"Footprints on the Heart" Text: Ephesians 2:4-6

 Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason - September 28, 2003

Our text for today is found in Ephesians 2:4-6.

"But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…"

Two little words open this fourth verse of chapter two…"But God…" Paul’s intention is to reveal the greatness of our salvation and to help us understand what has happened to us in Jesus Christ.

These two words represent a contrast with the opening verses of this chapter. Paul has been painting a picture of the condition of mankind and it has been a gloomy one. Paul tells us what God sees…man as he actually is in life. "But God…" introduces us to a living hope that is ours in Christ Jesus.

Most of us find it difficult to imagine the world without God involved in it. Remove God from this world and you remove every bit of joy, every bit of gladness, love and peace would be gone. Life would be suddenly drab and meaningless. Man would be miserable.

The only thing that alleviates this misery is the mercy and grace of God. Life would always be miserable were it not for God’s goodness poured out upon us in his attempt to reach us.

There are 2 things that caused God to act:

GOD WAS MOVED BY MERCY.

That was our condition; but God was moved to act. What moved him? The Apostle Paul says that the first thing that moved God was his mercy.

What is mercy? How is mercy different from grace?

We talk about these concepts frequently in the church, but often we don’t really understand what they mean.

A little boy was in Sunday School one day and was asked to tell the difference

Between love and loving kindness, because the Scriptures use both words. He

Thought about it for a minute and put it this way: "If I ask my mother for a slice

Of bread and butter and she gives it to me, that is kindness. But if she puts jam

On it, that is loving kindness!"

There is a difference between mercy and grace.

Mercy…has to do with the withholding of a deserved penalty.

Grace is the supply of undeserved blessing.

We understand that both God’s mercy and grace reach out to us, but each does for a different reason:

It is the guilt of man that draws forth the grace of God.

When God looks at us and sees us as guilty – as actually having made

It is our misery which calls forth his mercy.

Let me use a human illustration to show you what I mean by this:

If your child is suffering from a serious illness, his throat is sore;

his eyes are watering; his nose is stuffed up so much that he can’t

breathe; he is aching in every joint and so miserable that all he can

do is throw his arms around your neck and cry…How do you react?

Your child’s misery awakens your pity and you reach out to relieve

this condition in any way you possibly can. His misery has called

forth your mercy.

That is what Paul says has awakened the mercy of God…the misery

of man.

The message to us here is simply this: God is saying to us: "Your own condition is making you miserable." And his loving mercy reaches out to us because God wants to do something to relieve the misery of mankind.

GOD’S MERCY ARISES FROM HIS LOVE.

Love is active.

God’s mercy arises "out of the great love with which he loved us…" (Eph. 2:4)

What lies behind this statement is the cross of Calvary, the whole story of Jesus coming to earth. What was the sign of God’s love? How do we know that God loves us? John 3:16 "God so loved the world that he gave…"

That is always the mark of love, and we need to understand this kind of love in our relationships.

Love is not just a feeling.

Love is a commitment of will, a choice you make.

Love is an active moving out to meet the needs of someone else. You love somebody when you respond to his needs. That is when a husband loves his wife or a wife loves her husband. If your love is not active…then it is not love!

Paul is trying to help us to understand that God loves us and he did something about it. He came here. He was touched by our misery; he wept and suffered for us. He became the poorest of the poor; he was rejected; he was hurt, misunderstood; he experienced all the trials of life which come into our lives.

And when he had fully identified with us he went out and in the indescribable anguish and pain of the cross, he bore our sins. All of this is behind the idea of the love of God reaching out to us to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

When we were hopeless, and helpless God did something. God took action. What he accomplished broke the spell of evil and set us free when we believed in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior.

If we are going to experience true freedom in Christ, we have to understand what happened to us when we believed in and accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

There are three things here that are pointed out by the Apostle Paul:

1. "God made us alive together with Christ." (Ephesians 2:5)
1. It was the grace of God not the activity of man that accomplished this
2. We have been raised up with him (vs. 6)
3. We have been made to sit with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (vs. 6)

Please note that the tense of these verbs is past tense. These things have already happened, already taken place. These three things are realities that will bless us if we truly understand what God is telling us here.

The central secret of the Christian Life is found right here: "made us alive together with." This is one word in the original Greek and means to enliven…he enlivened us. We were made alive with Christ the instant we believed in Jesus. We begin to change in that instant. One of the results of those changes was that we began thinking about others rather than thinking only about ourselves.

God is now our Father. We have a sense of belonging. There is a hunger for God. That is a mark of passing from death to life.

The greatest fact is that we are joined with Jesus Christ. He has come to live in us. We are now one person with him. The result is that you are now enlivened in Christ. That is reality. We have his life within us.

The image Paul gives us here is that of being seated in the heavenly places with Christ. Being seated with Christ, if it means nothing else, means that we are at rest with Him! We talked about the concept of the heavenly places. The heavenly places envisioned by Paul are the realm of the spirit…that unseen spiritual realm that surrounds us all the time.

That is how God sees us…alive, raised up and seated with Christ Jesus. GOD SEES US AS IF WE ARE ALREADY THERE IN HEAVEN. HE SEES US AS IF EVERYTHING IS NOW COMPLETE AND WE ARE WITH HIM…EVEN WHEN WE ARE NOT YET THERE. All of this has already occurred when we believe in Jesus Christ. We are not the same. We cannot go back to living the way we once did. We have become new creatures in Jesus Christ.

We are no longer dead.

We are no longer alienated from God

We are no longer afraid of God.

And knowing the love of God…we begin loving others.

And love is active or it is not love.

Years ago someone gave RuthAnn and I one of those really nice framed poems. We have had it up somewhere in the house for almost 18 years and this is what it says:

Those are the footprints of love…love that is active.

Jesus has left the footprints of love on our hearts…when we believed and accepted his death as the sacrifice for our sin…He made us alive with Him.

He raised us up…

He seated us in heavenly places…and we have been changed.

What footprints of love are you leaving on the hearts of those around you?

Take time to do an inventory. Remember, if your love is not actively seeking to meet the needs of those you say you love…it is not really love.

Love prompted God to reach out to us and show us mercy.

God’s love is always active. And ours should be too!

 --Dennis Gleason