Last year I was reading a book on adoption by Russell Moore (a seminary lecturer at a Baptist college in the US). In his book Russell describes the adoption of his two boys from an orphanage in Russia. He recalls the very first time he saw these two boys, which a Russian judge had picked out for them: two boys that had been abandoned and dumped by their mothers; orphans.
When Maria and I first walked into the orphanage, where we were led to the boys the Russian courts had picked for us to adopt, we almost vomited in reaction to the stench and squalor of the place. The boys were in cribs, in the dark, lying in their own waste … Each day we would visit them … and leaving them at the end of each day was painful, but leaving them on the final day, before going home to wait for the paperwork to go through, was the hardest thing either of us had ever done. Walking out of the room to prepare for the plane ride home, Maria and I could hear Maxim calling out for us and falling down in his crib, convulsing in tears. Maria shook with tears of her own. I turned around to walk back into their room, just for a minute. I placed my hand on both of their hearts and said, knowing they wouldn’t understand a word of English, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’ words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only think worth saying at the time. For us, it didn’t matter that they seemed like any other orphan in that institution; they were part of our family now. We knew them. We loved them. We claimed them. And it didn’t matter that for the next several weeks they’d still be called Maxim and Sergei. The nameplates hanging on the wall of their new room in a faraway country read Benjamin and Timothy, now our sons. (p.25, Adopted For Life).
I want to say to you this evening as we come to these few verses in Ephesians 2: this is what you and I are being told here; as Paul speaks of the sovereign grace of God in our lives, and as Paul speaks of the Father’s love for you: you were a spiritual orphan dead in your transgressions and sins, and God loved you and made you alive, and raised you up with Jesus to be His son or daughter
And so what I want to do this evening is to begin by visiting a spiritual orphanage. I want to walk with you down into a spiritual valley and unpack for you the Bible’s teaching on the problem of the orphaned soul. Discover the reason why we need Jesus, the reason why the gospel is good news, and the reason why God’s grace is glorious.
The gospel is supremely good news when you begin to understand the depths and darkness of the orphanage or valley that you are in. So here in vv.1-3 Paul is going to take you down into the valley of your soul, showing you the depths of your lostness, your helplessness, and your brokenness. And then he’s going to show you why the good news is glorious because in vv.4-7 he will ascend the mountain of God’s glorious grace and show you the heights of God’s grace. We begin with darkness and we end with light; we begin with night before we meet the rising sun; we move from death to life; we begin in a valley before we ascend to the peak of a mountain.
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The full sermon notes can be downloaded by clicking here
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