44 Days Through the New Testament – Day 29

Ephesians 1-3

You just can’t get too far into the book of Ephesians before being firmly put in your rightful place!

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

Ephesians 2:1–3, ESV

Oh, snap! 

On so many occasions I have had people try to tell me that “Christianity is only a crutch!” I am not exactly sure what they mean by that. I assume that they are trying to say that I am took weak to walk through life on my own, so I need a “crutch” to help me through. That “crutch” being, of course, Christianity. Well, that theory is cute, but I’m not sure what help a crutch would be to a DEAD person.

I wasn’t a wobbling weakling before Christ saved me, I WAS DEAD!

Go ahead and throw a crutch in a coffin. Try it out. See if it helps. It won’t.

Praise be to God, because of His great love for us, He made us who believe alive with Christ!

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 2:4–7, ESV

Ephesians 4-6

In the same way that so many unbelievers do not realize that we were actually spiritually DEAD before we were made ALIVE with Christ, even believers fail to realize that there is a spiritual war going on all around us at every moment of every day.

Satan is real. He hates us. He wants to kill, steal, and destroy. This is why we believers are not called to cling to some silly crutch, but to put on the full armor of God:

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

Ephesians 6:11, ESV

One of the things that I love about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is that it gives us some incredible insight into the kinds of things we would not naturally think about. For those of us who believe in Jesus as our Great Redeemer and Glorious Savior, we have passed from death to life, and we have been given the weapons and the armor to stand against the schemes of the devil.

Praise God!