Grace - Ephesians 2:1-10

2:1-2 - Chapter 1 ends with Paul explaining that the God that they worship and Jesus Christ are more powerful than any God that people made up and he continues in chapter 2 that God uses this power to “quicken” us “who were dead in trespasses and sins.” A few verses ago, Paul noted that God used His power to raise Jesus from the dead, and he might be making a connection here to Jesus being raised from physical death and our being raised from spiritual death. Paul notes that his audience once “walked according to the course of this world” and makes an interesting name for Satan, he calls him “the prince of the power of the air.” Just as a side note, the article on this chapter from gospeldoctrine.com quotes Joseph Fielding Smith giving an account on 10 elders and Joseph Smith taking a river boat going from Independence landing to Kirtland. During the trip there was some adverse weather, during which “Brother Phelps, in open vision by daylight, saw the destroyer in his most terrible power, ride upon the face of the waters; others heard the noise, but saw not the vision… It may seem strange to us, but it is the face that Satan exercises dominion and has some control over the elements. This he does by powers which he knows but which are hidden from weak mortal men.” It then goes on to talk about how Job was afflicted by a great gust of wind coming through and knocking his house down and killing everyone in his household. So apparently Satan does have some power over the elements, but I would imagine that they are subject to the will of God. 2:3-7 - Basically Paul is saying, “God has saved you from spiritual death because you used to act according to the world, look we’ve all been there,” “we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” I like this because he’s saying, “look we’ve all spent our time in the dirt, we all have acted after our natural inclinations, angry, lustful, gluttonous, etc. but Jesus saved us.” And he saved us because he loves us. Our sins killed us spiritually, but he “hath quickened us together with Christ.” He saved us from spiritual death to “sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.” It’s kind of like he’s saying, “we were lost and he saved us so that he could reward us and love us and be nice to us.” That’s kind of an interesting idea, he gives us a way back so that we can come hang out with Him so that he can give us presents and be nice to us. What a life that would be huh? 2:8-10 - So we know why he gives us a way back, but this begs the question, “how”? Paul explains that it is “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” Salvation is a gift from God, but let’s look at it like any other gift. Say someone buys you a gym membership for your birthday. You can take that gift and use it everyday and get is great shape, or you can ignore the gift and have access to the gym but never go and never have the benefits. That’s how I feel grace vs. works is. The gift of salvation is there for us to use, but if we don’t want to use it, then we don’t have to. The article uses a “parable of the bicycle” to reference how grace and works go together, basically where a little girl saves all her money to buy a bicycle and ends up with 61 cents so her dad pays the difference of like $99.39 for her to get a bike. I guess I can see the application there, but it doesn’t really make sense to me because Jesus doesn’t just pay the difference, he pays the whole thing, he uses a completely different currency to pay our debt. It would be like if that little girl brought 6 buttons and a seashell to the bike store to pay for her bike and her dad paid the actual money. But even then it doesn’t make any reference to the personal development and change that happens in a true application of the atonement. We don’t just give our best efforts for a few months then get our reward, we make small, incremental changes to be more Christlike over time, and those changes make us different people. Going back to my gym analogy, let me go another way. Say Jesus puts on a marathon where the reward for finishing is everything in the universe. Jesus offers to be your personal trainer and help you train and meal prep and encourages you. He gives you the opportunity to have literally anything ever in existence. At this point you have two options, you can accept his help, take his advice and change who you are as a person, become healthier, stronger, faster, etc. Or you can say, “yeah I’ll meet you at the gym” and then never show up. You can have the opportunity all day long, but Jesus won’t force you to take the reward because it does take you effort on your part to get there. But without him personally bringing you the opportunity to run the race in the first place, you were never going to get that reward without him. You couldn’t have created that event by yourself, you didn’t have the resources to give the reward of everything in the universe as a prize because you yourself don’t have everything in the universe to give away. At the end of the race we could say that he created who we are, or that “we are his workmanship.” Likewise, in this life he created us “unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” We were created to go good works, to have that be in our nature to want to do those types of things for other people. Love is our true nature, but so many times it is buried under mountains of self-defense mechanisms. Jesus can help us dig out from under that mountain, but it takes time. In our marathon analogy, we could say that God made us naturally athletically inclined so that we would want to run a marathon. We’ve been given gifts from God to help us on our journey. Now that’s something that just hit me pretty hard.