"Helpless"

Ephesians 2:1-10

Over the years, I have met people who were once active in church, but who had become disillusioned and dropped out. I have also met their counterparts: people still going to church but are there for mainly social reasons, and long ago had developed a tepid faith after many years of feeling God had deserted them in the face of all the difficulties they’ve encountered and problems they still have. They might be heard saying under there breath, “where was God when I needed Him?

There are degrees of this problem; some people have it worse than others, but it all springs from the erroneous notion of what a personal relationship with God entails. In our lesson today, Paul is stressing to the Ephesians that whatever relationship we have with God, God is the initiator. He chooses us, not the other way around. And we are helpless, totally at God’s mercy in all things.

When we assume we have a relationship of mutuality with God, an understanding, a bargain, a contract, a quid pro quo connection, and God fails to deliver his side of agreement, some are so disillusioned they walk away from God. They lose faith. But if you know that God is sovereign and is not subject to your influence, that He moves on his own time and according to his own purposes---that we are his instruments in the world, then you stand on a firmer foundation.

God does not always remove adversity from our paths, as we would like it, but rest assured the strength that can only come from Him will help us weather whatever storms we encounter. Our challenge is never to lose faith that God is with us, no matter how hot it may get in the kitchen of life.

We strive to shape our preferred circumstances, then declare that what WE want as God’s will. When we say that God is our friend, what we really mean is that God is our “buddy”---that you and God have an understanding that if you will do certain things for Him, he will do certain things you.

Acts 17:25 says God is not “served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” He is a sovereign God and all that is, flows from Him. He has created us to serve as vehicles of his nature in the world—his love, his compassion, his right actions. If we have the strength to love without condition, it is not our doing, rather it is the love of God, flowing through us.

Our very purpose in the time we have been given in life is to avail ourselves to His will, to become holy vessels of healing, reconciliation and the outbreak of joy! I say this even as the troubles of this world never relent. Once understood, this becomes the source of our security, the ending of our anxieties, and our struggles are put in perspective. All our suffering, all our disappointments, our missteps are put in perspective.

I know this because, despite our pathetic state, God saved us---not by anything we have done, but by His grace. God is the giver and we are the receiver. He is the creator; we are the creature. He is the potter; we are the clay. And if we are righteous, it is God moving through us. Otherwise, we are but self-serving sinners, committing acts of kindness and charity that are designed to redound to our own purposes.

God is the unmoved mover (Aristotle), the Alpha and the Omega (Revelation 1:8). He stands alone and is not subject to my influence. “In him we live, we move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)