Why do we treat a canvas that is painted differently than we treat a blank canvas? It’s just pigments and resins and some kind of surface they will stick to. The cash value of the actual parts is not that much. And yet the cash value people pay for it is remarkable. Why do we put our kids’ pictures or stories up on the refrigerator? Once again, the crayon on notebook paper is worth about a penny on the market, but we think of them as priceless.
Something added value. Something made these things more than just the sum of their parts. There was canvas or paper and something to make marks. Yet a painting can sell for millions of dollars, and we keep the letters and drawing for years.
Something added value - in this case, the personal touch of the someone who took ordinary things and created something of great value.
This is as old as Genesis 1. God takes dust and adds value. The material value of the human body: about $160 dollars for just raw materials. God makes common clay into imago dei representationally (we are icons of God), intrinsically (our representational status gives us inherent value and dignity), and functionally (we act on God’s behalf in the world).
In Ephesians 2, Paul goes beyond the fact of imago dei and shows what Christ does in us and for us. First, he explains what kind of material God has to work with. Brace yourselves: it’s even worse than you thought.
As for you, don’t you remember how you used to just exist? Corpses, dead in life, buried by transgressions, wandering the course of this perverse world. You were the offspring of the prince of the power of air—oh, how he owned you, just as he still controls those living in disobedience. I’m not talking about the outsiders alone; we were all guilty of falling headlong for the persuasive passions of this world.
We all have had our fill of indulging the flesh and mind, obeying impulses to follow perverse thoughts motivated by dark powers. As a result, our natural inclinations led us to be children of wrath, just like the rest of humankind. (Ephesians 2:1-3)
I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I like to think of myself. However, that’s the raw materials. That’s us before Christ. We’re not just plain canvas; we are stained and soiled canvas. We’re not just paper – we are torn and soggy.
Paul doesn’t pull any punches. We were corpses, dead in life. We were the zombies in a much more serious sense of the word than most horror movies show. Those are just biological problems. Ours is deeply spiritual.
I find it interesting how how an increasing number of modern stories use a thing like a zombie – the Walking Dead - to make a point that we find in the Bible 2,000 years ago. It’s as if no matter how far from Christ people wander, there is this lingering dread that we will somehow be dead even while we live, just wandering through a world that robs us of life and offers us nothing in return.
A recent book series called The Zombie Bible takes incidents from the Bible or early church history and inserts zombies – which sounds silly, but the author (who takes the Bible very seriously) uses them to stand in for the deepest expression of being dead in our sin.
This world was one of hunger, filled with those who would devour you—both among the dead and among the living.… Like a violent fever, the hunger eats away mind and spirit. In the end, everything that we truly are is gone. Only the hunger remains. Even other men and women are no longer anything but… meat for our desires and obsessions. Then we are lost— unless some other brings a Gift. We cannot recover ourselves alone.” – From What Our Eyes Have Witnessed
If that’s what we are stuck with, that's lousy for us and everyone around us. But Paul says this is not our fate.
But God, with the unfathomable richness of His love and mercy focused on us, united us with the Anointed One and infused our lifeless souls with life—even though we were buried under mountains of sin—and saved us by His grace. He raised us up with Him and seated us in the heavenly realms with our beloved Jesus the Anointed, the Liberating King.
He did this for a reason: so that for all eternity we will stand as a living testimony to the incredible riches of His grace and kindness that He freely gives to us by uniting us with Jesus the Anointed. For it’s by God’s grace that you have been saved. You receive it through faith. It was not our plan or our effort. It is God’s gift, pure and simple.You didn’t earn it, not one of us did, so don’t go around bragging that you must have done something amazing.
For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago. (Ephesians 2:4-10)
Lots of worldviews offer a solution for the problem of walking in our own life of death and feeling like we are worth nothing. Another thoughtful zombie story called Warm Bodies offers a solution:
“We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.”
The problem is, that never happens. It’s a humanist salvation story, but nothing in the history of the world suggests that solution will work. Humanity’s never been the cure of the deepest, darkest aches in our souls. We’ve always been the problem. Even when we fix a particular issue, it’s only a matter of time before we ruin it again.
We said, “Hey, let’s get more energy by harnessing the power of the atom!” and then figured out how to use it to kill a lot of people.
We said, “Let’s cure disease with stem cells!” and eventually began to plunder the bodies of unborn babies for our benefit.
We said, “Hey, wouldn’t we be healthier if we could learn about sex earlier and more explicitly? The problem with our culture is that we are prudish and repressed. ” And eventually we found ourselves in a culture where STD’s are epidemic, and pornography and the hook up culture first desensitizes us then damages us.
We say, “Let’s protect the freedom to speak!” and use it to slander and blaspheme and gossip and produce copious amounts of pornography.
Remember John Winthorp who wanted build a “city on a hill” characterized by Christian love and generosity in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?[1] It lasted 17 years. “As the people increased,” he wrote, “so sin abounded.”
Nothing in human history suggests we are able to save ourselves. [2] On the other hand, the Zombie Bible got the solution right (and it better, with ‘Bible’ in the title):
“What do we know to be true? Nothing is broken that cannot be remade. Nothing is ill that cannot be healed, nothing captive that cannot be freed. That is what [Jesus] taught us.” – from What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, The Zombie Bible series.
That’s actually the gospel. That’s part of the good news. Tom Holland’s book Dominion traces the history of Christianity, and one of his points is that, even when Christianity got off the rails as a movement, it contained within itself – within the revelation of Scripture from God and the incarnational reality of Jesus – the seeds for its own revival. It’s the only thing in the world that does that.
Paul says we can do nothing on our own – our default is to be one the spiritually Walking Dead – and we don’t raise ourselves up. Now, we are raised by Jesus and made fully alive. Heaven’s poetry is etched on our lives by his saving hand; other translations say we are His handiwork. God plans for us to be the ones through whom His good work is seen, and by whom His good work is done in the world.
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If Christ is “raising us up”, if God is restoring all these things in us and putting us on His mission, there are at least three important things that follow.
This should bring to us a staggering amount of humility. Paul says none of us can boast about how we contributed to the project of moving from spiritual death to life. “Don't’ go around bragging as if you did something amazing.” Any time we think, “I just wish people had the self-control and work ethic and mastery of emotions that I have crafted for myself,” we have missed the point. We should be thinking, “All that I am is a gift of grace. I will pray that God works in the life of others so they too can experience God’s grace.”
Paul never says, “Look at me!” He always says, “Look at Christ in me.” I would guess that’s because the minute he says, “Look at me!” someone else could say, “Do you mean all of you? Do you realize what you were doing 10 years ago? You killed people!”
Why would I say, “Look at me”? Just ask my wife if I have given a perfect picture of what it means to be a godly husband. Ask my boys if I have been a perfect father. Ask anyone in this church if I am a perfect pastor. Ask my friends if I have been a perfect friend.
For every time I want to say, “I’m awesome!” someone around me is thinking, “Except when you’re not.” What I have to say (if I look at myself honestly) is only this: “Please don’t look at me. Look at Christ in me. He is the only hope of glory in my life.” The fact that Christ steps in and raises us up should bring about an incredible amount of humility
This should change how we view our worth and dignity. If you are the product of God’s hand - if God is raising you up so you can bring good into the world in a way that will be empowered by Christ working in you - then you should never say, “I guess I deserve to be mistreated. I guess I deserve to be belittled. I don’t matter. My life is nothing. Everybody else is cool and doing great things and I’m just stuck with my personality or looks or circumstances.” If that’s the voice in your head, I promise you it’s not the voice of Christ.
The voice of Christ says, “Just bring what you’ve got. It’s my job to take you are and craft you into something that will be for your good and my glory.”
Now, God will ask us to “run the race” that He sets before us, and that might look sketchy at times, because now we are involved, and we bring sketchiness to the project. In fact, it is often through the process of walking (and stumbling, falling, and getting back up) that Christ does this work in us. But we “run the race” only because Christ has shown us the track, and strengthened our legs, and given us the right kind of shoes, and given us a prize on which to fix our eyes.
So we are called to run the race, but the glory for the ground we cover belongs to Christ alone.
This should change how we treat others. This is why we should never treat others in a way that shames, belittles or mocks them. We don’t brag about our spiritual exploits to other people. We don’t judge how far we think we are down the track vs. how far back we think they are.
We don’t take advantage of people, or purposefully hurt them with our words, our attitudes, or our hands. Read Romans 14. Paul has a pretty blunt chapter on this.
We are, after all, created for “good works” – that is, we are to do good to others as representatives of Christ’s presence on the earth. Certainly that will include walking in the path of life that God has shown us, but it goes beyond just that. We look for opportunities to do good. We look for opportunities to affirm in those around us that they matter, and love them as Christ would love them.
I loved watching the gymnastics community support Simone Biles this past week. They got it. They understood. While lots of people were complaining that she was weak or a ”national embarrassment” for withdrawing in the Olympics, the ones who know what she was going through (“the twisties”) cared for her rather than discarded her.[3]
Isn’t this what life with God’s people is supposed to look like? When we lose our way in the middle of our spiritual routine, what are the rest of us on the team supposed to do? Show the empathy Jesus showed us[4]; surround them[5]; lift up those who have become disoriented and lost their way[6]; train together again under the only Coach who can teach us finish well. [7]
If heaven is writing poetry on the lives of my wife and children, who am I to step in and scrawl nonsense on the work of Christ? Whenever my words or my attitude send them a message that they are failures, or that they have to earn my love or pride, or that they are an annoyance, I deface the work of Christ. Every time I give my wife a look that tells her without words that she is “less than”, I step in and write shame and anger into the poetry of heaven.
We need to model grace and speak words of life to our family and friends and church community. We need to honor and not shame, to speak truth but always with grace, to affirm gifts and talents, and to display the compelling nature of Christ through our words and actions.
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We often wonder if God has a plan for our lives. Yes. His plan is to raise us up as His children.His plan is that we become a testimony to the incredible riches of His grace as He makes us into something beautiful.
#practicerighteousness
Share with someone how God’s grace has “raised you up” when you were dead in your sins.
Read through this passage every day to remind yourself of the immense “added value” God has given to you through Jesus.
Purposefully practice the three implications (practicing humility, remembering value and worth, and consciously treating others well). Pray for the Holy Spirit to guide your heart, mind, and strength.
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[2] G.K. Chesterton, a famous author, was once asked by a newspaper, “What’s wrong with the world today?” He famously responded, “I am.”
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/us/simone-biles-olympics-gymnastics-physical-mental-health/index.html
[4] Hebrews 4:15
[5] Romans 12; 1 Peter 3:8
[6] 1 Thessalonians 5:11
[7] 2 Timothy 3:16-17; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Matthew 5:19