Your Daily Bread – Come Alive In Christ

➡ Paul, the voiceover for a ministry called Your Daily Bread, discusses the true meaning of being a Christian and being saved. He emphasizes that being a Christian is not just about having past sins forgiven, but also about receiving the power of God and growing spiritually. He uses the book of Ephesians to explain that when we accept Christ, we are complete and have everything we need. Paul also highlights that salvation is not just about being saved from sin, but also about being saved by love, into life, with purpose, through faith, and unto good works.
➡ The text discusses the concept of sin and spiritual death in Christianity. It explains that all humans are born sinful and spiritually dead, which leads them to commit sins. The text emphasizes that sin is not just about doing wrong things, but more about failing to reach God’s standards of glory, holiness, and perfection. It concludes that even good deeds can’t make up for this failure, as the ultimate goal is to live a holy and perfect life, which is only possible through Jesus Christ.
➡ The text emphasizes that being good to others isn’t enough to meet God’s standards. It’s not about what we do, but what we fail to do – living up to God’s glory. This is achieved by believing in Jesus Christ, not just by being a good person. The message encourages us to keep faith, stay strong, and shine our light in the world.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God Is Government, called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be on coming alive in Christ. Look with me, would you, at the second chapter of the letter to the Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 2.

And we’re going to discuss what it means to come alive in Christ, what it really means to be saved, what it is to be a Christian. This is one of the great sections of the Bible about salvation, and much of this is not new to us, but it’s so refreshing to our hearts to go over these wonderful truths. You know, this study of Ephesians is so very vital. Understanding what you have in Jesus Christ is really essential. I was talking to a gentleman in our church yesterday and he was saying to me, you know, the study of Ephesians is so very important because he said, I was raised in a family where I was told, and in a church where I was told, that when you get saved, when you come to know Jesus Christ, basically nothing happens.

The only thing that takes place is sort of a judicial act on God’s part where he forgives your past sins, and that’s it. There’s no empowerment, there’s no gift of the Holy Spirit, there’s no nothing, just a matter of past sins forgiven. And then when you get the second blessing, then you get all the goodies that go with it. And it would be a horrible thing to think of. But that’s the way most of those people have to exist. Somewhere in the limbo between believing, though they’re saved, they have nothing, and trying to find that second thing that you finally get that can give you the power you need.

But that is not what we learn in Ephesians, is it? What we see here in Ephesians is that when we have Christ, we have everything. We are complete in him, and the wonders of all that God gives us are here delineated explicitly in this wonderful letter. We often ask ourselves the question, what does it mean to be saved? What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to be really born again? Well here is the definition of that, and there’s a lot of confusion about it. There are a lot of people, as we know, claiming to be born again today, that it’s very obvious, don’t know the meaning of it.

I remember when I was speaking to a group of people, and I presented Jesus Christ to a handsome, strikingly handsome, dark-complexioned man from India, and I got all finished, and he came up to me and he said, I am a Muslim, but what you have said has intrigued me, and I would like to have Jesus Christ. And I thought, boy that’s fabulous, because you don’t have Muslims do that very often. So we went off in a little side room at the hotel where it was happening, and I presented Christ to him, and he prayed a little prayer, and he invited Jesus Christ into his life.

And then he opened his eyes and looked at me and said, and now isn’t it wonderful I have Jesus and Muhammad? And I said, I don’t think you understand. Christianity is not going up to the shelf and saying, I’ll take one of those, and let’s see one of those. That isn’t it. A lot of confusion about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to have Christ, what it means to be born again. But if you’ll look with me at Ephesians 2, 1-10, it ought to eliminate any doubt and any question, because it’s here.

Now, remember that the book of Ephesians is concerned with what it means to be in Christ, what it means to be one with Jesus Christ, what it means to be a part of his body, the church of which he is the head, what it means to have been master-planned into the body from before the world began. We saw in chapter 1 through verse 14 that Paul presents the master plan of God in the eternity past. Then in verses 15 through 23 he prays that we would understand it, that we would really get a grip on the meaning of being in Christ, what it means to be a part of God’s eternal plan, what it means to have been elected, redeemed and granted an inheritance forever with God.

We’ve talked about the tremendous wonders of our position. All that we have in having Christ is in chapter 1. Now Paul moves from eternity past in chapter 1 into time in chapter 2. In chapter 2 we find the Apostle Paul describing the very process of salvation, the very act of salvation, the very miracle of salvation that drew us into realising this eternal plan. The plan is in one. How you get in it is in chapter 2. Now I want to tie another thing into your thinking also. The Apostle Paul is very concerned that we understand that as Christians we are possessors of the power of God, all right? It isn’t just that when you’re saved you get your sins forgiven plus nothing.

No, no. You receive all the power of God. It’s all there at the moment of salvation and that’s the message of verse 19 of chapter 1 where he is praying that we would understand the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the already present working of his mighty power. In other words, Paul is praying, oh God, may these Christians know, may they know the tremendous power that is theirs in you. That’s what is on his mind. He wants us to understand this power and so he gives an illustration of it in verse 20.

You’ll remember we looked at it last time. It is the power with which he raised Christ from the dead and set him at the right hand. It is resurrection power. It is exaltation power, okay? That’s his first illustration. He’s praying, oh God, may these Christians understand their resource, their reservoir, their power, their might, their energy. May they know what they have in having Christ. And in order to illustrate that he says, it is the power that was so powerful it unlocked the chains of death and set Christ free and drew him right up to an exalted place at the right hand of God.

That’s the power. Further, he says in chapter 2, it is the power that raised you from the dead and lifted you to the exaltation of the sons of God to sit you at the right hand of God with Christ. In other words, this is point two, to understand the power of God. Look at the resurrection of Christ and his exaltation. Secondly, to understand the power of God, look at your resurrection and your exaltation. You say, what do you mean? Have I been raised from the dead? Have I been exalted? Yes. Spiritually, that’s already happened.

Physically, it’ll happen in the future. Someday, you’ll be raised out of this world physically. The redemption of the body, Romans 8 talks about, and you’ll be with Christ and you’ll be in his image. Someday, the resurrection and exaltation of the body, but already past tense if you’re a Christian, God has accomplished the resurrection and exaltation of your soul, of your spirit. And that’s the miracle Paul wants to talk about in chapter 2, and in so discussing it, presents to us a great picture of the doctrine of salvation. But really, this presentation is an illustration of the power of God granted to the believer.

Now, let’s look at it, and as we examine this, verses 1 through 10, I want you to see six aspects of salvation. Now, the general outline of this text is that he presents salvation in three tenses. Past, verses 1 through 3, present, verses 4 through 6, and 8 and 9, and future, verses 7 and 10. He sees the past, the present, and the future of the Christian, what he was, what he is, what he will be as salvation takes place, and so we’re looking at that. But under that general thrust, I want you to see six aspects of salvation, and these are the six.

Salvation is from sin by love into life with purpose through faith unto good works. Now, we’ll give those one at a time. First, salvation is from sin, from sin, and this deals with the past, the past from sin. Look at verse 1, and you, and we’ll skip the part that’s italicized. If in your Bible it’s italicized, that’s meaning it’s added, it’s all right there, but we’ll skip it because it picks up later in the text. And you who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which in time passed, now you see we’re in the past tense of the Christian life.

You walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all had our manner of life. It’s past tense again, in times passed in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. We’ll stop right there. Now, there is probably no clearer statement on the sinfulness of man in the New Testament than that. That really delineates it, and it makes Paul’s first point.

You are a sinner, and you are dead. Now, if he’s going to tell us about God’s power, God’s power is best demonstrated in resurrection. And the resurrection of Christ was demonstration number one, and your resurrection from sin is demonstration number two. If you’re a Christian, you’ve already been raised from the deadness of sin, and maybe that’s a great miracle than physical resurrection. Look with me at verse one again, and you who were dead. Now, this describes the condition of every individual. You were dead. Now, listen to me. If you’re a Christian, this is your past.

If you’re not a Christian, this is your present. This is where you are right now. You’re dead. You see, man’s trouble is not that he’s out of harmony with his environment. Man’s trouble is not that he can’t make meaningful relationships. Man’s trouble is he is dead. In 4.18 of Ephesians it says, he is alienated from the life of God. So that his deadness is not deadness in the physical, it is deadness in the spiritual. He is dead to God. His body is alive, but his inner man spiritually speaking is dead.

You say, what does it mean to be alienated from the life of God, dead to God? The best way to see it is in reference to physical death. Physical death is an inability to respond. No matter what the stimulus is, physical death means you can’t react. You’ve been to enough funerals, and so have I to know what physical death is. It doesn’t matter what the stimulus is, no physically dead individual ever reacts to any stimulus. Jesus put the two concepts together, physical death and spiritual death together, in the eighth chapter of Matthew, when he called a certain man to be his disciple and follow him.

And the man said, well, I’ll follow you, but first let me go home and bury my father. And Jesus said in Matthew 8.22, let the dead bury their dead. And he put them both together, let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead, I’ve got better things for you to do. And so it is that man is in a state of death walking. First Timothy 5.6 Paul said, she that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. It’s a case of going through a zombie-like activity. And what is the activity of the death walker? Look at it.

Verse 1. Dead in trespasses and sins. Functioning in the area of sin. Functioning in the area of trespass. Now I want you to notice something. We are not dead because of sin. We are dead because we were born sinful. We are not dead because we commit sin. We don’t do a sin and then die. We’re born dead. That’s why we sin. I always think of it this way. I am not a liar because I lie. I lie in the first place because in my heart, what? I’m a liar. A man does not kill and thus he is a murderer.

He kills because he is a murderer. The Bible says that it is what comes out of a man that defiles the man. And we are dead and that deadness functions in sinfulness. The in here in the Greek is what is called a locative of sphere. It is talking about the sphere in which we live. It is not a because of, it is an in. It is a location, a position. And by the way, the opposite of being in Christ is being in trespasses and sin. The word sins is interesting. Hamartia, very familiar word. It’s a hunter’s word.

It means to miss the target, to miss the mark. A man shoots his arrow and misses the target. The second word paraptoma, the word trespass means to slip or fall or stumble or go the wrong direction. Both are true of man and I don’t know, commentators through the years have tried to make distinctions between what these two words mean. They’re basically two ways of looking at the same thing and it’s just that God uses two words and both of them in the plural to show the totality of sinfulness that is the result of deadness.

Being alienated from the life of God means total deadness, total sinfulness. Now you say, but hamartia, in the sense of missing the mark, what do you mean by that? Now watch. This is the real true biblical definition of sin. Sin is a failure to hit God’s target. Alright, well you say, what’s God’s target? Here it is, listen, for all have sinned, even chi there, come short of the what? Glory of God. Sin is a failure to glorify God. Romans 1 says that, when they knew God, they what? Glorified him not as God.

That is sin. Sin is coming short of glorifying God. It does not mean, when we saw a person as a sinner, it does not mean that they’re all the same level of vile, rotten, degraded, corrupt, decaying sinners. You could have 20 dead corpses and they could all have varying degrees of decay. They’d all be dead, but different degrees of decay. And so it is in human history, and human kind, all are dead, but there are variances in the decadence, in the decaying of what is left. But sin is not a question of decay ultimately, it is a question of falling short of something.

In other words, now listen to this, we all understand that a robber is a sinner, and a murderer is a sinner, and a rapist is a sinner, and a liar is a sinner, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth. We’re all clued in on that. But listen to me, sin has much more to do with what you don’t do than what you do do. You got that? Sin is really not an issue of what you do, but of what you fail to do. It is that you fail to come to the glory of God.

It is that you fail, Matthew 5.48, where Jesus said, be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. And that’s where we fail, right? Or as it is written, 1 Peter 1.16, be ye holy for I am holy. Glory, holiness, perfection. That’s the target, and that’s where we fail. Now, there may be different levels of morality, different degrees of decadence, but we all fall short. It would be as if the whole congregation from Grace all lined up on the Pacific Ocean and said, we’re going to have a jump off, folks.

We’re going to see who can jump to Catalina, and you can have as long a run as you want, and we’ll run down to the beach, and everybody jump, and we’ll see who gets there. Listen, we’d all end up at different levels in the water, but nobody would get to Catalina. Now, the same thing is true in terms of the spiritual. There are different levels of attainment in human life. There are different levels of morality and so forth, but nobody gets to the glory of God, and nobody gets to perfection, and nobody gets to holiness.

That’s why we only know that in Jesus Christ, when his righteousness is given to us by God. You see, it is not so much that sin is what I do. It is what I fail to do. I’m trying to jump to perfection. I don’t make it, and I land in the sea of sin. So my behavioral sins are simply what is left when I can’t make it to God’s standard. And I say that because a lot of times we meet good people, and we say, I’m a good guy. I mean, I do civic good, humanitarian good.

I’m a wonderful father, love my wife, love my kids, take care of things. I’m very generous, very kind. Listen, nobody would ever deny that, and that’s very wonderful. I mean, that’s a good way to be. Jesus recognized that. In Luke chapter 6, verse 33, Jesus said, if you do good to them who do good to you, what thanks do you have? Sinners do the same. Jesus said, sinners do good to each other. That’s right. People do good to each other, but Jesus said, people who do good to each other are still called what? Sinners.

Because sinning is not an issue of what you’re doing to each other. It’s not relational. You can’t say, well, I’m alright because I do good to people. That isn’t the point. The point is, it’s what you don’t do, and you don’t live a holy life, and you don’t live a perfect life, and you don’t reach the standard which is the glory of God. That’s the issue. And in Luke 11 13, Jesus said this, In other words, he says, you know there are people who give good gifts to their children. What kind of people are those, Lord? Evil.

What do you mean evil? Well, their evil is not manifest in the fact that they do good for their children. It’s manifest in what they don’t do and can’t do, and that is to reach the standard of the glory of God. After the shipwreck on the island of Malta or Maleta, it says, and the barbarous people showed us no small kindness. You know those barbarous, pagan, ungodly, Christ-rejecting people showed great kindness to Paul? You see, that isn’t the issue. Good works isn’t the issue. Relational goodness isn’t the issue. Being a good neighbour and a good father and a good mother and a good parent, that’s not the issue.

The issue is the glory of God. Let me show it to you another way. John 16 8. John 16 8. We’re gonna hurry a little bit, so if you don’t have it, just listen in and I’ll read it. He’s gonna move into the hearts of men and convict them of sin. What’s sin? Verse 9. Now notice, the sin of which the spirit will convict is the sin of not doing something. You see that? It’s not the sin of doing something, it’s the sin of not doing it. You are not living to the glory of God.

You are not perfect. You are not holy because you are not believing on Jesus Christ. And no matter what else you’ll do, you’re just ankle deep in the sea a long way from the goal. That’s the problem. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of coming alive in Christ. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. God bless you.

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