1. "Skeptics of human depravity are always looking for less radical answers to blame the sin on various aspects of the sinner's environment, things external to them. His upbringing, his training, his circumstances, his gender, his race, his job. His view on guns or on immigration."

2. "The book that we're studying, Paul's letter to the Ephesians, offers a more searching diagnosis of sin than do your favorite news sources. And what's more a hope greater than the terror and tragedy of even the gravest and most hopeless appearing human sinfulnesses."

3. "Mercy is the specific shape of God's love involving sinners like us."

4. "God's mercy account is extravagant, overabundant. Without measure, unlimited, and therefore not able to be exhausted by the likes of you or me. You don't need to worry when you go to God in need of mercy. His account of mercy never runs low. None of His offered checks of mercy will ever bounce."

5. "God loves us, not because of anything in us, but because of what's in Him. His love is a part of His very character, His own holiness."

6. "God's love is so great that receiving that love is the most significant distinction between the Christian and anyone who has not received that love."

7. "Understand that the Father does not love us because the Son died for us, but the Son died for us because the Father and the Son and the Spirit love us. God's love is not just a feeling. It's been worked out on the bloody cross."

8. "God takes lives of bad people doing sinful things and interrupts them with the lightning strike of His mercy."

9. "God has taken the cold currents of our misery and has overcome them by the warming, life-giving waters of His mercy. And He's given us new life in Christ."

10. "There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us."

Observation Questions

1. According to Ephesians 2:1-3, what three things were believers following or living in before God intervened (the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, and the passions of the flesh)?

2. In Ephesians 2:3, how does Paul describe humanity's condition by nature—what phrase does he use to describe what we were apart from God's mercy?

3. What two attributes of God does Paul specifically highlight in Ephesians 2:4 as the basis for His action toward sinners?

4. Looking at Ephesians 2:4, what adjectives does Paul use to describe God's mercy and God's love respectively?

5. In Ephesians 1:11, what does Paul say about how God works, and what does this reveal about God's sovereignty over all things?

6. According to Ephesians 1:4-5, when did God's love for His people begin, and what did He predestine them for?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why is it significant that Paul places the phrase "But God" immediately after describing humanity's desperate spiritual condition in verses 1-3? What does this grammatical structure emphasize about salvation?

2. The sermon distinguishes between mercy (not giving someone the bad they deserve) and grace (giving someone the good they don't deserve). How does understanding this distinction help us appreciate what Paul means when he says God is "rich in mercy"?

3. How does the doctrine of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit in eternal loving fellowship—demonstrate that God's love is intrinsic to His nature rather than something He developed in response to creation?

4. Paul says we were "dead" in trespasses and sins, not merely sick or weak. What does this teach us about humanity's ability to contribute to or initiate their own salvation?

5. How does the sermon's emphasis on God's particular love for His people (as seen in Deuteronomy 7:6-8, Jeremiah 31:3, and John 17:23) relate to Paul's statement that God loved "us" in Ephesians 2:4?

Application Questions

1. When you hear news of tragic violence or human evil, do you tend to look for external explanations (upbringing, politics, circumstances), or do you recognize the depth of human depravity that Ephesians 2:1-3 describes? How might this biblical diagnosis change how you pray for and respond to such events?

2. The sermon states that "there is more mercy in Christ than sin in us." What specific area of shame, regret, or repeated failure do you struggle to believe God's mercy can truly cover? How can meditating on God being "rich in mercy" address that doubt?

3. Since God's love moves Him to use Himself for others' good rather than using others for His own purposes, how should this shape the way you treat family members, coworkers, or fellow church members this week—especially those who are difficult to love?

4. The sermon challenges us: "How can God so love someone else at such cost to Himself and we treat them with such callousness and coldness?" Is there a specific relationship in your life where you need to show the mercy and love you have received from God? What concrete step can you take?

5. Reflecting on how God interrupted your life with "the lightning strike of His mercy," what would your life look like today if He had not intervened? How does remembering this fuel gratitude in your worship and humility in your relationships?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Romans 5:6-11 — This passage expands on God's love demonstrated through Christ dying for us while we were still sinners, reinforcing the sermon's emphasis on God's initiative toward the spiritually dead.

2. Deuteronomy 7:6-11 — Here God explains that His love for Israel was not based on their merit but on His own faithful love, illustrating the sermon's point about God's particular, distinguishing love for His people.

3. 1 John 4:7-19 — John develops the theme that God is love and that His love was made manifest through sending His Son, connecting to the sermon's teaching on love as intrinsic to God's character.

4. Titus 3:3-7 — Paul provides a parallel description of our former sinful condition and God's saving mercy, echoing the "But God" contrast found in Ephesians 2:4.

5. Psalm 103:1-14 — David celebrates God's abundant mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, which the sermon referenced as Old Testament testimony to God's rich and inexhaustible mercy toward sinners.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Tragedy in Atlanta and the Truth of Human Depravity (Ephesians 2:1-3)

II. The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Sharpeville Massacre

III. God: The Sovereign Creator and King (Ephesians 2:4)

IV. Mercy: God's Compassion Toward Offenders

V. Love: God's Eternal, Intrinsic Character

VI. Rich: The Inexhaustible Abundance of God's Mercy

VII. Great: The Immeasurable Magnitude of God's Love

VIII. Us: The Undeserving Recipients of Divine Love

IX. Loved: God's Decisive Action Through Christ

X. But: The Glorious Interruption of Grace

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Detailed Sermon Outline

Friends, the taking of life in Atlanta that we just prayed about, arrested it seems only because of the police successfully intervening, is a reminder of the truth of what we considered in our last study in Ephesians 2. You remember those verses? The beginning of Ephesians chapter 2.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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, 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.

You know, skeptics of human depravity are always looking for less radical answers to blame the sin on various aspects of the sinner's environment, things external to them. His upbringing, his training, his circumstances, his gender, his race, his job. His view on guns or on immigration.

And of these, there can certainly be contributing factors to sin. But at the end of the day, the Bible teaches that sin is too deeply enmeshed in human nature to be satisfactorily explained by circumstances because other people were brought up like him. Other people are like the murderer in so many ways who would never do something like this. And so courts award settlements, sometimes to victims' families, public crusades to end this hatred or that by penalties are enacted, laws are passed, court decisions are reached.

And yet no small part of our history continues to be written in the ink of innocent blood.

Each date yields its own reminders.

So today is March 21st.

In the strange providence of God, today is the day that is marked every year in many places around the world as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It was so designated by the United Nations because it was on this date, March 21, in 1960, that hundreds of South Africans gathered in Sharpeville, South Africa, just south of Johannesburg, to protest South Africa's new passbook laws that were enforcing racial segregation. What happened there on March 21, 1960, has been called the Sharpeville massacre. Police fired on the crowd. 69 protesters were killed, many of them with shots in their back.

186 more were wounded.

This mass killing is considered the turning point in South African racial history, marking the start of mass public protests against apartheid.

So today is a public holiday in South Africa called Human Rights Day. It was because of that tragedy that President Nelson Mandela, 35 years later, went to Sharpeville to sign the new South African Constitution aimed at part in eliminating legal racism.

Friends, whether we are thinking about tragedies in South Africa or murders in Atlanta, or struggles in our own lives. The book that we're studying, Paul's letter to the Ephesians, offers a more searching diagnosis of sin than do your favorite news sources. And what's more a hope greater than the terror and tragedy of even the gravest and most hopeless appearing human sinfulnesses. To see that, we want to look again at Paul's letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2. So as you take your Bibles, you open up to Ephesians, chapter 2, find our verse, verse 4.

Let me remind you what Ephesians is about. We think it's one of Paul's later letters, written from his detention in Rome. If you look at the end of Acts, it looks like he's under kind of house arrest. He wrote this along with a letter to the Colossians, the letter to his friend Philemon. Around 8060 or 61, it was from Rome, he wrote probably his last letter a few years later to Timothy who was the pastor of the church in Ephesus.

Ephesians is one of the most influential books in the history of Christian thought especially when it comes to the theological basis of how can we all be together? How can we all be united? It's been divided into six chapters and is so often the case with Paul's letters, the first half, the first three chapters are about what God has done In the second half, the second three chapters are about what we should therefore do. Chapter 1 and the first half of chapter 2 are about the new life of salvation that God gives us. We saw that in the amazing first 14 verses as God's blessings in Christ are presented.

And then Paul prayed that beautiful prayer we examined a few weeks ago at the end of chapter 1. In the passage we considered last time in chapter 2:1-3 Paul presented our dire need for redemption in some of the grimmest verses in the Bible. And it's in that context that we have the first rays of gospel dawning in verse 4. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us. That's what we want to meditate on during this time together this morning.

To read it in context, let me go back up and start again with verse 1. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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, 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. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us. So if you want to see how this reads as a complete sentence, you have to go up to verse 1, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins, and now you find the, you can break off the kind of phrases there in verses 2 and 3 for the main trunk of the sentence, and then you go right to our verse, But God... so you were dead in the trespasses and sins, but God...

And then you have to go down to verse 5 to find the main verb, made us alive together with Christ. That's our topic for next week. But God, that's what we're thinking about today, next week, made us alive together with Christ. Well, I want us to lead us through meditating on this wonderful truth in verse 4 as we go from word to word really. And I'm going to note a lot of the different words in this verse as we meditate through it.

I'll note eight of them. Especially, and I pray that this will be a blessing and an encouragement to you this morning. And let's start with God, God. He's not mentioned, you know, in the first three verses, but now here in verse 4 the lens of Paul's camera switches, as it were, from man to God.

Now if you're here today and you're not a Christian and I use the word God, I wonder what you think of.

Do you think there is a God?

Do you think He exists?

Do you think you can know anything about Him, what He's like?

Well, God is the subject of this whole section coming up. In fact, the way it's placed immediately behind the butt makes an emphasis on God. Paul turns our gaze from the creature under the power of the prince of the air, to the Creator and King Himself who rules over all, God. The word is pregnant with meaning and weight. This is the God who made the world, who defeated the mighty empire of Egypt, bringing His enslaved people out.

This is the God who gave His people His laws and who slew one generation in the wilderness as He provided for another for 40 years. This is the God who raised up Joshua to lead His people to conquer Canaan. This is the God who judged the judges and sent Samuel the prophet. This is the God of King David and his son King Solomon. This is the God to whom Jerusalem's temple was built, whose temple was destroyed, and then his people exiled.

This is the God who brought his people back out of captivity and led them under the preaching of still more prophets to rebuild the temple. This is the God who we've read in Ephesians 1 chose us in Christ predestined us for adoption, made known His purposes through Christ, and brought them to pass. Paul said up in chapter 1, verse 11, that God is the one who works all things according to the counsel of His will. He is the Father of glory who gives the spirit of wisdom. His power and His might are immeasurably great.

He is the one who is immense and omnipresent, all seeing and all knowing. As Paul prayed up in the last phrase there in chapter 1, He fills all in all. Friends, this is the God we've all testified to believing in when we joined this church. We've all signed the statement of faith. We've all said we believe that there is one and only one living and true God, an infinite, intelligent Spirit whose name is Jehovah.

The Maker and Supreme Ruler of heaven and earth, inexpressibly glorious in holiness and worthy of all possible honor, confidence, and love, that in the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, equal in every divine perfection and executing distinct but harmonious offices in the great work of redemption. If you want to think more about God and consider Him today on this Lord's Day, When you go home, go to our church's website and find the sermon that I preached on that article last summer on June 28th. Very easy to find on our website. It's only 18 minutes long. We were just seeing what outdoor sermons would be like then as we started again.

We relished our unity together knowing this sovereign God, the one who gives us His laws to obey and follow. Or as we read in Daniel 5, Until Nebuchadnezzar knew that the Most High God rules the kingdom of mankind and sets over it whom He will. This is the great God that Paul has written about so beautifully in chapter 1. But I want us to go on to another word here written about God, and it's this word mercy. You see that in our verse, mercy.

We're all familiar with the idea of mercy. The word conjures up compassion. A love that's more loyal than is deserved. Unmerited kindness. It's been said that grace is giving someone what they don't deserve, whereas mercy is not giving the person the bad thing they do deserve.

The distinction, I think, helps us to see the shape of God's love described here. Mercy is not intrinsic to God because it presumes someone outside of God, someone who has offended God by his actions. Mercy describes the kindness that the offender is met with.

I wonder if it's surprising to you that God would be merciful.

Paul, who is writing this, knew himself to be a recipient of God's mercy. He wrote to the pastor of the Ephesian church, Timothy, I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life.

Among Christians, We should recognize this quality of God reflected in each other.

Richard Sibbes observed, Mercy to others should move us to deny ourselves in our lawful liberties oft times in case of offensive weak ones. The weakest are apt to think themselves despised, therefore we should be most careful to give them content. It were a good strife amongst Christians, one to labor to give no offense, and the other to labor to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others.

Friends, mercy is never natural to fallen men and women. Once our consciences are activated, we immediately become defensive. And we cry loudly for justice, not mercy, as we point over at somebody else, never ourselves. But as Portia wisely says to Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy.

Oh, friends, mercy is the specific shape of God's love involving sinners like us.

A third word to notice is so similar. It's this word love. You see the word love there. Paul had mentioned God's love already. If you look at the end of chapter 1, the end of verse 4, our translation have those two words in love to set off by themselves starting a new sentence.

Well, look at that sentence, chapter 1, verse 4, right at the end, In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the beloved. If you want to think more about God's love, read through 1 John this afternoon. As Paul intended here, love may be synonymous with mercy.

But there are aspects of love that we distinguish from each other as we come to investigate it more closely and appreciate God's character and actions. I think that's why our English translators have always used these two different words, mercy and love, to render the Greek here. Love is part of the character of God, part of the character of the God against whom we have rebelled. And it's even more fundamental to God than mercy. It is intrinsic to His character.

Is that clear to you how God has always been love even before the creation of the world, even before He created any other beings? There was no need for mercy then because there had been no offense. But from eternity past, God is and has always been Love in Himself, Father, Son, and Spirit. That's why if you ever hear a preacher say that God made the world because He needed to because He was lonely, you probably don't want to listen to that preacher very much. Friends, that's just not true.

God's never been lonely. The Father's always had the Son in the Spirit, and the Son's always had the Spirit in the Father, and the Spirit's always had the Father and the Son.

That helps us to realize that God loves us, not because of anything in us, but because of what's in Him. His love is a part of His very character, His own holiness. And we reflect this love when we don't use others for our purposes, but rather use ourselves for others' good.

That's where some of the writing of the press on motivations of the recent murderer have been so sick and distorted. The idea that someone could take human life to help themselves spiritually is a terrible perversion, a complete upside down of what the Lord Jesus did in giving His life for us.

And what he calls us as his followers to do, where we use our lives to be a blessing to others, because God is love. This is something of God's love that Paul mentions here. A fourth word I want you to notice is that word rich. Rich, his mercy is rich. And this sounds like Peter.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to His great mercy. He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Peter says that God's mercy is great. Paul here says that God is rich in mercy. That is, He is wealthy in it.

This is His continual state, being rich in mercy. So His account is full. Like down in verse 7 where God's grace is said to be immeasurably rich in kindness. Or back up in chapter 1 verse 7 where Paul mentions the riches of His grace. Paul uses this idea of the wealth of God in His mercy and grace several times in this letter.

And you see what this means. God's mercy account is extravagant, overabundant. Without measure, unlimited, and therefore not able to be exhausted by the likes of you or me. You don't need to worry when you go to God in need of mercy. His account of mercy never runs low.

None of His offered checks of mercy will ever bounce. His account is full and overflowing. There is plenty of mercy for the Ephesians as well as for Paul, for the Gentiles who would believe as well as for the Jews, for those who would read this letter as well as there was for Paul who wrote it.

The Lord knows that receiving His rich mercy is a mark of His favor. This is the God who revealed Himself to Moses proclaiming, the Lord, the Lord, A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. Friends, mercy is not something God has to learn, an alien habit. This is the God who poured out mercy after mercy upon His Old Testament people. When Nathan confronted King David with his sin, David could pray, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgression.

God's mercy is what we heard David exalted in Psalm 103 that Rachel read for us a few minutes ago. Psalm after Psalm echoes with this phrase of David, the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. In the exile in Babylon, Daniel could say, To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness. And after return from the exile in Babylon, Nehemiah could recall his people's sins and then say, But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. In fact, it was Jonah's confidence in God's extravagant mercy that led him to be reluctant to preach to his enemies, the Assyrians in Nineveh.

'Cause He knew it would be just like God to cause Him to repent and show mercy. As the prophet Micah exclaimed to God, who is a God like youe, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of His inheritance? Oh my friend, even today you should hear this ancient call from Isaiah, Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts.

Let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Brothers and sisters, it's about this mercy that Jesus commissioned his disciples to teach and that we've gathered around today in this field. His mercy is tender and calls us to repentance. How did Paul put it to Titus? He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy.

When you joined us this morning, were you thinking about how rich God is in mercy? I think it's true how one writer put it, Whether we have been sinned against or have send ourselves into misery. The Bible says God is not tight-fisted with mercy, but open-handed. Not frugal, but lavish. Not poor, but rich.

That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes, but homes in which divine mercy abides. It means His mercy is not calculating and cautious like ours. It is unrestrained, flood-like, sweeping, magnanimous. It means on that day when we stand before Him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of God's mercy-rich heart we had.

God is rich in mercy. And we've experienced that as a people, haven't we? Friends, I hear frequently of churches closing down in our area. And yet here we are meeting in the hundreds with new members joining. And others waiting to be baptized.

Lord, the Lord has given us mercy after mercy. As a church, we swim in God's mercy.

A fifth word to notice, and this is the word great. God's love is great. We've already really been thinking about this. God's rich mercy is an expression of His great love. Of course, our love is only the dimmest shadow of His love.

His is so great most fundamentally because it is this quality that God has had within Himself eternally. Again, God has love within Himself, the Father communing with the Son and the Spirit. We sing of it in almost every hymn. What love could remember no wrongs we have done? we ask this morning.

Spelled out some of that love, and He's done so much for me. He gave His life for me. He washed my sins away. He gave me victory. Oh, here is love vast as the ocean, loving kindness as a flood.

Brothers and sisters, God's love is so great that we can be sure as His children that whatever we have experienced of it, there is always more. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

That whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. Brothers and sisters, we could spend all day. We could spend all week on this and our meditations would never exhaust God's love. He is the one who in His love seeks the lost. Most fundamentally, the lost do not seek Him.

The lost are spiritually dead, Paul has said so clearly in the verses before. God's love is so great that receiving that love is the most significant distinction between the Christian and anyone who has not received His love. Let me say that again. God's love is so great that receiving that love is the most significant distinction between the Christian and anyone who has not received that love. We are those who know that He is not weary of us because we've seen His love in Christ.

This is why we're here together this very day. This is why we treat each other with such love even when we have disagreements. This is why we will be together forever. Just as God is rich in mercy, So He is not stingy in dispensing His love.

A sixth word is us, us. To appreciate this, we have to remember who this us is. Again, those first few verses in chapter 2.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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, 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. Friends, before Christ, even our desires were deathly. We were tainted through and through. We are creatures made by Him in His image, though we have been horribly deformed by the fall. And that's why there are such tragedies that we read of in our newspapers and in our history.

Friends, remember in our own experience individually what we were when God found us. We weren't striving for good or desiring God.

We weren't seeking God. Initially, we didn't even understand ourselves correctly. But we have been made the object of God's redeeming love, as Paul has already begun to write about in his praise to God in chapter 1. So what comes clear in all of this is that God's love and mercy for us overflows His heart. God has love for a particular people.

If you go back to the Old Testament, to Deuteronomy chapter 7, the Lord explains how it is that He's come to love Israel in particular. Deuteronomy 7:6, For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set His love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it is because the Lord loves you.

David testifies of God's distinguishing love in Psalm 4, Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for Himself. He says to His people in Isaiah 43, you are precious in My eyes. And Zephaniah, the Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness; He will quiet you by His love; Through Hosea, God prophesied of His people once exiled, I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely. And the Lord says to His people in exile in Jeremiah, 31, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

On the last night of Jesus' earthly ministry, before His crucifixion, He spoke much of God's love to His disciples. The Father Himself loves you because you have loved Me and have believed that I came from God. Or in His prayer, He let them hear in John 17. I in them and you in Me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent Me and loved them even as you loved Me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known that the love with which you have loved Me may be in them and I in them.

John writes, in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us.

And sent His Son to be the propitiation of our sins. So we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. We love because He first loved us. Friends, God calls us to be His people by His great love.

This is why we love to gather together on Sunday night and spend time praying to Him. God's love is not some abstraction. He has loved us so different than those relationships in which we've known little love and no mercy. We learn in Scripture that the Father has given us to the Son. Us, we are His gift.

He gives to His Son. Brothers and sisters, if God has so treated us, oh, we should be mindful of how we love those. Upon whom God has set His love. How can God so love someone else at such cost to Himself and we treat them with such callousness and coldness?

Well, it's what I want us to really turn to next, number seven. It's that word loved. You see that word loved. Not the noun where God's love is said to be great, but that verb there in the past tense, it says that God loved us. So the point here is not an abiding characteristic of God, but an action that God has taken.

Brothers and sisters, I asked you here this morning, how do we know that God has loved us? God has decisively acted to show His love to us through Christ. Again, Jesus prayed to the Father in John 17 that the love which you have loved Me may be in them. We saw in Ephesians chapter 1 something of the Father's election, the Son's redemption, the Spirit's regeneration. God has loved us by sending Jesus as our Savior.

Friends, all of us have sinned, and because God is holy and He is not indifferent to sin and He loves justice, He will judge us. Justice means God judges us.

But in His great love for His people, He sent His Son to live a perfect life and to die on the cross as a substitute to bear His right wrath against those who would sin against Him. The Son bore that wrath for all of us that would ever turn from our sins and trust in Him. And God raised Him from the dead. He presented His sacrifice to His heavenly Father, accepted it. He calls us all now to turn from our sins and trust in Him.

That means you. Jesus' sacrifice on the cross is the supreme expression of God's love. If you wonder if God could love you, look at the cross and pray for God to help you believe in Him. Repent of your sins. Jesus Himself, the night before He laid down, His life on the cross said, Greater love has no man than this, that He lay down His life for His friends.

And understand that the Father does not love us because the Son died for us, but the Son died for us because the Father and the Son and the Spirit love us. God's love is not just a feeling. It's been worked out on the bloody cross. This is the love that's restrained His wrath and directed His mercy. By the gift of His Son, God has made the church.

And you can be sure that He will not suffer His work to be lost. He will preserve us and is preserving us even now because He has loved us so.

And now finally, let's notice that First word in our verse, but. But. Some of you may have been wondering, Mark, why are you not talking about that most obvious word but? Because I wanted you to see what dam God had built up against His wrath necessitated by our depravity in those first three verses. And that dam is built up out of His own character.

I wanted us to stare at God to understand His love and His mercy. His love that is great and His mercy that is rich. And to see how He has loved us specifically. That's how that but gets erected against the flood of our depravity in verses 1 to 3. But God.

Thomas Goodwin called that but a particle of admiration. But despite all of this, for God to treat us like this when we have treated Him like we have. One Indian brother observed, Rulers traditionally show little sympathy for rebels, but God is different.

I mentioned this as the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, an infamous taking of human life. March 21 is also the anniversary of Giving Life, 465 Years ago today, on March 21st in 1556, Thomas Cranmer, the great English reformer, was burned alive at Oxford. Cranmer didn't have to be burned alive. Cranmer, by then an old man, could have lived. But he would not forsake the truth of the gospel that we are justified by faith alone.

He wanted to testify to the truth of how God has loved us. And he knew that truth was worth dying for.

Almost 200 years later, again on March 21st, a young Englishman involved in the North Atlantic slave trade was humbled by a terrible storm while he was on board ship at sea.

And he began earnestly praying and reading the Bible for the first time in his life. That was John Newton who wrote Amazing Grace. He knew that whereof he wrote. God takes lives of bad people doing sinful things and interrupts them with the lightning strike of His mercy. Friends, what are there, 400, 500, 600 of us people gathered here right now?

What would all of us be doing if God had not interrupted our lives with the lightning strike of His mercy?

What kind of sin and rebellion against God would our lives show?

But God has taken the cold currents of our misery and has overcome them by the warming, life-giving waters of His mercy. And He's given us new life in Christ. This but shows a stark contrast between man and God, but also between the hateful sinning of the spiritually dead and the merciful resurrecting of the spiritually dead to spiritual life. This textual interruption points to the glorious spiritual interruption, the transition from wrath to grace that every Christian knows. The dead in verse 1 begin to awake at the butt in verse 4.

It implies a resurrection. But friends, it's almost noon and we're at the end of verse 4. So that's going to have to wait till next week, Lord willing, with verses 5 and 6 and 7.

There's only one hope. For sinful man who's spiritually dead. God must make us alive. God must take the initiative. We've concentrated on these phrases here which expose God's character, His heart out of which He acts towards us, out of which He saves us.

So rescued sinners like you and me have no ground to be proud ever. We could never have we have saved ourselves. These first three verses of the chapter make it clear that we're not able by our own strength to save ourselves or even to prepare ourselves to be saved. Our misery and need didn't assure our salvation. There are many people who are still in misery and need.

There's nothing that God sees in our own vice or in our own virtue that causes Him to save us. He saves us only by His Free and special grace, His love we see back in chapter 1 verse 4, which was there before the creation of the world. His glory is manifested. His love and His mercy are displayed as sinner after sinner is interrupted on the way to hell and is brought to new life in Christ. There will be more on this new life later in our passage next week, Lord willing.

You can read more in Romans 6. Objects of wrath have become recipients of love.

I wonder how all this finds you today. Taking God's love for granted? Or on the other hand, do you assume that God could never love someone as bad as you are? There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us. Whoever you are here today, hear Christ's invitation: if anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.

Come to Christ today, friend. Come to the God who brings us life when we are in death, and with this new life, joy.

Let's pray.

But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us.

Oh God, we have been so loved by youy. We have been. We thank youk for your love for us in Christ. We pray youy would make that love evident and obvious and overwhelming To each heart here, we ask in Jesus' name, Amen.