Finding God’s Purpose for Your Life (Ephesians 2:1–10)
God has a purpose for our lives even before we are born (Psa. 139:16). In our last lesson we found that God wants to use the same power He used to raise Jesus from the dead to transform our lives. God wants to transform us so we can fulfill His purpose for our lives. To find God’s purpose for our lives, we need to know three things:
Our Predicament Without Christ (2:1–3)
To appreciate who we are in Christ, we must understand our predicament before coming to Christ. Our frightening, pre-Christian predicament was being dead in our trespasses and sins (2:1, ESV). This means we were spiritually dead. What does it mean to be spiritually dead? When people are physically dead, they do not react to physical stimuli. If I fell over dead right now, you could stand over my corpse and say, “Major, are you OK?”, but I wouldn’t hear you. If you didn’t like me, you could kick me and I wouldn’t feel it. Just as a physically dead person doesn’t respond to physical things, a spiritually dead person doesn’t respond to spiritual things. Without Christ we are spiritually dead and will not receive not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:14a). Why, according to 1 Corinthians 2:14b–c?
