Made Us Alive – Part 1 – Ephesians 2:5
In Ephesians 2:5, Paul shows the miracle of salvation: God made us alive together with Christ. After describing man’s hopeless condition apart from Christ as dead in trespasses and sins, enslaved to the world, Satan, and the flesh, and deserving of God’s wrath, Paul reminds believers that regeneration happened “even when we were dead in our trespasses.” God did not make us alive after we improved ourselves, softened our hearts, took the first step, or began moving toward Him. Spiritual death requires more than advice, encouragement, moral improvement, or religious effort. Dead sinners need life, and God alone gives spiritual life. Regeneration begins with God, not with man, and this protects the doctrine of grace as grace.
Paul’s grammar makes the theology clear: “But God… made us alive.” God is the subject. We are the recipients. Regeneration is monergistic, meaning God alone does the work of giving life to the spiritually dead. Faith and repentance are real and necessary responses, but they are the fruit of new life, not the cause of it. God renews the will, opens blind eyes, removes the heart of stone, gives a heart of flesh, and makes sinners willing to come to Christ freely by His grace. This truth is not meant to make Christians proud or cold in evangelism, but humble, grateful, bold, and dependent on God. We still call sinners to repent and believe the gospel, trusting that the same God who made us alive can make dead sinners alive through Jesus Christ.
FULL SERMON TEXT:
In Ephesians chapter 2, verse 5, where we are going to spend our time this morning, this explains to us, it shows us the miracle of salvation, and in particular, regeneration.
We’ve seen how depraved and how terrible our condition is apart from Christ, even though we might outwardly look fine, and even to the world we might look good. But as God has described our character, our nature, our very essence before regeneration in those first three verses, it puts us all on that same level playing field.
Nobody is good enough, no matter what you look like, no matter what you’ve done.
He has shown us this condition, shown us what it is to be a man, to be a woman apart from Jesus Christ, and it is a desperate situation.
Go back and read. We’ll go back and read through those verses here in just a minute along with the rest of them.
We were dead in our trespasses and sins. We were under slavery to sin, to the world, to Satan, and we deserved—we were children of wrath. We deserved God’s wrath. Rightly so, because we are sinners by nature and sin in practice.
And then verse 4 changed our direction. It took our gaze off of us, and it pointed us to the One who actually has an answer for our problem.
We saw how merciful and loving God is, and because He is that, He did what we’re going to look at this morning.
He has made us alive together with Christ.
This is the miracle.
This is the doctrine.
This is regeneration.
This is the new birth.
This is spiritual resurrection from the dead.
The point that Paul is making, that God is making here in this passage, is that dead sinners do not make themselves alive.
God does.
Please stand with me for the reading of God’s Word.
Ephesians 2:1-10: And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Father, this morning, as we come to the climax of this passage, that you have quickened us, that you have regenerated us, that you have spiritually resurrected us through Christ, Lord, may Christ be magnified this morning.
For some in this room who may not have heard these things or may not understand some of what we discuss this morning, would you use your inspired and inerrant and sufficient Word to teach us?
For those who have heard some things, but have not quite come to a full understanding, or we haven’t fully believed or fully understood or begun to obey, Lord, would you bring reproof?
Lord, would you also provide correction for those who have been reproved?
And for those of us who have heard this 100 times, and we understand this and we love this and we are grateful for this truth, Lord, would you continue to train us in righteousness?
Do not let us get complacent, to lose the sense of awe, to lose our sense of gratitude and humility for what you have done.
And Lord, in doing these things through your Word, let it accomplish the task that you’ve put it forth to accomplish, Lord. Let it make us more complete, more like Christ, so that we would be equipped for every good work.
Lord, do this by your Spirit and by your Spirit alone. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. We cannot understand. We cannot do any of these things.
Lord, by your Spirit, open our eyes, open our hearts, open our minds, and empower us to understand, believe, and obey what we have heard this morning.
And do this all for the glory of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior.
In His name we pray. Amen.
You may be seated.
The main point we need to understand this morning is that God alone gives spiritual life to dead sinners, and He does so by uniting them to the risen Christ. And His saving work is entirely, entirely, entirely by God’s sovereign, electing, irresistible grace.
So this morning, as we look at this doctrine of regeneration, that will be our main theme as we are understanding what God has done, what He is doing, what He has done in our life as Christians.
First, let’s look here in this section, in this verse, at the timing of regeneration.
He says, “Even when we were dead in our trespasses.”
And you’re like, “Mark, we’ve already covered this one.”
That was verse 1.
Repetition is how we learn.
God knows that. Paul recognizes that, and he tells us again here just in case you forgot between the first sentence and now.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses.”
Before he says what He’s done for us, he’s reminding us once again, “I just told you who I am. I just told you that I am merciful and loving. But let me remind you once more, you were dead.”
Notice the timing of regeneration in our life.
God didn’t regenerate us once we improved ourself, once we softened our hearts to hear His Word, once we took the first step.
God acted while we were still dead.
He made us alive when we were in this dead state.
You cannot get to God in your dead state.
Spiritual death, that nature that we have before Christ, requires more than just help up. It requires more than just helping you understand better your situation.
“Hey, you’re dead. Did you know you’re dead?”
That doesn’t help.
We don’t just need healing. We don’t just need a handout or a hand up. We were dead, and because man in his natural state is dead, the thing that he needs is life.
And what can a dead man do?
Nothing.
Now, we’ve stated this, but it bears repeating.
We’re talking about people being dead by nature.
But you’re looking around, you’re going, “There’s a lot of lost people. They don’t look dead to me.”
That’s the point.
That’s how deceptive our sin nature really is.
Born in sin, all we can see is, “I’m a good person.”
All I can see is what matters to me.
All I can see is the good things that I do outweighing the bad.
It is so deceptive that we don’t even see our spiritual inability.
Yes, we can think. Yes, we have a mind. We have emotions. We have a body. We can discipline ourselves in some ways to do things physically. We can build habits in our lives that seem positive.
But ultimately, we are dead spiritually.
We are dead specifically towards God.
We cannot understand the things of God.
We do not want the things of God.
We don’t care about God.
We don’t care about His Word.
We don’t care about His people in a way that adds one bit of goodness to our life.
We don’t naturally love God.
“Well, I’ve always loved God.”
No, you didn’t.
We don’t naturally submit to the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Well, I’ve always known Jesus, and I’ve always followed Jesus.”
No, you have not.
And if nothing has changed from when you started thinking you were following Jesus, from your first steps or whatever to now, then you probably have not been regenerated.
You’re following maybe a Jesus, like we’ve talked about before, that you’ve made up in your own mind.
Or perhaps you are mistaken about what salvation really means, about the gospel, about what God calls us to.
We don’t naturally receive and understand spiritual truths.
We don’t come to the light on our own.
We like the darkness.
And our sin is so deceptive that we think we are walking around enlightened while we are in the dark.
“Even when we were dead in our trespasses.”
Before he talks about regeneration, before he talks about making us alive, he states this phrase again because what we need is to understand that this doctrine, this right thinking about who we were, protects the doctrine of grace.
It sets it up for what it really is, not for what people have turned it into, that grace is a license to sin, that grace is that God just loves you enough, that if you come, He’s just going to give you a big hug and everything’s going to be great.
Setting this up in these terms shows us that His grace is completely of His own choosing.
Regeneration, being made new, being born again, whatever word you want to use, or quickening if you’re using a King James Version, does not begin with you.
It begins with God.
It’s His grace that has made you alive.
You, as we talked about last week, contribute nothing to your salvation.
God gives life where there was not life, period.
Old Puritan Stephen Charnock summarized the order here. He says, “Life precedes motion and is the cause of motion.”
And that’s the point.
Your spiritual motion, spiritual life, this ability to follow Christ, to believe on Him, to go towards Him, to follow after Him, doesn’t produce spiritual life.
That’s putting the cart before the horse.
Spiritual life produces motion towards Him.
You have to be regenerated. You have to receive new life in order to believe and to obey.
That statement separates some churches. Divides some churches.
Now, I will say this: regeneration, rightly understood according to the Scriptures, doesn’t divide true believers. True doctrine unites.
Why?
Because one of those says, “I have something to do with it, and I’m important,” and the other says, “I’m a worm. I’m a worthless child of wrath apart from God, and I brought nothing to the table.”
So churches split over this doctrine being taught like this because, “Well, I don’t want to lose that idea. I don’t want to believe that God is the One who did it all.”
That’s again why this understanding of being dead in our sins, why he brings it up again before he shares about regeneration, this protects the doctrine of grace.
It shows us grace as it really is.
Grace is not helping those who help themselves.
Grace is God helping those who can’t do a thing.
And so that’s where it begins.
The timing of regeneration, he didn’t regenerate you when you were already working your way towards God.
You were dead.
That’s the state you were in.
And then he says, “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive.”
Look at the author of regeneration.
Who’s the subject here?
Obviously, if you just look at verse 5 here, we’re in the middle of a sentence. The subject here is important, but we can’t look just in this verse for the subject. It’s not in there. You have to back it up in the sentence.
And Paul’s grammar here, like I’ve revealed in some other places over the last few years, his grammar here is theology.
The subject, the one who does the making alive, is not you.
The subject of the sentence is God.
In verse 4, “But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, made us alive.”
Subject, verb.
But God made us alive.
God did it.
God is the subject of the sentence.
He’s the one doing the action.
He made us alive.
We are the recipients of that action.
What’s the English term? The direct object, is that correct?
All right, making sure I’m not too far off.
I’m not going back to 8th grade English. Not going to do it.
We’re the direct object. He’s the subject. He’s the one doing it.
So this tells us that regeneration is, here’s a big word. I’ll explain what it means. Don’t fall over because I’m using a big word.
As Brother David said, you need to hear big words. You need to learn how to say them, spell them, and love them. Amen.
Regeneration is, here’s the word, monergistic.
Mono means one.
Ergistic means working, energy.
One who’s doing the work.
Regeneration is one person doing the work.
Not both. Not two. Not three. Not more than one.
One.
One working.
In regeneration, God alone gives spiritual life.
You do not cooperate with God in the act of regeneration.
Now, I say that specifically using those terms on purpose because some people mistake saying God saved us by Himself, and then they include your entire Christian life, that you have no work to do.
No, no, no.
I’m talking about regeneration. I’m talking about justification by faith. I’m talking about this life-giving.
That is God at work only.
You have nothing to contribute. You can’t.
How could you possibly have something to do with it if verses 1 through 3 and the beginning of verse 5 is true?
What could you have done?
You see, where it’s synergistic, and that’s multiple people working, is in sanctification.
We get to that in verse 10. We’ll get that, I don’t know, a couple months from now.
But regeneration, making dead people alive, is not a work that we do.
God made us alive.
You can’t twist that around.
You can’t make that say, “God and me made me alive.”
Or add to it, “God made us alive as I did this.”
God gives life.
The sinner does not cooperate in regeneration.
In God’s quickening work, we are entirely passive.
It is being done to us.
That’s what Paul’s language here enforces.
God is not looking around on the earth and trying to find some flicker of life that He can resuscitate.
He’s not looking for a little spark that He can fan into a flame of life.
That’s not what He’s looking for.
He gives life where there was nothing.
We are regenerated by God’s work alone.
He made us alive.
Now, let me bring this in here because people very quickly will go, “Well, what about faith and repentance?”
Listen to me.
Faith and repentance, we’ll talk more about that in verses 8 and 9. We’ll get into it even deeper.
But faith and repentance are actual real responses, but they’re the fruit of life. They don’t cause new life.
The Bible commands sinners to repent and believe, absolutely. And when we are sharing the gospel, we command people who are lost in their sins to repent and believe.
And Scripture also says that every single sinner who actually comes to Christ comes willingly.
But faith does not create the spiritual life in a dead heart.
How can that happen?
If you are dead spiritually, that means you can’t believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
You can’t obey God in a way that is meritorious.
Faith doesn’t create spiritual life.
You have to have spiritual life in order to exercise faith and repentance.
Regeneration is the root, and faith and repentance are the fruit.
And that happens in a moment.
It’s not like you got regenerated and then two weeks later you decided to have faith in Jesus Christ.
It happens in a moment, but regeneration is first.
How can you exercise repentance and faith? How can you do anything positive spiritually towards God if you’re dead towards Him?
You can’t.
This new birth is all of God.
John 1:13 says believers are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
“But I willed it.”
Only because God willed it.
The new birth then, regeneration, is not produced by growing up in the church, by growing up in desire for Christ, or by religiously working towards a higher level of Christianity so that you can be accepted into the group.
Your will is not the cause of your new birth.
It’s God’s will.
It is of God.
Not by the will of the flesh, not by the will of man, but of God.
Now, that doesn’t mean your will isn’t part of it, but it follows regeneration.
And what does God do in regeneration?
He changes your will.
Before God showed you grace by making you alive, you were not, again, neutral and you definitely were not good.
You loved darkness rather than the light.
But in regeneration, God does not violate your will.
He renews it.
You didn’t have a spiritual will that wanted God.
You were dead.
There was nothing to violate.
You had no desire for God.
The only way you could have a desire for God is if God gave you a desire for God.
And that’s what He does.
In regeneration, He gives you a new heart.
He gives you a will.
He makes your will no longer a slave to this world, to your passions, to the power of the air.
Again, this is all connected to what we’ve already talked about.
I’m not saying something new here.
Your will did not want God. So God gave you new life, spiritual life.
And in giving you this spiritual life, He made you willing by grace.
By His grace, He made you want Jesus.
Before God regenerates, you don’t see Jesus as someone to adore. You don’t see Him as the pearl of great price worth losing everything in life for.
You see Him as a guy. Maybe a good guy. Maybe somebody who has some good ideas to think about.
But that’s all He is until God changes your will so that you want Jesus, so that you want Him, that you believe on Him.
And this is God effectually calling someone.
He regenerates as He is calling you to faith and repentance.
God calls sinners by His Word and by His Spirit.
He gives you new life, and through the preaching of the Word, through the preaching of the gospel, as His Spirit is at work in your life, giving you new life and enlightening your mind to understand the truth that you are hearing.
He removes the heart of stone and gives you a heart of flesh.
He renews your will, and He draws you.
He causes you to see Christ as He truly is, as a wonderful Savior, as the One who died on the cross so that you may come to Him freely.
You come freely, but you are made willing by His grace.
The 1689 London Baptist Confession states it like this: “God is effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ, yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by His grace.”
And so this keeps the biblical balance.
God effectually draws us as the gospel is proclaimed by His Spirit at work, and then the sinner truly comes.
He truly believes, and he doesn’t come against his will.
He comes because grace has made him willing.
He comes because now he once was blind, but now he can see.
I didn’t see Jesus for what He was. I didn’t see Him for who He is. But now I do, and that’s what I want.
It sounds confusing. It sounds contradicting to our human, fleshly mind, but it’s not.
It’s a paradox. There’s a balance.
God draws, and the sinner comes willingly as the Lord is working in the heart.
Listen, let me give you an illustration from the Scripture that you all know very well.
Lazarus.
Let’s talk about dead men coming to life.
Lazarus.
You remember this story.
I’m not talking about Lazarus and the rich man.
I’m talking about Lazarus the dead dude, friend of Jesus, buried in a tomb four days.
He’s dead.
Whether he was in there to start with dead or not, we don’t have to argue that. At four days inside of a sealed tomb, he’s dead.
Lazarus didn’t cooperate in his resurrection.
He came out of the tomb. He obeyed what Christ said.
Christ said, “Lazarus, come forth,” and Lazarus came forth.
But how?
Because Jesus gave him life.
Life came first, and then the obedience.
Life comes first, then faith.
Life comes first, then repentance.
You can’t have faith, you can’t repent, you can’t obey God until you are given life.
The dead hear the voice of God and live.
So what this does is it takes away any sense of false confidence that you might have.
So let me address maybe where some of you might be.
And in a room this big, I don’t know where everybody is, and especially with some that are maybe have been visiting or not members. I don’t know your heart.
But listen, you are not regenerated, you are not given new birth, by walking down an aisle.
Every step you take down the aisle towards the steps at the church is not one more bit of life coming into your body.
That’s not how regeneration works.
You’re not regenerated by repeating a prayer that somebody says, “Hey, say this after me.”
You don’t get new birth, you’re not regenerated because you signed your name on a card saying, “I believe in Jesus.”
You’re not regenerated whenever you get baptized in the water.
You don’t have new life because you grew up in the church.
You don’t have new life because you are trying really, really hard to be a good person.
And you definitely don’t get new life because your grandma was saved, and your dad was saved, so you just must be because you were born into it.
Those things might be part of the process God’s using, but those things in and of themselves do not make dead people alive.
Charles Spurgeon said, “Mending you, patching you, revising you, reforming you will be of no avail. You must be new created.”
And that’s what Ephesians 2:5 is saying.
God does not improve your old self.
He gives life to the dead.
He creates a new person, a new spirit, a new heart.
2 Corinthians 5:17 and 18 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.”
I’ve only gotten halfway through my sermon. We’re going to make this a two-parter.
Beloved church, we don’t say these things, I don’t share these things, I don’t share these truths about how regeneration takes place and effectual calling and the order of how this happens in your life because I want to make you go out there and tell people, “You need to be regenerated before you can believe and repent.”
No, no, that’s not the point.
Who’s he talking to here?
The church.
What’s his point then?
To humble you.
You’re not in this room as a believer because, man, you made it into the group. You worked hard, you earned the gold stars in Sunday school, and you memorized the right verses, and you finally made it.
That’s not how you make it in.
In fact, you can’t make it in.
God made us alive, and that’s what we need to remember.
So then, as we do go out to share the gospel, or as you are in this room and maybe you have not believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, you’re not a Christian, you have not been saved, you need to hear this.
You don’t need to hear, “Hey, you need to be regenerated before you can believe.”
You need to hear, “Repent and believe the gospel right now.”
And if you will, He will save you.
I’m sharing these truths to encourage and embolden, but also humble my fellow beloved Christians in this room.
Don’t think yourself too big.
You didn’t make you.
God made you, and we need to remember that.
Amen.