Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Mark Clark Podcast. Hopefully you're doing well. All right, let's be honest, this passage, this episode, it's heavy. As we open Ephesians 2, we're now in chapter 2. Paul starts with reality, spiritual death, sin, and life apart from God, apart from Jesus. What is it like? It's uncomfortable, this message, but it's necessary because until we understand the bad news of what our situation is, what our plight is, we'll never grasp how good the gospel truly is. So Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones years ago said, if we don't understand sin and our situation, we'll never wanna fly to Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:00:40]:
We'll never understand our need to fly to Jesus, that Jesus is far more than just an example for us. He did something that changes our lives in profound and eternal ways, but we gotta understand sin in order to get there. So hopefully this one is helpful for you as we explore it. And for me it was because it helped me understand myself, my tendencies, my proclivities, Why am I like that and what can God do about it? So let's get into it.
Mark Clark [00:01:03]:
Open up your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 2. We are in chapter 2 now. Praise God. All right. That's awesome. If you're new, we are in chapter 1 for a long time. All right. So coming up on chapter 2, very excited about this.
Mark Clark [00:01:17]:
Now, here's the thing. You know those days when you come to church and it's encouraging to you, it's exciting. You come and you sing and you connect with people and you hear the word and you leave encouraged and you're just ready to go and you're excited. This isn't one of those days. One of those days at all. All right, this is— all right, what we're about to unpack here, it's just heavy. It's really just getting into the grime of sin in your life. And so if you're new, it's not like this every week, but we gotta kind of go here and delve into this because this is the nature of what the Bible's trying to get us to think about our own life so that we really understand and appreciate the glory of the gospel in good news.
Mark Clark [00:02:01]:
But to understand that, We gotta kind of get into the dirt and grime of what our life is before Jesus. So the way I'll set it up is this way. When I was in college, I was really set on what I was gonna do with my life, all right? So I was gonna go and get into the film industry. I was gonna be a director, a writer, an actor, okay? This was going to be my life. I loved it. And so I went to school for it. I interned at a news station, post-production, editing equipment, Lights, cameras, all of it. Loved it.
Mark Clark [00:02:33]:
And that's what I was going to do. I wrote screenplays. Alright? I wrote a sequel to Titanic. Alright? When I was 17. Alright? That thing took me a year. Alright? Word for word. Awesome story. Could have made millions.
Mark Clark [00:02:47]:
So— What? So, wrote that sequel. Got into that kind of life. And then I remember I went away with a couple buddies of mine and they sat me down. We were up at my friend's cabin. We were around the campfire. And they said, here's the thing, man. I think you're getting called into pastoral ministry. I think what's happening is you have these things, leadership and teaching, that you should be in the local church being a pastor.
Mark Clark [00:03:19]:
And I was like, no, I'm going into the film industry. And they're like, listen, I think you've got the wrong read on your life. And I'm like, hold on. "Did you read Titanic 2?" All right, and they're like, "Yes, we did." All right. So I don't know what happened. All right, but anyway, so they're like, "Man." So then here's my reaction. All right, I ran from that. Okay, I ran physically, literally away.
Mark Clark [00:03:50]:
We got home and then I went up to my friend's house for a weekend to just escape all of this pressure and this tension of people telling me, this thing. And then I remember getting out of the hot tub and I went inside and this person's dad was in this room and I went in and I started to talk with him and we just kind of jived for 20 or so minutes and then we prayed and then as we prayed he kind of looked up from that prayer and he said, "Here's the weird thing, man. I was just feeling the Lord press on me that you need to go into pastoral ministry." And I'm like, "What's up?" He's like, I'm like, Titanic 2. He's like, what's that? I don't understand. So then I came and I ran away from him, and I went to work. And now I worked at Michael's Arts and Crafts store, believe it or not. That was me. So $6.85 an hour.
Mark Clark [00:04:40]:
Picture me, big red apron. Mark, happy face. Glad to have you. Never had a clue what I was doing in that store. People would be like, do you know where the fuzzy feathers are? Yes, aisle 5. I got to get out of here. And I'd just go in the back and chill for like 20 minutes till they were long gone, 'cause I never figured out where anything was. So I remember standing, looking, putting some googly eyes away on this wall, true story, and the Lord literally just ruined me.
Mark Clark [00:05:13]:
And this doesn't happen to me, like I started to cry, just crushed me at Michaels. I became ruined, and I was like, "Man, what am I doing?" And he just pressed on me that the road you're going down, you've just got the wrong read on your life. Now, here's the thing, all right? As we preach this text, this message for some of you is going to be that conversation, that you literally have the wrong read on your entire existence. You got the wrong read on why you divide with people, why you don't like God, why you have trouble walking with God, why you have division with people in your own heart, why you struggle with sin and temptation. All right, you have the wrong read on your life, and this text is gonna come at us and give us some very horrible, dark, bad news. All right, you excited? All right, this is gonna be just dirty. All right, so here we go. I don't like that.
Mark Clark [00:06:11]:
Chapter 2. Verse 1. All right, here's what it says: And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. So like, Joel Osteen has trouble making this thing be happy right there. Like, eee, smiley, you're dead in your trespasses and your sins. Awesome, I'm excited. So here's what this text starts out by saying: You You are dead. Now, some of you are like, well, no, I'm not dead.
Mark Clark [00:06:43]:
I woke up this morning. I got in my car. I put my pants on. I'm not dead. This is saying spiritually you're dead. Spiritually you are in the morgue. Alright? And this is what we've got to understand about ourselves. Spiritually— some of you are like, hey, I like spirituality.
Mark Clark [00:07:02]:
This text is going, listen, I'm not talking about vague spirituality. Some of you believe in spiritual things and heaven and this and that, God, you know, whatever you mean by that vague spirituality. This text is saying you're dead. The only way to truly become alive is through Jesus Christ. That's what Paul is going to go on to say. So it's really important right up front that you understand your predicament, that you understand your diagnosis. Your diagnosis is not that you're in the doghouse, all right? It's not that you and God had a little bit of a spat. It's that you're in the morgue.
Mark Clark [00:07:33]:
You are dead spiritually. Alright, that's what he starts out as. This is what we fundamentally have to understand about our reality. We are dead. Alright, so we can deny that all we want. Paul in Romans chapter 1 says what happens with human beings, because we never want to blame ourselves for anything, is we push against this diagnosis in a way where Paul says, man, if you look to creation, if you look to the clouds and the mountains and the trees and the oceans,, you will start deducing that God exists. But your problem is not the lack of evidence, it's the suppression of evidence. It's that you see all of those things and you say, "I choose not to believe." And it's the same reality here.
Mark Clark [00:08:17]:
You are dead in your trespasses and sins. That's the diagnosis. And in order to get healthy, you can either understand that, deal with that, or you can put your fingers in your ears, right? If you walked into a doctor and they said, You have a tumor. The solution is not, "La, la, la, la, la, la, no I don't, la, la, la, la, la," right? That'd be dumb. It's to say, "Okay, how do I actually deal with this?" So Paul is going, first thing that you've got to understand is that you are dead. That's your reality. Now, this tends to be different than our cultural analysis of us because some of you are sitting here and you're saying, "Man, my psychologist tells me I'm a gem." My psychologist tells me I'm good, I got the divine spark in me. And Paul's going, you're dead.
Mark Clark [00:09:08]:
Because here's the reality. Most of us think in our culture that we kind of begin where Adam and Eve began. Right? Genesis 1, God made heavens and the earth, put Adam and Eve in this garden, and they had everything that you could ever want. I mean, nudity and fruit. What else? And God, alright? Nudity, fruit, and God, alright? That's it, that's all you need right there, that's what the Bible's saying. And then what happened is we sinned against God, we chose to go our own way, even though God said don't do this, we went and did this, and the woman, the text says, was the first one to to get tempted, and the man who was supposed to be leading her did a fundamentally flawed thing. He followed her. And in fact, he stood by while she got tempted.
Mark Clark [00:10:04]:
And the text says, because we often blame Eve, we're like, "Yeah, silly Eve. You know, you're weak. Whoa." You know, it's like, wait a minute, the text actually says he was right there with her. So here's what the man did, and it's classic men even today in our culture. He stood by and did nothing. It's the silence of Adam. Passive, doesn't want to take leadership, just like many men today, just followed his girl around like a lost puppy. Here, go over here.
Mark Clark [00:10:32]:
Okay. Say this. Okay. Eat this. Blah, blah, blah. You know, that's just— All right, that's what men do. They're scared. They hide behind their wife.
Mark Clark [00:10:42]:
They let her define everything. And some of you guys are like, that guy's a loser. That's you. And so this was the fundamental flaw. We sinned. We walked away from God. We sinned against God. We chose our own way.
Mark Clark [00:11:00]:
We were disobedient. And here's the reality. We don't start out where Adam and Eve started. We start out where Adam and Eve ended. They ended hiding from God. They ended disobedient. They ended dead. In trespasses and sins.
Mark Clark [00:11:15]:
God says your curse is that you are going to die. And so we don't all start where Adam and Eve began with this divine spark in us and we can solve all our problems and we're— the diagnosis of us is that we're in a good position, that all we need is a little tweak. He's saying you are absolutely spiritually dead. All right, then he says this: what are you dead in? You're dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. So this is a really dark picture. This is a really dark picture of sin in history. It's saying, man, you look back through history— I mean, Christianity has this great philosophical explanation that other faiths and other worldviews don't have about what's wrong with history, what's wrong with the world. When people go shoot people up and the Holocaust and Hitler and Pol Pot and all of these— Stalin and all of these horrible people.
Mark Clark [00:12:07]:
Christianity comes along and says, "The reason is, is because you're sinful. The reason is, is because you're spiritually dead. You're dead in your trespasses and your sins." So generally speaking, sociologists say when you go into a culture, usually those cultures are trying to answer 4 basic worldview questions. Who are we? What's the problem? Where did we come from? What's the solution? And Christianity comes along and says, "The problem is right here." that you are dead in the trespasses and sins. Now, here's the thing then. It should never blow us away when history is a conveyor belt of corpses. It should never blow— like, people are blown up by this Lance Armstrong thing. Lance Armstrong, I can't believe.
Mark Clark [00:12:51]:
Maybe Lance Armstrong— I'm not saying Lance Armstrong used drugs. I'm saying he might have. And the reality is, is we're all, oh, I can't believe. What do you mean you can't believe that? Of course you can. Have you read your Bible? We're dead in trespasses and sins, and like every single one of us, he wants worship. He wants to be a hero, so he'll do anything to do that. That shouldn't surprise you. We're dead.
Mark Clark [00:13:17]:
This is our diagnosis. So I met with a guy this week and he's saying, this couple that I know, they're having really difficult problems in their marriage. And I said, they said, all of a sudden one of them got really weird. And I said, did they cheat? Well, no. What do you mean no? Well, I know them. They would never do that. Listen, I'm not a pessimist, but I've read the Bible enough to go, man, never get yourself into a spot where you go, I would never cheat, right? You say that about yourself, I would just never cheat on that person. You're missing the diagnosis that the text lays out for you.
Mark Clark [00:13:58]:
You're dead in your trespasses and your sins. You are capable of far more than you would ever think or imagine. So, starts out, you're dead in your trespasses. Now, here's the key part. The second word he says, "you," it's very important because the game that we play tends to be us and them. Right? So there's good people and there's bad people. The good people are usually you. The bad people are usually them out there.
Mark Clark [00:14:29]:
And what we do is we tend to blame our environment. We tend to blame our parents, right? So I'm really messed up. I have problems. Well, whose fault is that? That was the way my parents raised me. That's the environment I got raised in. That's this person's problem. That's my education. Everything external.
Mark Clark [00:14:44]:
What he's saying is, no, the problem is you. There is no us and them. See, all of us go, "Yeah, you know, them, those bad people." What bad people? You know, the people they make jails for, the people they make bullets for, the people that they try to keep away from the good people. And you know what those people in jail are thinking? The same thing about you. Because you know who you are? You're the church-going moralizers with your khaki pants, all right, and your afternoon brunches with your family. See, the problem is you keep the rest of the world who's poor oppressed and you make them shoot people to steal money because you got way more money than you need. And don't you know, by the way, that you Christians, you moralizers, you people who pick up your Bibles and come to church every week, that you have killed millions of people all throughout history and you killed a bunch of witches? It's not us and them. You, you're dead in sin.
Mark Clark [00:15:50]:
You're dead in trespass. Now he's saying this is who you were before you came to know Jesus. Some of you were trespassers. All right? Some of you were people who just, you did I mean, you just, I mean, you smoked, you slept around, you listened to Bon Jovi, alright? You did that. That was you. Alright, you're a trespasser. That was me growing up. I hated God, I hated the Bible, I didn't go to church, any of that.
Mark Clark [00:16:25]:
That was me. Now, some of you think you're off the hook. You say, "Yeah, dirty trespassers. Don't you know I grew up in the church?" Okay. That's my wife. She grew up in the church. She went to Sunday school every week. She had a Bible.
Mark Clark [00:16:41]:
She never kissed the boys, all right, at least she told me that. All right? First kiss was on our wedding day. So, she was a good girl. She took every opportunity. She got raised, you know, in a school. She took every opportunity, every project she did, when she got to get up and speak in front of people, it was all about how evolution is wrong and how the world is really only 6,000 years old and pictures of Adam riding a dinosaur because she was going to change her entire class. She was gonna convert her entire class and her teacher and everything was an evangelistic opportunity. That's how she got raised.
Mark Clark [00:17:27]:
And some of you are like, That's me. I'm not a sinner. I'm not a trespasser. That's exactly who you are because that's why Paul includes both words. See, trespass biblically means you did something that you knew you shouldn't do. That was me. Sinner means, the word sin means to miss the mark, meaning you did not do what you were supposed to do. Meaning my wife did all the right things, but she didn't do a whole bunch of things that God asked her to do.
Mark Clark [00:17:55]:
Love and serve others. Make God the center of your universe. She played a game so that people would think she was righteous. Trespasser and sinner, both people. He says you're dead in your trespasses and your sins. So what are the 3 ways in which we're dead? First, verse 2, in which you once walked following the course of this world. So the first issue we have, the first thing that enslaves us is the reality of this world. So if you exist in this world long enough, Paul is saying you're just going to start adopting a lot of the values, philosophies, and worldviews of the world that surrounds you.
Mark Clark [00:18:41]:
So you'll begin to think in a particular way. You'll watch enough commercials. You'll go by enough billboards. You'll watch enough CNN or Fox News or whatever it is you watch. And you'll start to adopt particular worldviews of the world that surrounds you. And so you're like a fish and you're just kind of going downstream dead. And instead of being alive and kind of going against the grain, you get enslaved to what he calls the world. The values of the world, the thoughts of the world, the philosophies of the world.
Mark Clark [00:19:13]:
So sometimes I'll have conversations with people about Christianity and they'll come at me and they'll say, Your problem is, is that all of your ideas are influenced by the scriptures. And so when you think about sexuality, for instance, when you think about marriage, your ideas come from the Bible. And that's true. The Bible says in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 that God made a man and he made a woman. And he took those two people and he said, get together, be of one flesh. Husbands, you are to leave your mother and father and be joined to this woman and become one flesh. And there's a reason for that. Right? Husbands are to leave their mother and father.
Mark Clark [00:19:51]:
Right? Why? Right? Because they get married and the husband's like, "You don't make pancakes like my mom." Alright? And the wife's like, "Ah!" Husbands! Leave! Your mom! Ladies, if you're looking for a man, look for a man who can exist without his mommy, all right? Who can have a job, probably lives on his own, can do a budget, puts on big boy pants. Jesus, job. Those are the two things you're looking for. Does he love Jesus? Does he have a job? Can he leave mommy and daddy, be joined to me, protect me, love me, lead me, serve me, or not? So the Bible says that's the image of marriage, that a man and a woman get together in the context of covenant and then sexuality can flourish. And what happens is people say, well, your definition of sexuality is oppressive, it's narrow-minded, it's judgmental. Why can't everybody just do whatever they want? And here's the presupposition that you're living in. You, if you hold that position, are a product of being a 21st century Canadian. Educated, born and raised where you're born and raised, and you've got all kinds of presuppositions and assumptions about the world that you're bringing to that conversation.
Mark Clark [00:21:17]:
Because I would say to you, why don't you go with all of your idea about sexuality over to the Middle East and ask them what they think about your ideas? What you're going to find there are people who will go to war for traditional ideas of sexuality. And my question is, do you think they're wrong? "Of course they're wrong!" Careful, now you're being judgmental. Who's narrow-minded now? Don't put your ideas on other people. Don't take all of your assumptions about sexuality and put them on me. Be more open. This kind of hypocrisy, the way we function, the way we roll in our culture, Paul says that's the world. You're enslaved to it. You think, you function the way that the society around you tells you to think and function.
Mark Clark [00:22:13]:
That greed is good, that living for the weekend is good, that using people is good. It's normal. Just go about it. Of course you gotta cheat in your business a little bit. It's okay. It's normal. Everyone does it. He says you're enslaved to the world.
Mark Clark [00:22:34]:
Secondly, he says you're enslaved. He says this: following the prince of the power of the air. You're enslaved to the world, but secondly, you're enslaved to the devil. This sounds old school, but it's a reality and it makes sense. I mean, you take collectively all the wars, all the horrible torture, all the terrible injustices of our culture, If it was just us, we would have solved these things by now. But it's not just us. There's something else, the Bible says, someone else behind this, pushing this forward, making sure an evil and a horrible agenda actually takes place. And he's not someone who's red with a tail and hooves.
Mark Clark [00:23:15]:
That's a joke. That's funny. Hehe. It's not that. Satan is real. The devil is real. He hates you. He wants to kill you.
Mark Clark [00:23:23]:
The Bible says he was a murderer from the beginning. He steals and kills and destroys. He wants to kill you. He wants to destroy your family. He wants to ruin your faith. He wants to kill this church. He's real. And what this text is saying is you used to follow him.
Mark Clark [00:23:38]:
That's what's messed up. They say following the prince of the power of the air. Now, this doesn't mean you actually knew that, all right? It doesn't mean you actually woke up in the morning and now I will sacrifice my baby brother on the altar in my bedroom and I will go to school because I follow Satan. That's not what it's saying. It's saying you followed Satan, but you never knew you were following Satan. You followed what Satan produces. You followed lies. You followed dissension.
Mark Clark [00:24:05]:
You followed selfishness. You put everything in your life above the God of the universe, and in that way, he says, you followed the devil. You were a disciple of Satan. Some of you are like, "I brought my friend." What? You could have posted you were saying disciple of Satan before I brought him. The text is just saying, man, you followed the devil. I don't know what else to tell you. You have two options when it comes to your discipleship. The question is not whether you're a disciple or not.
Mark Clark [00:24:40]:
The question is you're a disciple. Who are you a disciple of? Are you a disciple of Satan or are you a disciple of Jesus? Those are the options. Those are the options. And it makes sense out of the world that we look at because there's so much evil, there's so much injustice, there's so much negativity that why wouldn't we think that there is someone behind it? When we look at beauty and the design of the universe and music and art and love, we say, "Well, these are pointers to God." Then why isn't the opposite true? That when we look at evil and injustice and sin and torture and Holocaust, that there's somebody— And realize he's saying this is not an impersonal, kind of, you know, Star Wars, for you Star Wars geeks, this isn't like the Force, alright? It's not an impersonal, vague, New Age kind of religious, spiritual evil. It's a person. He says he's the prince. It's an actual person that we follow before we come to know Jesus. So the world, the devil, and then finally, the flesh.
Mark Clark [00:25:40]:
The flesh. Now, here's what Paul means by the flesh. He doesn't mean what some of us think he means, which is like the flesh and bone of our body. All right, the idea that flesh is bad and that spirit world is good is not biblical. All right, it comes from Greco-Roman dualism. That's Plato, not Jesus. And that's where we get a lot of bad ideas about heaven. All right, that we're going to go away to heaven someday, be babies with a diaper, playing a harp on a cloud, disembodied bliss, and we all go, The party in hell will be so much better.
Mark Clark [00:26:17]:
And that's because you have a wrong idea about what heaven is. Heaven is not that. The hope of the Bible is re-embodiment. That's why the hope of the Bible is resurrection life. Flesh is good! God made the whole world and he called it good! So let me restore it! If all God did was say, "Oh, that messed up. Now I'll bring you to a spirit world for all of eternity," God loses. So what God does in Jesus is he kills Satan, sin, and death, and he promises, just like Jesus is the prototype, that our hope, that our future is resurrection life. What Paul means here is none of that.
Mark Clark [00:26:55]:
What Paul means is that the flesh is— your sin is inside of you. Meaning this: if your only problem was the world, then you could go inside your room and insulate yourself from the world. If your only problem was Satan, then you could just say prayers all day and meditate all day and you wouldn't have to worry. But here's what Paul is saying: if you went in a room and you isolated yourself and you prayed and meditated all day, guess what? You would still sin because it's in your flesh. It's in your Adamic sinful self. You can't hide from it. Any of you seen the movie The Village? All right, M. Night Shyamalan? 3 of you, awesome.
Mark Clark [00:27:33]:
Has nothing to do with our church. I'm gonna ruin it for you. It came out long enough ago. It's a movie about a bunch of people who are totally hurt by the world. Their friends got hurt and killed and all of these terrible, horrible things happened to them. And so they came up with an idea. Why don't we go away to a place and build a culture and put up walls so that the world cannot get us and we will raise our kids in purity and goodness. And so they build up walls around a forest and they say that their kids, as they grow up, can never go out into the forest because if they did, they would find out there are walls.
Mark Clark [00:28:10]:
And if they look over the walls, they would see Jeeps and planes. But this guy's so rich, he actually worked it out so planes couldn't actually fly over. And these kids live in this reality of the 19th century all the way into their life. And they said, We gotta insulate ourselves from the evil. And then one day, one of those kids, when he's 20 years old, gets completely jealous and in a jealous rage takes out a knife and stabs another one. And the whole village is shocked because evil found its way in. You can't build walls big enough because evil's not out there. It's within you.
Mark Clark [00:28:52]:
And it'll find its way every single time to you. So Paul's going, here's your predicament. You're dead in trespasses and sins. You're enslaved to the world, to the devil, and to the flesh. Awesome, huh? That's exciting stuff. Look at what he says. In verse 3, "Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. We were by nature..." By nature.
Mark Clark [00:29:29]:
This is in you. This is what you were born into, right? You didn't learn this. You were born into sin, right? And if any of you doubt that, just watch a group of kids for 3 minutes. Right? My kids, they are liars, cheaters. They'll look me right in the face and just lie right to my eyes. They steal. They're idolaters. They're selfish.
Mark Clark [00:29:59]:
They're horrible. I took my 3 daughters out to a store the other day and I was buying Something, and my daughter said, can I please, our 6-year-old, can I please have that Barbie? We said, no, you cannot have that Barbie. You just had a birthday, you got 4 Barbies. You don't need the Barbie. And then we had to buy a little sleeper for our 1-year-old, and we went up to the till, and my 6-year-old walked up to the 1-year-old and goes, you get everything, I never get anything. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you get nothing. You're naked, you're hungry, You don't sleep inside. You get nothing.
Mark Clark [00:30:38]:
Where did she get that? Her mother. Right? No, she gets that, alright? By nature. It's inside of her. It's natural. It flows out of her flesh. Her sinful self, she's never satisfied. And before you judge her, think about how you live. You get that nice new shiny house and you love it.
Mark Clark [00:31:12]:
You love that house. It's perfect. It's exactly the way I wanted to build it. And for 3 months, it's the bomb. And then at 3 months, something crazy happens. You notice something you never noticed before. Your neighbor's house is a little bit bigger. And their lawn's a little bit nicer.
Mark Clark [00:31:31]:
And their car is just a little bit newer, and 3 months later your life sucks. Because by nature, you're sinful, you're selfish, you're never satisfied. Nothing can fill this void that you just keep trying. Paul's trying to give you This is from love, all right? This is a loving pastor saying, let me give you the proper diagnosis and I'm going to get to the solution, but let me give you a proper diagnosis so that you completely understand where you're at. He says it's by nature. This is very important. In our culture, we tend to excuse people's sin if they claim it's by nature. And so we talk about my natural God-given things, and therefore it must be true, it must be right, it must not be sin.
Mark Clark [00:32:35]:
The problem is, is the Bible says there's many things God is against that flow out of our sin nature, the fact that we live in a fallen, broken world. So we— I know people, their natural proclivity that they're born with is to be to be a rageaholic, to be angry. There's psychopaths and sociopaths that we don't say, "Oh, it's just the way you were born. Carry on." "Well, I killed 40 people." "I know, but you were born that way. Carry on." That's not how we function. I was doing marriage counseling this week with a couple, and the guy said, Something very important that I tell you and my wife, and we have to clear this up right up front, I'm not a morning person, and everybody knows in my family that they shouldn't talk to me for the first 30 minutes. He turned to his wife and said, you got that? Yes, I got that, honey. Okay, I won't talk to you for the first 30 minutes.
Mark Clark [00:33:34]:
I said, sorry? I said, what are you doing? Did you just hide behind I was born this way. I don't like the morning. I said, okay, so here's the reality. That has to change. What do you mean that has to change? This is how my natural, that's just who I am. I'm like, listen, you can't go through the next 40 years of marriage not talking for the first 30 minutes. We can't? Hmm. Did you know this? But this is who I am.
Mark Clark [00:34:20]:
Then change! See, this is what the Gospel is all about. Jesus Christ by way of His Holy Spirit can come inside of us and change not what we do, but what we want to do. Our will, our affections, what we love to do, what we pine to do. He can change us. He can transform us. This is the point of the gospel is He doesn't leave you sitting in your natural sinful state. He can change your very nature. That's the point.
Mark Clark [00:34:56]:
Now, one more step. Down into the darkness, believe it or not. Alright, there's one more that we gotta get just— oh, this is the bottom, and then we're gonna try to get up, alright? So, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and we were by nature— listen to this— children of wrath like the rest of mankind. Children of wrath. Here's what the Apostle Paul is saying. Because we're sinful, we lie, we steal, we cheat, we worship ourselves, what we deserve is not friends and family and good wine and nice music. What we deserve is the wrath and the judgment of God. Very important you understand that.
Mark Clark [00:35:57]:
This is what Jesus, in Jesus' language, calls hell, Gehenna, Hades. The severity of God upon our state of sinfulness. That if every good gift comes down from God, as James says, comes down from heaven, meaning love and purity and comfort and joy and all of those things come down from God, then the opposite of that is the place where none of those things exist, where all of that common grace is removed and the wrath of God remains on us. That's what Jesus calls hell. That we, in our lives, at any moment, when we say, "I want to worship something other than God, I want to worship something shiny, I want to worship money, I want to worship my reputation," what you're saying is, I actually prefer prefer the absence of God. And in hell, that's exactly what you get. Where God says to you, by the way, you're a successful rebel until the end. You rebelled against me, you came against me, and you will get eternity without me.
Mark Clark [00:37:03]:
And so people come along and they say, well, what about the God of love? I like the God of love. I don't like this idea of the God of wrath. That's the Old Testament God. But the Bible comes along and says, "Listen, Jesus—" If what Paul's been saying for the first 23 verses of chapter 1, the Trinitarian God is saying Jesus is God, which means this: there's no dichotomy between some Old Testament concept of God and some New Testament concept of God. Jesus was there when God was smiting the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. Jesus was executing it himself. What? He's saying, here's what's very important. You've got to have a concept of God where you fear him.
Mark Clark [00:38:00]:
You've gotta have a concept of God where he has wrath. He's angry. And if you're like, well, that's not fair, you have wrath. You have love and anger, don't you? I do. Alright, my kids look at me and they lie to my face, I get angry. I read the newspaper the other day, it was all this horrible news about this guy killing this and doing that, I get angry. I went to the hospital to visit someone a couple weeks ago and there was a children's section. Our kids are dying, man.
Mark Clark [00:38:43]:
If God's not jacked up and angry about that, he's not worth worshiping. See, here's what Paul wants to do, the same thing Jesus wants to do all through his ministry. He wants to create in you— and listen, if you don't know Jesus, here's the point— he wants to create in you a fear of the wrath of God. He wants you to ask the question, am I okay with the wrath of God remaining on me? Remaining on me. Now, how horrible is the wrath of God? How horrible is the image of hell? Here's what Jesus does to help us. In Matthew chapter 5, he says this: If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. 'For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.' Now listen, 'For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.' It is better that you lose this member of your body for the next 80 years then you would have it and go to hell.
Mark Clark [00:39:57]:
He's saying, don't think about the wrath of God in a vacuum. Think about it comparatively to the things that you love and cherish in this world. That's how horrible hell is. So I have a pastor friend of mine who has stage 3 brain tumor. All right, he's got 2 young kids, a young wife, and he says to me, every day I live with the reality that I'm never going to be able to brush my fingers through her hair again. Every day I live with the reality that I'm not going to see my daughter walk down the aisle. I'm not going to throw the ball around with my son anymore. Every day I live with that.
Mark Clark [00:40:31]:
But listen, what's better for me is that I know Jesus Christ. And what would be far worse, listen, is if I could do all of those things, but in the end I fall outside of the kingdom of God. That's what Jesus is trying to say. He's trying to say, man, it's worth it to go. You should pluck out your eye. You should never see the sunrise again. It is better for you if you never see the sunrise again, if you never rub your hand through your wife's hair again and walk your daughter down the aisle, if you never get to do those things, but you are in the kingdom of God, it is far better. Then, if you get to do all those things, if you live to 100, but you die and you go to hell.
Mark Clark [00:41:23]:
To live a happy, healthy, fat kind of life where everything's great, but you die and you don't know Jesus. Jesus is trying to say, that's the kind of fear I want to try to well up in you, to draw a picture of the wrath of God. And some of us are like, I don't believe in a God that we fear. Don't you know God gave us a spirit, not of fear? But that's not what that text is about. Listen, the Bible is constantly— listen to Jesus. Jesus, Luke chapter 12, says this: I tell you, friends, do not fear those who kill the body and after that have nothing more that they can do to you. I will warn you whom to fear. Fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell, yes, I tell you, fear him.
Mark Clark [00:42:10]:
Here's what he's saying. You fear people more than you fear me? You fear your reputation more than you fear me? You fear being poor and being unliked more than you fear me? That's a mistake, 'cause here's the thing. The worst thing people can do to you is kill you, but there are far worse things than dying. Jesus says, "Fear God." Now, let me give you one more example of the wrath of God before this thing gets lighter, all right? You happy yet? Mm. All right. One more image of the wrath of God so we get this very clear in our mind and we're not walking out of here with some idea of God being some sky fairy who sprinkles happy dust on everybody, all right? The book of Habakkuk, chapter 1, verse 5. Says this, "I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told." "I'm doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told." And Christians love this verse, all right? You walk into a Christian bookstore, all right, it's right there beside the doilies and the Passion of the Christ nail and the Testaments. All right? That's true product right there, Testaments.
Mark Clark [00:43:27]:
You walk in there and they put this verse on a mug, on a t-shirt, "I'm going to do something in your day that if I told you right now—" And everyone's like, "Come on, Lord! Bring it! What's the thing you're going to do in our day? Let's wear it on my t-shirt!" And the thing is, you keep reading Habakkuk, and the thing that he's going to do is kill everybody. They're like, "You're going to do the thing in my day that you wouldn't believe if I told you." "What is it?" "Kill all your friends." kill your whole family, kill all your livestock, and burn up the earth. Bring it. Huh? When Paul's talking about we fall under the wrath of God, we gotta just work, alright? We gotta work at getting that picture in our mind because we will forget and we'll just take West Coast, modern, 21st century ideas of God. When all that wrath stuff is working behind the scenes in Paul's mentality, and it's very important that we understand it. Now, some of you are like, "Oh my goodness, this is horrible. I brought my friend, everyone's depressed." I agree, it's depressing. So here's why Paul doesn't end there.
Mark Clark [00:44:43]:
Here's what he's gonna do. He drew a dark background for us so that now the gem of the gospel looks beautiful. Like when I was looking for an engagement ring for my wife, What did they put out? A black velvet background. So when they put that gem on there, it's just bam! That's what Paul's doing. Let me describe the most horrible, horrific background. So now, now listen, these two next words are the two most beautiful words in the entire book of Ephesians. Chapter 2, verse 4, but God. What? You are sinful, dead, wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, naked.
Mark Clark [00:45:31]:
You do no good. You're in the morgue. Flesh, the devil, sin, the world, wrath by nature. Ah! But God. And what he's about to say is, but God, listen to what he does, 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. You want to know what the gospel is? It's not that if you just pull up your moral bootstraps and do better, God will move from wrath to liking you. It's not that. It's that God had to come himself.
Mark Clark [00:46:23]:
And he walked into the morgue where you were laid out. And he opened up the drawer. And he bent down. And he said, "Get up." And he breathed on you. And he made you alive. See, the reason Paul described your horrible reality is because he wants you to be in awe of the God of the— he wants the cross to be majestic and beautiful to you. He wants the work of God in his grace and his mercy to be beautiful to you. And the only way to do that, listen, If all I did was to describe to you the judgment and the wrath of God, that is never going to turn you into a worshiper of God.
Mark Clark [00:47:14]:
It's never going to work, right? This is what people have done with the doctrine of the wrath of God. We thought that fear would create disciples. So when I was at summer camp and I was 8 years old and we went down to the fire and the guy was like, if you don't turn to Jesus, you're going to burn in hell. And we're like, man, he takes out the oil and that fire fire went, "Woo!" And he's like, "You want to go in there?" We're like, "Ahh!" And all the counselors are coming to the front, giving their life to Christ. That will never work. You know what happened to me? When hell became a caricature because it was my main motivation for trusting in Jesus when I was a kid, when that motivation died, my faith died. I stopped caring. I stopped caring because you can't be scared into loving God.
Mark Clark [00:48:05]:
You can scare people to give more money. You can scare people to come to your church. You can scare people to work harder. You can't scare anybody into loving, walking with the God of the universe. And you know what the reality is? Nobody who's guilty wants justice. Everybody who's guilty wants mercy. And so you're sitting here, I mean, I don't know, have you ever seen a trial where a guy's on trial for murdering people and the judge bangs his gavel and says, "You are guilty! You're gonna go get executed!" He goes, "Thank you, Judge! Thank you! Appreciate that justice, that's what I'm after." No, he pleads out mercy. Every person in this room, listen, you don't want justice to be done.
Mark Clark [00:48:56]:
What you need is mercy. What you need, now listen, here's the beauty of the gospel. You know all that wrath stuff that I just unpacked for 20 minutes? Here's the beauty of it. Jesus Christ took all the wrath for you. You don't have to go to hell because he went to the cross for you. You don't have to feel the wrath of God that Habakkuk talks about because Jesus Christ went to the cross and absorbed all the wrath of God on himself for you, died for your sins. This is what he's talking about. But God, he made the first move.
Mark Clark [00:49:40]:
God made the first move toward you. When you were dead and he went to the cross. This flips every kind of worldview, every kind of philosophy about how a human being's trying to connect to God in every culture. It throws it on its head. God came for you. So here's the question. What are you going to do? How are you going to respond to the fact that God died and rose again for you. You were dead.
Mark Clark [00:50:11]:
You were in the morgue. And he did what he had to do. The question becomes, will you do what you have to do? Repent of sin and give your life to Jesus, even in this moment. Father, I pray that your Spirit would move and work in the hearts and minds and that everything distracting in this moment would go away and every person here would simply feel you and them, their sin, their deadness, their trespass, the world, the devil, the flesh, that they were by nature children of wrath. But the beautiful word "were"—were—you were, you did walk in this—that those of us who've trusted Jesus, who took on the wrath for us, walk in the newness of life. We've been made alive in Jesus Christ. We are transformed. We have hope.
Mark Clark [00:51:05]:
And I pray that that every person in here who's never trusted you in this moment would give their life to you, so that they would not be people who experience the awful, horrible wrath that you justly bring on guilty people who are sinful both in nature and choice. And I pray even now, as we as we worship you in song, that what we say from our lips would not be hypocritical, that it would not come from a place of just getting through a service, that as we give, that we would give generously toward your glory, echoing out your mission going forward, that this would be real, that for the next few minutes as we sing, as we worship, as we give, as we even connect afterwards, I pray that it would be saturated in the celebration of the fact that you took the wrath for us, and now we have newness of life on the other side of it. Praise you. That our whole life would be to your glory. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.