan. If you’re a Christian here today then you are no longer dead in your sins, you are no longer in danger of God’s wrath.

And it goes on, read verse 6, “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.”

It's saying that we've been seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. Christ is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, he's the author of life, he's the Alpha and the Omega, he's the lord of all creation. Everything that exists is his! He sits on the throne of heaven! And this is saying that we get to sit with Christ on his throne, despite all we've done wrong!

And why? It says, verse 7, “in order that in the coming ages” God, “might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” God does all this so that He can spend eternity showing us just how vast and deep and wonderful his love and for us is. What a contrast to being a festering corpse destined for Hell.

This is the amazing offer that the Bible makes, to get to sit with the king of the universe for all eternity and be lavished with love and kindness like nothing you've ever felt or seen before.

But how do we get it? Just a moment ago I was saying that we were like corpses, slaves to sin and to Satan. What's made a change like this possible? How do we get in on this deal? What do we have to do?

If the answer is that we have to earn it, that we have to be really good or do certain things, then all this has been for nothing. We’ve already seen how totally undeserving and helpless we are without God.

Thankfully the plan was never for us to earn eternal life by what we do.

“For it is by grace you have been saved”, verse 8.

We're saved by grace! It’s an undeserved gift, not something that you earn. Grace is Jesus dying on the cross to take away our sins, and grace is Jesus rising again to give us life with him. We don't have to earn it. Being a Christian isn't about what you do, it's about receiving the gift of what Jesus has done for us for free.

And how do we receive it? Verse 8 goes on, “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”. We accept the gift, we accept grace, by trusting in what Jesus has done for us. That's it. There's no catch, no strings attached, nothing.

Let’s go back to Herbert, for a second. From inside the skyscraper someone else steps out onto the balcony and takes his place on the edge, before making the jump that Herbert should have made and dying the death that Herbert deserved. And before he jumped he didn’t ask for anything in return. Herbert gets to go free, justice is done, he doesn’t have to jump and gets to be reunited with his friend. Jesus did the same thing for us when he died on the cross, he took the punishment we deserved, enabling us to be reunited with God.

The passage finishes by saying that, verse 10, “we are God's handiwork,”, which is a massive change from rotting corpses, “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” What Jesus has done for us, doesn’t just stop with giving us eternal life, it also frees us from our addiction to sin, enabling us to do good things that God’s planned out for us. And the good works are from God, they are part of his gift. So we can’t even boast about them. It’s all part of the gift from God in Jesus.

If you're not a Christian here today, then this offer, this free gift, is for you. All you have to do is accept it. You get to go from being dead, waiting for God's wrath, to having the amazing honour of being able to sit with Jesus forever and ever, being given kindness and joy from God. And if you are a Christian then this is what you've been given! Don't be the way I used to be, trying to earn the right to keep the gift, it's yours forever, just keep trusting in Jesus and his death and resurrection.

If you've not accepted God's grace, if you've not become a Christian, then do not go away from this talk without accepting it. You can never get a better offer than this, and there's never going to be a better time than now to accept it. And if you decide to trust in Jesus this weekend, why not talk to one of the leaders? We'd love to celebrate with you, answer any questions you still have, and help you work out what next.

[Pray]