The Unacceptable Cure

Early on in his letter to the church at Ephesus the Apostle described those who live without faith in Jesus Christ.  What was true then is true now.   What is also true is that most of today's culture would disagree with his assessment of the human condition.  At the beginning of the 2nd chapter there is this word which is surely an unpopular one in our day.   "You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world...All of us...were by nature children of wrath..." (Ephesians 2:1-3)  Many find this word about a fundamental problem peculiar to each one of us to be unacceptable.

 

Actually, this Word about human sin has a divine solution.  The solution to the human predicament created by our sinfulness is never ours to fix.  Fixing it is outside the realm of human possibilities.  The fix is set forth in the next few verses, "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great with love with which He loves us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved..."  (Ephesians 2:4-5)  The fix for our sins does not belong to us, but to God and what He has done through Christ. 

 

The real problem with dealing with our sin is not that there is no cure, but that it is an unacceptable cure.  The Jesus fix ordained by God requires depending on Another to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  Most of us have to go to deep degrees of being broken before we will come to the reality that God does for us out of His love what we cannot do for ourselves.  The human fix in whatever form it might take is bankrupt.  It cannot deliver deliverance.  It only delivers an illusion of deliverance.  What is harder than acknowledging our sin is acknowledging that we must have help in dealing with it.  The way has been made, but it is a hard and narrow way and not everyone wants to find it.