Seated with Christ – Ephesians 2:6
In Ephesians 2:6, Paul continues showing the riches of God’s saving grace by explaining that believers have not only been made alive with Christ, but also raised up and seated with Him in the heavenly places. Salvation is more than forgiveness, regeneration, or being brought back to neutral. In union with Christ, believers share spiritually in His resurrection life now and are promised bodily resurrection and glory to come. God is the One who raises and seats His people; dead sinners do not raise themselves or take a place they deserve. We were dead, guilty, under wrath, and trapped in the old dominion of sin, the world, and Satan, but God united us to Christ and lifted us from the lowest depths to the highest place of grace, privilege, security, and hope.
Being seated with Christ means believers have a new standing, a secure future, and a new kingdom identity. We are not merely pardoned criminals kept at a distance, but those united to Christ, belonging in the presence of God because we are in Him. Our assurance does not rest in our performance, but in Christ’s finished work and exalted position; where Christ is, His people will be also. Though we still live in this world, still battle sin, and still face Satan’s accusations, we no longer fight from a losing position. We fight from victory because Christ has already won. Therefore, Christians must live as citizens of heaven, no longer shaped by the old world system, but by Christ, His Word, and His kingdom. We were dead, but God made us alive; we were buried in sin, but God raised us with Christ; we were under the old dominion, but God seated us with Christ in His kingdom.
FULL SERMON TRANSCRIPT:
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Go ahead and turn in your copy of God’s Word to Ephesians chapter 2.
We’re picking up where we left off, which is our practice. Last week, or the last two weeks, we looked at Ephesians chapter 2, verse 5. And this morning, we’ll pick up in verse 6.
But let me just remind you of where we’ve been so far.
What we’ve seen in chapter 2 is Paul reminding us of what God has done for dead sinners.
We were dead in trespasses and sins. We were sons of disobedience, following Satan, the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. We were children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
But God is rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us, made us alive, even when we were dead. Reminder of that. Even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
And then the last phrase there in verse 5, “For by grace you have been saved.”
Just a wonderful interjection there from Paul.
We saw that God gives life where there was only death.
But as you know, since we’re reading this entire passage every week, that’s not where this story ends.
You’d think that’s good enough. And I think a lot of Christians unfortunately only get through verse 5 in their understanding of the Christian life.
But there’s more here in verse 6.
Paul explains that union that believers have with Christ even further, not just in scope, but even in time.
God has not only made us alive with Christ, He has raised us with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places.
So this verse we’re getting into sounds like more than just forgiveness, as wonderful as that is. Don’t get me wrong. But this verse that we’re coming to is going to sound like more than just regeneration, as wonderful as that was that we looked at in verse 5.
Verse 6 sounds like more than redemption, as wonderful as that is, as we are talking about what it means to be in Christ, with Christ, in Christ. All these phrases point us to this union that we have.
And it’s this union. It provides for us more than just spiritual life now, but it provides for us resurrection, exaltation, privilege, and an honor in heaven, and ultimately here and now with a kingdom identity.
The same power that raised Christ and seated Christ has now been applied to us, those who are in Christ.
So we are going to look at this passage and ask the question, what does it mean that believers have been raised and seated with Christ?
Ephesians 2:1-10 2 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 continue through this passage of Scripture and see the wonder of your salvation, Lord, it’s already been wonderful. It’s already been amazing. It’s already been humbling. It’s already been assuring.
But you didn’t stop there. You keep going.
And Lord, what a wonderful gift your Word is to us, that we would see, that you would give us a glimpse, that you would pull back the curtain of time and space so that we can see the reality of who we are, whose we are, who Christ is, and what our end is, Lord, so that we can glory even more. That we can be even more amazed by your grace.
So this morning, Father, there may be some that this is new for. So Lord, would you use your Word to teach us?
For those who have misunderstood some of these things, Lord, would you reprove us?
For those who have been reproved and need the right way of understanding, would you correct us?
And for those of us that have heard these words and have understood these things, Lord, continue to train us in righteousness. Continue to remind us of these wonderful truths, Lord, so that we may be complete, equipped for every good work.
Do this by your Spirit and for the glory of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
You may be seated.
In verse 5, we have this glorious truth that God has regenerated us. He has made us alive together with Christ. And that just blows Paul’s mind and makes him cry out, “By grace you have been saved.”
He feels so overwhelmed at this moment that he felt it necessary to remind us of what he’s talking about here, of pushing us back to verse 1 all the way through to what we’ve already seen again.
Lord, do you even realize the grace that we have been shown?
It is by grace alone. It must be by grace that we have been saved.
And verse 6 picks up there with “and,” so this is a continuation of the sentence that we looked at last week, that interjection.
So if you remove that “by grace you have been saved,” you can see the progression of the sentence a little simpler.
So let me do that real quickly.
He says, “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 together with Christ and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
So these verbs go with the main sentence that we are working through that began in the beginning of verse 4.
And so the subject is still God.
Here it is God who has made us alive. That was the first verb we came to, “made us alive.”
And now we come to two more verbs in this sentence.
“Raised us up.”
God, He’s the subject, raised us up with Him.
And God seated us with Him, that is in Christ, in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
So this first phrase here, “and raised us up with Him,” Paul shows here how God is continuing the work. It is God’s saving action. He is the main subject. He has done this work.
It is God’s work of bringing dead people to life.
Dead sinners do not raise ourselves. We don’t do this. God is the One who acts.
So, as we look at what it means to be raised with Him and seated with Him, let’s not forget that we’re not the ones raising ourselves up and taking a seat that we believe we deserve.
He’s raising us up.
He is the One seating us.
So this reminds us then once again of resurrection language.
That raising us up is talking about being regenerated spiritually. But it’s also in connection, like we talked about last week, with Christ being raised up.
He was raised up not just spiritually like we are raised from the dead spiritually to life spiritually. He was raised from the dead physically to eternal life in the resurrection of His body.
So He’s not telling us here, let me be very careful, He’s not telling us here that He has already raised us up in the sense that we are physically there with Christ yet.
It’s not as if our bodily resurrection has already taken place. That’s still future. That’s still something that is to come.
But what He is saying is that in our regeneration, in our coming to life in Christ, in that work, in what God has done, He is saying that believers already share spiritually in Christ’s resurrection life.
Now, it’s also a promise of something to come physically for us. But being raised is that connection with Christ being raised because He was resurrected from the dead. We have spiritually been resurrected from the dead.
So that resurrection language is still very much at play here.
Romans 6:5 says, “For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall,” future, “certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.”
And then Colossians, Paul says the same thing to them in chapter 2:12. He says that believers have been raised with Christ through faith and the powerful working of God who raised Him from the dead.
So here in Ephesians chapter 2:6, it’s teaching us that the believer has already been transferred from the realm of death into the realm of resurrection life.
Now, we talked about that being made alive in Christ, but it’s more than just having life. It’s being alive. There is resurrection life in us, and that resurrection life is connected to the resurrection life of Jesus Christ, which makes what we’ve already discussed even more wonderful.
Think about it. Think about it.
Verses 1 through 3 put you in your place, did they not?
You worthless, wretched worm of a sinner. That’s who you were. That’s who we were. That’s who I was. All of us. Every one of us.
That’s the state that we were in.
Worthless, wretched, undeserving. We were enemies of God, unworthy of grace and mercy.
But God made us alive in Christ.
And that is so huge and overwhelming and wonderful that we have reveled in that over these last few weeks.
But He’s saying then it’s more than that.
You’re not given spiritual life so that you can come back to even, and now you’ve got to work really, really hard because heaven’s up here.
No, it’s more than just redemption. It’s more than just making it clean. More than just making us okay with God.
He is taking us all the way into the heavens, all the way to the highest height we can ever achieve or attain.
He’s taking the worst of the worst and raising us with Christ.
John Calvin said, “It is as if we have been brought from the lowest hell to heaven itself.”
That’s what we’re seeing here in Ephesians chapter 2.
Death to life. Wrath to mercy. This old kingdom, this old dominion that we lived in, and now part of Christ’s kingdom. From the grave to resurrection. From the lowest depths to the heavenly places.
God raised us up with Christ.
Not just raised us here, raised us all the way to where Christ is in the heavenly places.
We are not what we once were.
We are not under that old dominion, the powers, Satan, the world. We’re not under that anymore.
We no longer belong to this world.
We are above these things.
Now, be careful.
I saw a video this week of some guy that says, “Well, I’m not a sinner.”
Well, that’s not what I mean. And by the way, don’t listen to those people.
I don’t mean we’ve been taken up there and so we are just like Jesus. We’ve been raised with Jesus. We’re resurrected like Jesus. And so everything here is like Jesus now.
We still are in this world. We still are tempted. We still have to battle sin. We still have to live in this world.
But you do not belong to this world anymore.
God raised you with Christ.
So we’re not at a neutral point here as Christians and now trying to earn the resurrection.
It is more like we have been given this resurrection life in Christ, and now we are working that out until one day we are with Him there.
Paul says, “and raised us up with Him,” and the second verb here is, “and seated us with Him.”
This helps us complete the thought of what we were just looking at before.
It’s not just that He raised us. He seated us with Him.
We’re not just resurrected spiritually, and we’re not just promised resurrection physically so that we get to be there.
I’ve heard some people say stuff like, “I’ll just be happy to have a shack in the back of the room in heaven,” you know, kind of experience.
And what this is saying here is that your place in heaven is seated in Christ.
That’s different when we understand the depravity that we were in, the depraved state of our nature apart from Christ, and we see the amazing grace of God to make us alive together.
We are just happy to be here. I get that.
But God’s not just happy for us to be here. There’s more to it.
He has raised us, and He has seated us with Him in the heavenly places.
He has seated us with Him.
So this moves not just from resurrection, but even to exaltation.
See, Christ was raised from the dead. And then what happened according to Scripture?
He was seated at the right hand of God.
We saw that back in chapter 1, in verse 20 of chapter 1, that that’s what happened to Christ. He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand.
But now Paul is saying that believers, those who are Christians, those who have been saved by this grace, have been raised and seated with Him.
Remember, we are in Christ so that His life is ours.
So where He is, we are.
What God did in Christ then applies to all of us who are united to Christ.
Now before you take that too far, that doesn’t make you Jesus. That doesn’t make you God.
But in Christ, we have been united with Him in such a way that where He is, there we will be too.
It doesn’t say here specifically that we are at the Father’s right hand. So that’s the difference.
We are in Him.
The fact that He applies that right hand imagery to Christ is that right hand imagery speaks to dominion, speaks to authority, speaks to that Godness that He has, that He is over all things in terms of sovereignty.
That’s not what He says about us.
He just says we’re in Christ.
All right?
So, we’ve got to be careful. We’re not saying that everything Jesus is, we are, okay?
But where He is, we are.
Let me give you a biblical illustration. It falls woefully short. So, do not take this and run with it way too far, okay? But just kind of give us an idea of what I’m talking about here.
It is as if it is like Joseph. You know the guy with the many-colored coat, who was sold off into slavery, that Joseph.
Where did he ascend to?
Second in command.
It says that you are second to none, basically, is what the Bible describes it. There’s nothing you’re not over except for me and my wife, the Pharaoh says, right?
So he has this undershepherding authority, this sort of position that shows something of being as close to Pharaoh as possible, but not being him or having his particular position.
Again, it kind of helps us here a little bit, but let’s just dive in a little bit more to try to flesh this out.
Being seated speaks to position, to privilege, and to security.
Jesus alone is uniquely the Christ. He alone is the eternal Son. He alone is the Mediator. He alone is the head of the church. He alone is Lord of all things.
So believers being seated with Him doesn’t mean we are those things. It means that we share in His victory. We share in His privilege. We share in the honor because we are in Him.
To be seated with Christ means that the believer has been brought into a new standing before God.
We’re not just pardoned criminals who’ve been left at a distance.
We have been united with the risen Christ.
John Gill, old Puritan, said Christ is gone into heaven as the forerunner for us and is entered there in our name and for our good. And this expresses honor, pleasure, rest from labor and weariness, and safety and security.
So being seated with Christ means that we have an honor that has been bestowed upon us that does not belong to those who are guilty before God.
We have a security there in Christ that does not belong to those who are under the wrath of God.
Being seated with Christ means we have access to the Father that we didn’t have when we were lost and far off.
Being in Christ means that we belong there.
We belong in the presence of God.
Not just that He saved us, kept us at a distance.
We belong right there with God.
And the fact that He’s using this term seated, this “seated us with Him,” this sitting also has a deeper meaning to it.
When someone sits, when some divine or some king or ruler sits down, what does it mean?
They’re finished with their work, and what they have done is securely fastened. It is over. It is done.
So this being seated, our being seated with Him, is certain because He is seated.
What it’s saying here is though this hasn’t happened yet in real time, it will happen eventually, our destiny, our ultimate destiny, is bound to Christ.
So where He is, where He has gone, we will be.
If the head of the church is seated in glory, then the body is not going to be left here in the grave.
Romans 8:30 says, “And those whom He predestined, He also called. And those whom He called, He also justified. And those whom He justified, He also glorified.”
You see, He’s talking about future events that haven’t taken place yet, and still He’s speaking of them as already having been done.
He’s speaking of this future glory, this future seating with Christ, in such a way that it is as good as done.
Meaning your final destination is not hanging by a thread. It’s not fragile. It’s secure.
Where we are meant to be, having been saved, having been made alive, is with Christ.
And because He is there, we will be also.
So our assurance is not then in our ability to make our way to Christ to work ourselves to that high seat.
Our security is in Christ’s representative place before God.
Where Christ is seated, we will be.
Our life is hidden with Christ, Scripture tells us. And so then our future is secured in Him and in Him alone.
In other words, you will lose your salvation when Christ is dethroned.
Happen?
Never.
Never.
You cannot lose what is promised.
You cannot lose this salvation.
You cannot lose what He has planned to do.
You are raised with Him, and you are seated with Him, and nothing’s going to take that away from you unless Christ Himself is taken off the throne.
And that’s not going to happen.
So what does this do for us?
It makes us want to worship Him. It gives us confidence in Him. It makes us want to endure through trials and suffering. And it makes us want to be obedient to our Savior, to our Lord, to the One whom we are in.
He has seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
I kind of got this out of order here, but following along with this “in Christ” part, it’s in heavenly places, but the more important piece is “in Christ Jesus.”
This is the whole thing. This is the heart of the verse. This is what makes everything work.
He keeps using this: with Christ, with Him, in Him, in Christ.
We’ve seen it a lot all the way from the beginning of Ephesians over and over and over and over again.
He’s trying to drill into our minds that your blessings, your salvation, your future, your everything cannot be separated from Jesus Christ.
You get nothing apart from Him.
But what he’s referring to here, what he’s promising here is that you’re not going to be raised near Christ, in the vicinity of Christ. You’re not seated merely around Christ or even under Christ.
We are raised, but the words say here, we are raised and seated with Christ because we are not just with Christ, we are in Christ Jesus.
The 1689 London Baptist Confession says, “All those who are united to Jesus Christ, their head, by His Spirit and by faith, have fellowship with Him in His graces, His sufferings, His death, His resurrection, and glory.”
And that’s what Ephesians chapter 2:6 is telling us about.
Believers share in Christ’s resurrection and glory because we are in union with Him.
And just as everything else that we’ve talked about so far preserves grace, union with Christ also preserves humility in the believer and assurance to the believer.
It preserves humility because none of this is ours by nature.
You don’t get to be seated at the right hand of the Father. You don’t get to be seated in Christ Jesus. You don’t get to be raised up into heaven and seated with Christ on your own by nature.
You’re children of wrath.
You don’t climb your way into heaven.
You are raised. It is done to you.
You are seated. It is done to you.
It is therefore by grace.
And again, it preserves our assurance because what belongs to Christ can never be taken from Christ.
If salvation even for a moment depended on our performance, we would be lost. But because our life is in Christ, our hope is as secure as Christ Himself.
John Owen speaks, another old Puritan preacher, by the way, if you ever want to just have something to read, the old Puritans are really good.
John Owen writes on this union with Christ. He wrote that believers receive grace from Christ until the day of their final exaltation to a state of fellowship and glory with Him.
That’s what we’ve been talking about, this raised and seated.
So we have grace now. We have communion with Christ now. We have fellowship with Him now. And because those things are true, we also then have this final exaltation to heaven later.
This future glory that awaits Christians is not disconnected from the present grace that we have in being with Christ, in Christ. It is God completing what He began in Christ Jesus.
That’s what these things remind us of.
So then if these things are true, if we have been united with Christ, all these things are true, made alive, raised, seated with Christ in Christ Jesus, then that means we have to change the way that we think about ourselves, Christian.
We’re not little orphans begging for more soup.
And you all know what I’m talking about. That’s the image in my head. I can’t get it out. That’s why I’m laughing. It’s not funny.
But we’re not orphans begging for scraps.
We’re not orphans banging at the door begging God to let us in, and He eventually just gives in.
No, no, no.
We have been adopted.
We have been taken in as part of the family.
And the proof of that is that He has said He has raised us and seated us with Christ Jesus.
We are united to Christ.
That means we are sons of God as He is a Son of God.
We are part of the family.
This promise that is found in Christ is for us.
We don’t have to live with uncertainty about what’s to come.
We have been united with the One who has ascended and been exalted.
So, we don’t need to look at ourselves and just think how weak we are, or think about our past, or think about our failures, or the fact that we’re still being tempted, or the circumstances we’re in.
And we definitely, goodness gracious, don’t need to look at ourselves the way that other people look at us.
We can see ourselves in Christ.
We must understand ourselves, if we are truly believers, through this union with Christ Jesus.
I am not my own.
You are not your own.
We have been bought with a price, Scripture tells us.
So, let’s go back. Like I said, I jumped ahead, and then we’re going to touch on this. We’re not going to skip it.
“And raised us with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
“In the heavenly places.”
You see this theme already. We’ve been there a couple of times in chapter 1, verse 3 and verse 20, talking about the heavenly places. Now here in chapter 2, and then he’ll bring it up again in chapter 3 and in chapter 6, bringing up this idea of the heavenly places.
So he’s saying that this that has been done to us, this being raised and seated with Christ, has, as I’ve already mentioned, not taken place yet.
So having done this in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus doesn’t mean that we get to escape the world.
We’re still here.
I sometimes will joke that if God’s ultimate goal was only that we would just be saved and then be with Him, that as soon as we were regenerated, that as soon as we confessed Jesus as Lord, as soon as we believed in our heart that God raised Him from the dead, He would take us to heaven.
But that’s not what has happened.
There’s still purpose in our being here.
This promise is for us now.
In the meantime, why do we need to know about this?
All this seems to do for some people is go, “Well, I want to be there now.”
Well, that’s a good thing.
But what that future promise should do in us is give us hope for that future. It should make us strive on. It should make us persevere. It should encourage us to endure.
We’re still going to be wrestling. We’re still going to face all the things that we face.
However, knowing these promises means for us now, Christian, that we are no longer under those old powers in the heavenly places.
Remember that “in the heavenly places” being the spiritual realm that we are in.
Remember verse 2 said we once followed the prince of the power of the air, but now verse 6 says we’re seated with Christ in the heavenly places.
So Paul is saying here that there has been a change of dominion, a change in the kingdom that we have been a part of.
We are no longer a part of that old kingdom under Satan’s rule.
Christ has triumphed.
Christ has won.
He is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.
He’s in those heavenly places.
If we are in Him in those heavenly places and we are united with Him, then we share in His victory.
We are over those things.
Charles Spurgeon once said that we are not only alive, but we are elevated into the highest position of the new life. We are made to live with Christ and in Christ. Made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
We are positionally in Christ over all these things.
In heaven means we are no longer under those old powers. We are above them.
Sin no longer has dominion over you.
Satan no longer has dominion over you.
Now, like I said, that doesn’t mean we’re sinless or that we reach some sort of perfectionism in this life.
Being seated with Christ doesn’t mean there’s no longer a battle.
I mean, Ephesians chapter 6, remember the armor of God section that we’ll get to later, tells us that we wrestle against spiritual forces of evil right now.
So this promise that we’re looking at doesn’t mean we don’t face those things. This promise doesn’t mean we are going to have an easy life. This promise here doesn’t mean that we should pretend that the devil is not active in this world.
But the difference now for you and I, Christian, is that we don’t fight from a losing position anymore.
We fight from victory, not for victory.
We’re not trying to win anymore.
Christ already won.
And so because Christ won, because He is the victor, because He has already overcome and we are in Him, then we can resist the devil as those who belong to Jesus.
We can put on the armor of God as those who have already been brought under the reign of Christ in this new kingdom.
Romans 8:37 then means so much more to us. He says, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
We’ve already won.
The victory has already been won.
Death has been defeated.
Satan has been defeated.
And he no longer has authority over us.
Sin no longer has dominion over us.
Are we tempted? Yes.
Satan still accuses us. Yes.
He still tries to deceive us. Yes.
He still rages on this earth. Yes.
But he does not reign over Jesus Christ.
So therefore, he does not own those who are seated with Christ.
Do you understand that our enemy is very real, but we have already won?
The King in our kingdom, this new kingdom, is far greater than our enemy, whether that be sin in us, this world, or Satan himself.
Romans 16:20, I love this verse. He says, “The God of peace,” kind of sounds ironic when you hear the rest of this verse, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”
Who wins?
Well, it’s my feet.
Yeah, but it’s God who crushes him.
How do you explain that? I don’t know.
We’re in Christ and in Him we’re victors.
God will crush Satan underneath our feet.
We will overcome sin through the power of Jesus Christ that is in us.
We are victorious.
We are more than conquerors through Christ.
So if this is true, if we have been raised and we are seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that means that our life as Christians should look very different. Right?
Our position in heaven should make us obedient here and now.
Our citizenship is in heaven. So therefore, we should act as citizens of heaven.
Philippians 3:20 says, “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
So if our citizenship is in heaven, then our values and how we live must no longer be shaped by the world that we came out of, but by God and His Word and Christ’s kingdom.
We are counted as already seated in heavenly places.
So then we can no longer live according to these worldly ways.
In other words, we have been saved, and we are still being saved in this current life. That is sanctification.
But your position in Christ should shape your conduct in this world.
So we need to live where God has placed us. But we do not belong to this place. We do not belong to this world system. We do not belong to the ruler of the kingdom of the air.
We belong to Jesus Christ.
And so all of our thoughts, our desires, our habits, our relationships, our words, our worship, the way we relate to one another in our family life and in our church life should come in line with the reality of this new position, this belonging to Jesus Christ, this being raised and seated with Him.
So Ephesians 2:6 then tells us that God has raised us up with Christ, seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
This is the grace of God of our union with Christ.
We were dead, but God made us alive.
We were buried in our sin, but God raised us with Christ.
We were under the old dominion, the old kingdom, the old ruler.
But God has seated us with Christ in His kingdom.
So Christian, don’t be distracted by the things of this world.
Lift your eyes.
You are in Christ.
But if you are not in Christ, you are still in the old realm. You are still dead in your sin. You are still under God’s wrath. You are still without hope in and of yourselves.
But there is life in Christ Jesus.
There is mercy in Christ.
There is forgiveness in Christ.
When we come on His terms, when we believe in His death, burial, and resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins, when we repent, confess Jesus as Lord, believe in our heart that God raised Him from the dead, then we shall be saved.
The One who is seated in the heavenly places, our Savior, Christ Jesus, is truly mighty to save.
Amen.