"Under New Management"
Ephesians 2:1-10
We all enter this world under management. We all live our lives under management. And we all die under management. Sadly, too many people are living their lives, and too many people are dying, with the same management under which they were born.
The Bible says that we were all born in sin that we have from birth, a nature that is sinful. So many people around us are living and dying in that sin. But the Bible also says that we don’t have to live in sin and we don’t have to die in sin. If we are a believer in Jesus Christ we are no longer under the old management. Through what Jesus did on the cross we have a new nature, and we have been placed under new management. In Ephesians 2:1-10, the Apostle Paul provides encouragement for the believer; he gets at the very heart of who we WERE, who we ARE, and who we WILL BE.
First, let’s consider our Past 2:1-3
1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, You WERE Dead. Now, Paul is not speaking about physical death. Ephesians 4:18 says: "Being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart."
Sin places a body of death upon us. In Romans 7:24 Paul describes the effects of sin, "Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?" This term to which Paul alludes is descriptive of a shocking execution that was employed by the Romans. A corpse would be fastened to the condemned person so that he could not be released from the corpse. Every move he made was accompanied by the deceased. The decaying flesh of this cadaver would spawn disease and infection upon the condemned individual. Eventually... he would die a slow, painful, and emotionally horrifying death.
Many years ago there was a movie entitled "The Way We Were." The characters in the movie spent most of their time taking a sentimental look at the past. That is the way most of us want to remember the past. After all, they were "The good ol’ days!" Paul is saying that the "good old days" were not at all good. He said, "You WERE Dead." The operative word here is not the word "dead" but the adjective "WERE" - "You WERE Dead." As we reflect on our past, we must keep in mind that we are believers in Jesus Christ, we WERE Dead in sin, but by His marvelous Grace, we are NO LONGER dead in sin.
Paul does not simply stop at this point. He goes further to say that we were not only dead in our sin, we were unrighteous.
And we’ll talk about that tomorrow.