Saved! Ephesians 2:1-10 Week 3 October 6, 2013

Saved! Ephesians 2:1-10 Week 3 October 6, 2013 Hear the Word of God: And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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 3 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. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:1-10, ESV) This is God s Word. From about age 9 to 16, there was one event I looked forward to the most every year. As much as I enjoyed Christmas, or Halloween, summer vacation, or basketball camp, it was neither of these. It was church camp. A week long getaway just outside of Effingham, Illinois with some of the greatest friends I had ever met (our very own Justin Neally being one of them). We swam in the lake, played capture the flag, had both a dance and a talent show, slept in Hogans which is another name for a cabin without doors or walls. We played games, made crafts, sang songs oh my. Those songs. How I will never forget the woes of little bunny foo foo bopping field mice on the head. And if none of you know what I'm talking about, my wife at least does, because she often asks me to sing it to her. Probably because of how animated I get. 1

And as much as I enjoyed every one of these facets, camp was something else for me. In my heart, it served as my once-a-year opportunity for spiritual rejuvenation. It was my "holy week" if you will. Growing up, My entire life of "faith", wasn't really faith at all. It was religion. When I use this word "religion", I'm referring to this belief that "If I obeyed God, then He would accept me. If I did good things and lived a moral life, following His rules, then He would love me." I knew that I was a bad person who did and thought bad things, but I believed that I was able to earn God's favor and justify myself by virtue of counteracting that bad behavior with good behavior. I would treat my time at camp as a chance for redemption for all of the bad I had committed and was most certainly going to commit. I would pray, sing songs about Jesus, read the Bible, take communion, and when I got home, I would feel so much better about myself and my relationship with God. I had convinced myself that He was happier with me because I went. The true Gospel message tells us that in spite of my attempts for self-reconciliation, I am incapable of saving myself. Only God is able to do it for us. However, because of my sin, I am enslaved to continue believing that I can. As we make our way through the book of Ephesians here at Christ Community, our hope is that we would understand our true identity in Jesus, and how that identity transforms every facet of who we are, for our good. Today as we hear form Ephesians 2:1-10, Paul will make this point very clear to us: That in Jesus, we are saved from our hopeless attempts to save ourselves. We Are In Need of Salvation Now, you've probably heard this word "saved" before here at Christ Community or in other Christian circles, but it's often easy for this word to be simply said and not understood. It refers to salvation, specifically, salvation by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on our behalf. Why do we need this salvation? The Bible tells us that in the beginning, God created us in His image to reflect His love and glory to all of His creation as we delight in that same love for our own joy in relationship with Him. Yet while in the garden, our first parents Adam and Eve were deceived by the devil to turn their back on God and become like god themselves; free to live to their own will rather than their creator's. In acting upon this lie, they sinned against God, and separated themselves from His presence. When we think of sin, many of us often see it as breaking the law, or telling a lie, or doing something that is morally wrong. Our sin though, is not primarily an action, but a disposition. Sin is an aversion to God, and it manifests itself in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. As sinners, just like Adam and Eve, we remove God from His throne in our hearts and put ourselves in His place to live lives opposed to His will for our own, self-serving glory. 2

Because of sin, death has entered the world and effected every living thing, fracturing the universe from the original state that God had intended it to exist in. As for it's affects on us, Romans 5:12 says that "just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin death spread to all men because all sinned." The original sin of Adam became like a disease, infecting every person who would descend from him. Every one of us is by our nature, at our birth, separated from God as sinners. That's me, that's you, that's everyone. No one is exempt. We are in desperate need for redemption from our sin, and reconciliation with God. This is what the Bible refers to as "the Fall". You may or may not be familiar with this story in particular, but I believe that everyone of us can agree that something actually has gone wrong in the world. I think we can all say with confidence that the default instinct of the human heart is selfish in its nature. Each one of us live with an innate desire to fulfill the longings of our hearts by our own control. Consequently, that hunger for contentment can never be satisfied by the things of this world. This often leads us to do terrible things at ours, and our neighbor's expense, in order to get what we want. No matter how subtle or how flagrant those acts are, we are all guilty of sin, and each of us experience a need for redemption. How Do We Respond? So how do we respond to this need? We take matters into our own hands, don't we. We live in a do-it-yourself society, and that is certainly true for our attempts at reconciliation. Whether Christian or not, we know that our lives are in need of fixing. Who is better equipped to fix our lives than ourselves? Just take a look at our book stores. What genre of books are purchased the most every year next to sexy vampire books? Self-help! Right? We would much rather do it ourselves then dare ask someone else for help. We respond the same way when it comes to God. Instead of asking forgiveness of God for our sin, we try and earn back His favor by counteracting our sin with good works, or, we simply deny His existence and work for the world's approval. This is exactly what I was doing with my life for so long. I thought that if I worked myself to the bone, filling my life with every spiritual good, I could then compare myself to the rest of the world and say "well at least I'm not like them!" This became true of us immediately after the fall. In Genesis 3, when God comes looking for Adam in the garden, He says to him "What have you done?" And Adam, by his sinful default, replies, "well, this woman, who YOU gave me, she made me do it. It was her fault!" Now guys, this should go without saying, but if someone comes to your house with a bone to pick, don't point them to your wife saying it was her fault. You will then have two people very upset with you. But there it was, right there. The very moment after we sinned against God, we began to compare our righteousness to others in a despicable attempt to earn back God's 3

favor. Just as sin has ruled over our lives since that moment, so has our response been an insatiable desire to justify ourselves by good works. Why Are We incapable of Saving Ourselves? This is where we find ourselves today in Ephesians 2:1-10. Paul begins by describing to his readers exactly why our attempts to save ourselves are hopeless. So turn back with me to verse one. He starts by saying "And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked " 1. We Are Dead Let's stop right there. The first reason as to why we can't save ourselves is because we are DEAD. We are not in danger of dying, we are already deceased. Death is not simply dying a bodily death, it is a spiritual death in separation form God. True, ever-lasting life comes from God alone. He is both the creator and sustainer of it. When sin separates us from Him, we are then separated from that source of life. Consider your new iphone 5s; after a good charge, it can last for hours. But, if you don't plug it back in at the end of the day, it dies. As creation rather than creators, we operate in the same way. We cannot survive independently from God's source of life. When we are separated from God in sin, we no longer even have the option to plug back into that life source. The cord that once connected us has been ripped out entirely. So what do we do instead? We try and plug back in to other sources of life. We plug into our jobs, or our families, or our comforts. We try and draw life from money, sports, video games, TV, the internet. We find our meaning in how our friends respond to us on instagram, or twitter, or facebook, or pintrest. We try and draw sustenance from alcohol, or drugs. You name it. Because the lasting life source that we once received from God has been lost, we need something to give us life once again. So, we take these things that were once intended for good and we make them into substitute gods. These are what the Bible refers to as "idols": created things, whether immaterial or material, that we place our hope and identity into instead of God. However, whatever sustaining life they can offer, it will never be enough. They are mortal gods, where our only true God is immortal, and is the only true source of eternal life. It's like having a deep hunger at a banquet table filled with the finest foods. But no matter how much we eat and how delicious the meal is, our hunger is never settled; it only aches for more. So why don't we recognize this? Why can't we just set aside these counterfeit power sources and plug back in to God? You see, in our death, we are blind to what is truly alive. Our sinful pursuit of these idols convinces us that we are getting the life we need 4

from them, because we've never tasted true life to begin with. The more we busy our lives with our worldly passions, the less dead we feel. The more we justify our deadness with good works, the more righteous we feel. Why are we incapable of saving ourselves from death? Because we don't even know that we're dead! Upon hearing me say that, you may think to yourself, "what are you talking about? My life is great! I have this going for me, I'm involved in this, I have plenty of this. I am not as dead as this person, I'm a good person, who are you to say I am dead?" If this is you today, then you have only proved my point. Spiritual death is unresponsiveness to the truth of the Gospel. The Bible says, "you are sinful and in need of salvation." We respond "no I'm not, just look at my works." We simply won't hear it. Why? Because dead people hate to be thought of as dead! We don't want our friends to see us as sinful, broken people, do we? We want to be bright, shining examples of a life where nothing is going wrong and everything is perfect. Consider this for yourself. When God brings conviction into your heart because of your sin, are you quick to repent, or do you counteract that sin with your good deeds? "Listen, I know that I'm cheating on my spouse, but I'm still a really good parent to our kids, that's gotta count for something, right?." Do you hold your righteousness up to others in an attempt to make your sin not look as bad? "Yeah, I may get to work late on a daily basis, but this guy rarely even shows up!" "Yeah, I may get plastered most Saturday nights, but I go to church every Sunday morning." Do you shift the blame on to someone else like Adam did to Eve in the garden? I do this all the time in my marriage. I like to help Stacey around the house, whether that be with cleaning, or doing the laundry, or washing dishes; whatever chore it may be. And far too often, when she gives me specific directions on how to handle one of these tasks, I will do it the exact wrong way, creating even more stress for her rather than relieving it. But, when she tells me what I've done wrong, no matter how graceful she is, in my desire for justification, I turn the blame on her. My first response is to tell her that her directions were wrong, or she wasn't specific enough. That it was her fault. The truth is, I wasn't even paying attention in the first place. But, I could not stand the fact that I was the one to blame. We put on these masks that tell the world everything is ok and we don't need any help. We're like a bunch of lepers who paint up our bodies in make-up so no one can see how badly we're falling apart. We are dead, without any hope of reviving ourselves from the dead. 2. We Are Enslaved to Sin Paul continues on in verses two and three to tell us the second reason for why our own attempts of self-salvation are hopeless. He tells us that our sin 5

"[leads us to follow] 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." I love October. It is without a doubt, my favorite month. And as of the past couple years, one of the many reasons for that is getting to watch the Walking Dead with our MC. We are big fans. In fact, Stacey made this dessert last year for it's mid-season premiere that looked just like intestines but was actually this incredibly delicious cinnamon roll. Man, I love my wife. Though this comparison may seem silly, as people who are dead in their sin, we are very similar to the walking dead. Hear me out. If you could have a sit down conversation with a zombie, which I wouldn't suggest if you were a smart person, you could try with all your might to convince them that they are indeed dead. However, if they could audibly reply, they would say "you must be mistaken. Look, my body moves, I hunger, I'm alive and well." As we just talked about, because of our spiritual death, we would reply in the same way. Paul moves on here in Ephesians to tell us that because we are dead, we are enslaved to live as a dead person would, following the course of this world, living in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body. A zombie lives in the same manner. They wander from place to place, looking to satisfy a hunger that can not be satisfied. Both the walking dead and the spiritually dead cannot separate themselves from this instinct because it is their nature to live this way. So why then are we hopeless to save ourselves? Because by our spiritual deadness, we are enslaved to sin, and we are helpless to break free of that slavery by our own doing. In these verses, Paul mentions that our sin leads us to follow "the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is at work in the sons of disobedience." He is referring here to Satan. As the "prince of the air", he rules over our world. Now, I'm sure for many of us, when we hear the name "Satan", or " the Devil", or "Lucifer", there are a host of images that roll through our minds. We may think of a little horned, pitchfork-wielding goatman who stands on your shoulder fighting against the angel on the other side. I know for me, I think of my good friend Tim Parrish who dressed up as the blue devil mascot for his high school, doing shirtless back flips with a torch before a basketball game. Ask him to show you the video sometime, it's great. However, we must understand that Satan is a real, personal being, who lives to keep us from ever being reconciled to God. As sinners, we are not simply guilty of our sin, but we stand in opposition to God as His enemy. We have aligned ourselves with Satan under his allegiance. WE are the sons of disobedience that Paul is referring to, 6

because by our allegiance to the Devil, our lives are characterized by disobedience. Now, when we think of those who have not yet been saved, whether this is you or someone you know, I'm certain that our first thoughts of them are not as "Devil worshipers", right? By no means am I or Paul saying that those who are yet to be saved are incapable of doing good because of their allegiance to Satan. In fact, more often than not, I have learned how to love and serve others in the way that God does through the example of my non-believing friends. We're not all little Hitlers because of our sin. We were made in God's image, so vestiges of His goodness still remain in our lives. But, because our righteousness has been so badly marred by sin, our good works do not bear fruit in the way that God had designed them to. We cannot taste the sweetness of joy in loving God and loving people by our works. We are unprofitable servants who's moral lives bear no eternal weight. How Are We Saved? As Paul has now made very clear to us now, we are in desperate need of salvation. Not only salvation from our sin, but salvation from our hopeless attempts at saving ourselves. If we can't do it ourselves, how then can we be saved? What's the solution? Jesus tells us in John 3:3 that "unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." What does He mean by that? Born again? Obviously Nicodemus, the guy Jesus is talking to in this verse, has the same question. I always get a good laugh out of his response when he says "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" That's a legitimate question though, right? The son of God is telling this guy that in order to be saved you have to be "born again", and he thinks, "well, I know how I was born the first time " Right? Jesus graciously responds with an answer. He says "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." He is specifically referencing Ezekiel 36:25-27 where God says "I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules." What Jesus is saying here is that because our hearts are sinful from birth, we need to be made into an entirely new creation. We need to be given "new" hearts. Salvation then, must come form outside of us. We cannot wash our dirty faces with muddy water, right? We can only make it worse. We need new, pure water to get the job done. 7

Paul picks up again in verse 4 with God's incredible response to our need. Hear the word of the Lord... "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." " We cannot save ourselves. We need someone else to do it for us. We needed a rescuer to restore, not only our lives, but all of creation back to the glory that God once designed it to have. God Himself supplies for us this rescuer in the form of His son, Jesus. The Bible teaches us that Jesus is fully God as a part of the trinity, yet also fully man. That He entered into human history as a human Himself, born to a human mother, born as flesh and blood. As a man, Hebrews 4:15 tells us that Jesus, who is our high priest, is able to sympathize with our weaknesses. That He was tempted in every respect that we are to sin, yet He did not, living His entire life in perfect obedience to God. He did this so that He might become our substitute. On the cross, Jesus took the fullness of His Father's wrath; the punishment that we deserved for our sin. He then rose from the dead on the third day, displaying His victory over sin and death, beginning the fulfillment of God's promise to make all things new. Did Jesus die for us because our good works and self-justification made us worthy of it? No! It was out of the richness of God's mercy and love for us that He sent His son to rescue us from our sin. It was while we were still sinners, while we were still enemies, while we were still weak, while we were still dead, while we were still hopelessly trying to save ourselves, Christ died for us! This is the definition of grace. Paul continues... "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." Salvation comes by grace, that which we did not deserve, through faith, a trust in something outside of ourselves. NOT by our own doing, but as a gift from God. As Jesus shared with Nicodemus in John 3:3, we must be born again, not of the flesh, but of the Spirit. It is by the power of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, we are given faith to trust our lives to Jesus as our true King and Savior. Not by our own works, but by the riches of mercy God has for us through His son, Jesus. How then can we be saved? 8

In Acts 2, when Peter sets out to answer this same question for the people of Jerusalem, he does not reply by saying "Make sure you pray three times a day. Read your Bible every morning and every night. Never miss a church service. Give no less than 10% to your church. And remember, always be nice to others." No! He says "Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit!" As pastor Tullian Tchividjian puts it, Jesus plus nothing equals everything. God calls us to come before Christ with nothing but a plea for forgiveness. He requires perfection, and because our good works have been stained by our sin, then our imperfection will always prevail. But, through Jesus' death on our behalf, we are given His perfection, and new identities as sons and daughters of God. What Are We Saved For? So now what? What are the implications of salvation by grace alone? What does it look like to live with this new identity that Jesus gives us? What does Jesus save us for? 1. To experience His glory in worship First, God desires to "show the exceeding riches of His grace" that He has for us in Christ Jesus. Our father is rich in mercy, and He wants to lavish His love upon us. By doing this, we are inspired to drink deep of His goodness through our worship of Him. Our once broken focus of worship is realigned with Him when our identity becomes Christ's. Our joy is made complete in worship. This is why God longs for us to worship HIm. Not because He experiences self-esteem issues, but because it is through this worship we can experience the fullness of a life lived for His glory. Jesus takes that plug that was once torn from His power source, gives us His own, and plugs us back in to receive the satisfaction only God can give. 2. To work for His glory Second, Paul tells us that we become God's "workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which [He] prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." Now Paul here isn't making a sudden switch from grace to works. He's saying that just as our lives are reconciled by grace, so too are our good works. Jesus frees us from working to save ourselves, to working for the glory of God. As God's children, we get to participate in the work of redemption that God is bringing into this world as He ushers in His new Kingdom. He uses us, in spite of our brokenness, as messengers of reconciliation to a world held captive by sin. 9

And please, hear me when I say this: As depraved human beings, we're really good at taking the word of God and twisting it for our sinful purposes. The doctrine of grace is not your excuse for licentiousness living. It's easy for us to hear these verses and think, "well ok, since God has done everything for me, then I don't have to work at this faith thing at all. I can just keep on living my life the way I was before." It is true that the finished work of Jesus on the cross is sufficient to save you, even if you lived as a vegetable for the rest of your life, but, to not desire the fruit of God through good works at all is the sign of an unregenerate heart. Is reading your Bible, serving at church, helping the broken, singing praise to God wrong because they are works of righteousness? By no means! But, it is our motivation for doing these things that define them as sin. Are you living to enjoy God, or earn His favor? Jesus saves us from our slavery to works righteousness and frees us to delight in the good works that God has prepared for us before our lives even began. 3. To receive even more grace The third, and most scandalous reason yet is that God saves us by grace to receive even more grace. Grace in itself is exceedingly scandalous, isn't it? The gospel is most certainly offensive. It just feels "wrong" to us that God would save people without any effort on our part. This idea flies in the face of who we are by our nature. As we mentioned before, because of our sin, justification by our own merit will always be our first response. But Jesus saves us in spite of our hopeless efforts. Once we are saved by grace, our sin; past, present, and future has been paid for in full by the blood of Jesus. Does this mean that once we have been saved, we stop sinning entirely? No, it does not. Notice I say that our sin: past, present, and FUTURE, is paid for. We have yet to enter into perfection with God in His Kingdom. The power of sin still keeps it's tight grip on this world until that time reaches its fullness. We are then still prone to fall to temptation. This is where God's work of "sanctification" begins. Sanctification is the process by which we as Christians are "set apart" from the fallenness of this world to be made more like Jesus. The Spirit brings us through various trials so that our faith in God may be refined and strengthened. Where we were in desperate need of God's grace to save us from sin, we experience an equal need of God's grace to sustain us until He returns. Salvation then, is not a one time offer of grace, but a lifetime of continual grace. Because guess what, we need it! I promise you, no matter how much you have matured in your faith, now matter how righteous you think you have become, there will come a time that you will fail miserably. And worse yet, when that time comes, you will instinctively crawl back to a life of self-justification. How does this play itself out in your life as a believer? What works are you still defining your identity in Jesus by? 10

If you neglect to read the Bible for a few days, or maybe a few weeks, do you try and read a whole bunch to make up for the deficit? Do you still involve yourself in every way you can at the church to bolster your image rather than serve God's people? If you didn't make it to church or a missional community gathering, are you quick to make excuses? "Hey listen, it was just a long day at work, I wasn't really feeling it tonight, I needed time alone..." Also, side note, if you're not attending an MC gathering because you feel too stressed, then you're not getting the goodness that God has for us in community. Your MC is there to help you and pray for you in your struggles, not to be a burden on you. This is very relevant for me in my life right now. Preparing for this sermon has created for me one of the most difficult weeks I have experienced in a long time. It has just been a perfect storm of sin and self-justification. I do believe with great confidence that God has called me to be a pastor, and preaching here at Christ Community is an occasional part of that journey that I really enjoy. But each time I have been asked to give a message, this surge of sinful motives well up inside of me. I tell myself that in order to convince you, my wife, my family, and our pastors that I am indeed worthy of becoming a pastor, I have to out perform every other person who has graced us with the word of God from this stage. I also believe that I have to show my worth to God by the same measure. That He was right to call me into pastoral-ship. Ironically, because this bit of scripture means so much to me, these feelings came on stronger than they have any time before. This message I'm sharing with you today is on it's fifth re-write. I woke up at 4:30 both Thursday and Friday morning to make those re-writes happen, with plenty of editing in between. I didn't want it to be good, I wanted it to be perfect. For that sake, I have sinned against so many people. I have sinned against my wife by letting my responsibilities at home fall through the cracks onto her shoulders, and I have neglected her needs. I have not been her friend. I have sinned against my friends and my missional community by sheltering myself form them this entire week, not asking them for prayer. I have sinned against my employer and my co-workers by laboring over this sermon during the time I should have been working for them. I have sinned against you church, for taking God's word and using it for my glory instead of our joy. And most of all, I have sinned against God. For my entire life as a Christian, my greatest desire has been to hear the words of Jesus when He says to me, "well done good and faithful servant." But my sin has twisted that pursuit and lead me to believe that if I do not please God with a good performance, then I will never hear those words. But we are saved by grace to receive even more grace. It is no longer up to me. Even at our darkest, when our sins have over come us, God looks at you as He does His Son, and says "I love you," "well done, my good, and faithful servant." Friends, I plead with you as I do with myself to rest in this grace. In Christ, this is your new identity: you are eternally forgiven! Stop living a life of morality to earn God's favor. 11

He is not impressed with our Bible reading plans, or our over-loaded ministry schedule, or how many times we have shared the Gospel with our friends and co-workers. And if you think you have sinned in a way where you have fallen form grace, it is a lie! God has "seated us with Him in the Heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Yet we persist in trying to pull ourselves up to the throne that God has already sat us on. Take rest in the finished work that God has completed for us on the cross. Run to Jesus so that He might save you from your hopeless attempts to save yourself, by grace alone, through faith alone. 12

FOR FURTHER READING The Letter to the Ephesians (Pillar New Testament Commentary) By Peter T. O Brien Using the fruits of recent biblical research, Peter O'Brien shows how Ephesians sums up God's magnificent plan of salvation in Christ and spells out his divine purpose for believers today. Ephesians (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament) By Clinton E. Arnold This commentary provides the main point, an exegetical outline, verse-by-verse commentary, and theology in application in each section of the book of Ephesians. Ephesians: Who Do You Think You Are? By Mark Driscoll Sharing much in common with the campaign and sermon series by the same title, Pastor Mark s book on Ephesians is packed with great insights, direct application and tons of facts. The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (New International Commentary on the New Testament) By F. F. Bruce This commentary series is recognized by pastors, students, and scholars alike as a critical yet orthodox commentary marked by solid biblical scholarship within the evangelical Protestant tradition. Sermons on the Book of Ephesians By Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones http://www.mljtrust.org/collections/book-of-ephesians/ Ephesians: ESV Study Bible Notes By S. M. Baugh The ESV Study Bible combines the best and most recent evangelical Christian scholarship with the highly regarded ESV Bible text. 13